JUVENILIA
 
 Juvenilia : being a Second Series of Essays on sundry ^Esthetical Questions, . 
 
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 LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN.
 
 JUVENILIA
 
 BEING A SECOND SERIES OF 
 
 ESSAYS ON 
 
 SUNDRY ^ESTHETICAL 
 QUESTIONS 
 
 VE1(NON LEE 
 
 VOL. I. 
 
 JLonDon 
 
 T FISHER UNWIN 
 26 PATERNOSTER SQUARE 
 
 MDCCCLXXXVII
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Introduction : Juvenilia i 
 
 The Lake of Charlemagne . . -23 
 Botticelli at the Villa Lemmi . . 77 
 Rococo . . . . . . . 131 
 
 Prosaic Music and Poetic Music . . 149 
 Apollo the Fiddler ..... 165
 
 JUVENILIA: 
 TO MY FRIEND CARLO PLACCI. 
 
 VOL. I.
 
 JUVENILIA: 
 TO MY FRIEND CARLO PLACCI. 
 
 TN calling this volume "Juvenilia," I do not 
 * intend to suggest that I consider myself 
 as already and utterly in the sere and yellow; 
 although I may have occasionally put great 
 store upon the abyss of years separating 
 twenty-five from thirty, in order to obtain 
 from you, my dear Carlo, more patience 
 for my theories and sermonings. 
 
 My meaning is not that. Do you re- 
 member, among the allegories on the floor of 
 Siena Cathedral, the little fifteenth-century 
 figures representing the various ages of 
 man ? Among them is Youth : a boy 
 holding a hawk, Now there is no reason
 
 4 JUVENILIA. 
 
 why a hawk should not be held equally by 
 a man of mature age ; and the good people 
 of the Renaissance, who saw their great 
 captains and orators and merchants and 
 reverend signiors of various descriptions 
 ride out a-hawking many times and oft, 
 were certainly aware of this. But whereas 
 to the mature man hawking is but a mere 
 holiday pastime; to the youth it and all 
 similar sports are the most serious matters 
 in the world ; indeed, the only matter for 
 which a serious creature can be expected to 
 exist. Hence the hawk is on the wrist, 
 not of the mature man, but of the boy; 
 though the one may bring back whole bags 
 of partridges, and the latter but a solitary 
 brace of sparrows. 
 
 Similarly in the case of these essays. I 
 do not imagine that assthetical questions 
 are fit only for immature young people- 
 forgive what seems a personal reflexion- 
 nearer twenty than thirty. I mean that, in 
 many cases, in my own case certainly, and
 
 JUVENILIA. 5 
 
 in yours I suspect, they are, up to a certain 
 age, the only, or very nearly the only, 
 questions which seem thoroughly engross- 
 ing. Later we care for them still, and 
 perhaps fully as much; but we care for 
 other questions also. It is the case of the 
 boy with the hawk; and for this reason I 
 class such matters as "Juvenilia." And, 
 therefore, my dear Carlo, I dedicate this 
 little volume to you, not because I conceive 
 you to be still in the phase when only things 
 of this sort seem important; but because, 
 on the contrary, you appear to be emerging 
 from that intellectual boyhood ; and I would 
 therefore fain talk with you, now that the 
 serious interests of the soul are beginning 
 to push aside its mere pleasant pastimes, of 
 the relative values of these things, and of 
 what is due to each. 
 
 You will think me, perhaps, unjust, to 
 my own past, and to what is still your 
 present. The Beautiful, you will say, the 
 Beautiful thus contemptuously classified
 
 6 JUVENILIA. 
 
 under the head of " Juvenilia," is the beau- 
 tiful not merely of material objects, but of 
 the soul. We, who are young and none 
 the worse for our youth (you continue, and 
 I agree with you) are not mere fiddle- 
 faddle dilettanti, adorers of roulades and 
 Japanese lacquer and " Odes Funambu- 
 lesques." We are serious; and seriously 
 seeking for the beautiful, and for what is 
 the same as the beautiful, the good. 
 
 I know it. In those earliest years of 
 spiritual existence, we are far removed from 
 every baseness. The danger of baseness, 
 indeed, comes later, with the consciousness 
 of imperfection and conflict, with the 
 necessity of making a choice. Taken in 
 themselves, those early days of thought 
 and feeling are exquisitely calm and pure ; 
 we require their memory later, as a refuge 
 from present reality. The only pity is that 
 this comparative Elysium was never a reality, 
 but only a phantom place of our own 
 fantastic building.
 
 JUVENILIA. 7 
 
 It came home to me very keenly, like 
 the taste or the scent of some fruit or 
 flower not seen for years, the peculiar 
 flavour, I would call it, of those aesthetic, 
 classic, Goethian days, while reading Pater's 
 " Marius the Epicurean." The book is to 
 my mind the most charming, and in a way, 
 consolatory, of any latterly written, precisely 
 because it takes one back to those first 
 years when the good and the beautiful 
 seemed as the concave and the convex .of all 
 things. I read it in the earliest days of 
 our Florentine spring. The banks were 
 full of fennel tufts, of sage, marigolds, and 
 all manner of herbs that leave an aromatic, 
 spring-like scent upon one's hands ; between 
 the leafless vines the paths were powdered 
 with daisies ; on the hillsides the peach and 
 almond blossoms made a pinkish, whitish 
 mist upon the silvery olives, the coppery 
 sere oaks ; and everywhere in the sprouting 
 bright green wheat, flamed the scarlet and 
 purple anemones, the light playing with
 
 8 JUVENILIA. 
 
 them as with gems. The pale blue sky 
 was washed by recent showers ; the air of 
 delicate cold crispness. With these im- 
 pressions from without mingled the impres- 
 sions of the book : sunny, serene, bracing, 
 like those first spring days, with its back- 
 ground of the Latin country life of Virgil 
 andTibullus; its principal figure, harmonious 
 and strong and chaste like the statue of 
 some high-born boy priest ; its story of the 
 search after Beauty and Good, the Lehrjahre 
 of an antique Wilhelm Meister; but a 
 Wilhelm Meister simpler, purer, more 
 dignified than the hero of Goethe. The 
 book brought back to me, more vividly 
 than the sunshine and daisies and scent of 
 crushed herbs, the sense of a moral and 
 intellectual spring; the poignant remem- 
 brance of long ago, when at eighteen or 
 nineteen I too had read those descriptions 
 of rustic life and rites, austere and serene, 
 in Virgil and Tibullus; when I too had 
 looked upon the world as a tract of spring-
 
 JUVENILIA. 9 
 
 tide country, through which one might 
 wander, calm and wise, like an antique 
 statue, in search of the great dualism : the 
 Good and the Beautiful. The Good ? One 
 feels, at that age, that one has got it; for 
 v/ho can connect anything save good with 
 beautiful form, when it is temperate, har- 
 monious, perfect; with sensations and 
 emotions and thoughts so utterly simple, 
 single-hearted, and detached from all things 
 practical ? The world is beautiful, or we see 
 only its beauty ; we feel, therefore, happy ; 
 and in feeling happy (being consciously 
 harmless), we feel also good. It is the 
 morality of all antique art and philosophy, 
 of the teachings of Goethe and of Plato, 
 of every blossoming fruit tree and sprouting 
 blade of grass ; and it is the morality of 
 the youth of such of us as are best. 
 
 Unfortunately, it is delusive, and when 
 we come to read <f Marius " a second time 
 we feel a certain sadness, of which this book 
 is the seemingly serene result. 
 
 2*
 
 IO JUVENILIA. 
 
 Little by little we begin to perceive that 
 there are ugly things in the world : apathy, 
 selfishness, vice, want, and a terrible wicked 
 logic that binds them together in thousands 
 of vicious meshes. And perceiving the 
 ugly things in the world, we perceive for 
 the first time, perhaps, the ugly things 
 within ourselves : for of each there is 
 somewhat in each of us. Then comes the 
 moment of choice : we have learned, or 
 guessed, that in continuing to live only 
 for and with the beautiful serenities of art, 
 we are passively abetting, leaving urifought, 
 untouched, the dreadful, messy, irritating, 
 loathsomenesses of life ; and, on the con- 
 trary, in trying to tackle even the smallest 
 of these manifold evils, we are bringing into 
 our existence ugliness and unrest. Gradu- 
 ally, in short, we discover that to be good 
 means, unluckily, to deal with evil ; to 
 be, I will not say beautiful, but clean and 
 moderately healthy, spiritually, means to 
 see much that is ugly and foul. Of course
 
 JUVENILIA. II 
 
 we may still go and live with the daisies 
 and the statues, seeing only them with the 
 eyes of body and soul ; unfortunately to 
 live with the daisies and statues means no 
 longer to be like unto them, but like rather 
 to the dust-heap and the scarecrow, not 
 much more beautiful in soul, certainly. 
 
 We were happier first. Decidedly ; 
 that is what I have been insisting all 
 along. But while we were happy other 
 folk were wretched ; and this convenient 
 division of property and class cannot be 
 kept up for good. I know not whether 
 the old saints were judicious in stripping 
 off their good clothes, amply sufficient for 
 themselves, that beggars might have them, 
 each rather less than he needed; nor whether 
 the Socialists of to-day would be wise in 
 dealing similarly with their own (or other 
 folks') worldly possessions. But this seems 
 certain : in order that the great mass of 
 mankind, which has neither peace nor 
 dignity, nor beauty of life, should obtain
 
 12 JUVENILIA. 
 
 a small allowance of any such qualities, it 
 becomes necessary that we, who happen to 
 possess thereof, should deprive ourselves of 
 a portion for their benefit. 
 
 Hence there comes a time, to such of 
 us as shall not remain eternally children, 
 when, by the side of all questions artistic, 
 there must arise other questions, less 
 pleasant to contemplate, and less easy, 
 alas, to solve, nay, seemingly, almost in- 
 soluble. And together with this there 
 comes also the knowledge that such things 
 as have hitherto absorbed our attention 
 are "Juvenilia." How such questions 
 arise ? In a hundred ways ; and less per- 
 haps from our additional experience of the 
 world than from a greater maturity within 
 ourselves ; for external matters would not 
 affect us were it not for a certain change 
 in us. Mere visible objects become some- 
 thing more than mere visible objects ; and 
 individual cases begin to pain us with the 
 force of great class evils.
 
 JUVENILIA. 13 
 
 This, my dear Carlo, you are beginning 
 to feel, and more so, I think, quite of late. 
 You have just been in England, and Eng- 
 land shows its evils grimly, as much as Italy, 
 unconsciously, thanks to climate, beauty, 
 and a certain dignified stagnation, hides 
 them. Moreover, while Italy makes one 
 think of the past ; England, inevitably, leads 
 one to speculate upon the future : each 
 country is a key to what is not yet, or no 
 longer, mere present. Among the various 
 sights, I don't know whether you saw, along 
 with theatres and slums, and political meet- 
 ings, and aesthetic houses, what to me must 
 always seem one of the most impressive of 
 all spectacles, short of hell the Tyne at 
 Newcastle, Impressive spiritually as well as 
 physically. A vast mass of leaden water, 
 polluted with every foulness, flowing heavily, 
 or scarce seeming to flow at all, between 
 lines of docks and factories, their innumer- 
 able masts and innumerable chimneys faint 
 upon the thick brown sky, faintly reddened
 
 14 JUVENILIA. 
 
 with an invisible sun, and streaked in vari- 
 ous intensities of brown and grey and black, 
 with ever rising curls of smoke. This 
 river flows, most often as deep as in a gorge, 
 between banks of blackish cinders, of white 
 poisonous chemical refuse, or worst of all, of 
 what was once pure live soil, now stained and 
 deadened into something unnatural, whereon 
 the very weeds refuse to grow. Down 
 these banks trickle, from black blast fur- 
 naces, and rotting greenish docks, and white 
 leprous chemical works, crumbling with 
 caries, foul little streams, vague nameless 
 oozes, choking with their blackness, staining 
 with their deadly purple and copper- colour 
 and green and white ; while the air is thick 
 with the smoke as of brickkilns, with the 
 hospital whiffs of chlorine. And against 
 this sky rise the masts and riggings, and 
 funnels and chimneys and cranes, the long 
 line of crumbling reddish roofs and black 
 sheds, to where the great river, thickening 
 and thickening in the greyness, a great river
 
 JUVENILIA. 15 
 
 of hell, winding in huge folds, spreads itself 
 out at Jarrow into a grey and sullen lagoon, 
 marked with serpentine posts, and ribbed 
 with rafts, a Stygian lake, among the dim 
 lines of chimneys and rigging. But sadder 
 even where, up at Newcastle, things seem 
 less bad : sadder where there rises sheer 
 from the water a mound of vivid green 
 crowned by a black church, greenness of an 
 abandoned churchyard ; making the grey of 
 the water, the blackness of the houses and 
 soil but the greyer and blacker, the violation 
 of all natural things more keenly felt, with 
 the suggestion, that but a few miles off are 
 the brownish moors and pale green fells. 
 And in this spot also, as if to remind us that, 
 as there are still in the world green places, 
 so there is also in the world's history a 
 period when other things were held more 
 important than the plating of ironclads, the 
 ribs of ships, coal, coke, and magnesia, 
 there rises above the polluted river, into 
 the smoke suffused with sun redness, the
 
 I 6 JUVENILIA. 
 
 delicate outline of a mediaeval church 
 tower. 
 
 There are men who live among all this 
 by the thousand, and they are far from 
 being the worst off in the world ; men like 
 those who crowded the Tyne steamer re- 
 turning home after their day's work ; black, 
 red-faced, and blistered, or with flesh in 
 pale creases under the grime, their clothes 
 engrained with dirt, shiny with grease, 
 often tattered, the filthy wisp of comforter 
 round their necks ; men who sat silent and 
 morose, scarcely exchanging a word, and 
 who are yet human beings, intelligent and 
 sensitive, who get treatises on political 
 economy from the free library, in order to 
 see why things should be so very queer and 
 uncomfortable down here. There are other 
 men also, not living on the Tyne, and 
 women also, clean, well-dressed, apprecia- 
 tive of art and music and literature, with 
 whom we can sympathize vastly about 
 Wagner, and Swinburne, and Whistler,
 
 JUVENILIA. 17 
 
 and Venetian sunsets ; for whom, in short, 
 we write our books, sing our songs, or 
 paint our pictures, as the case may be; men 
 and women, of whose souls we occasionally 
 get a glimpse, a glimpse that shows that 
 polluted as are the waters of the Tyne, and 
 black as are its smoke-clouds, and noisome 
 and sterilizing its fumes and trickles of refuse, 
 there are things more polluted and blacker 
 still, and more noisome and sterilizing. 
 
 These things are beginning to strike 
 you ; and, therefore, you complain, you no 
 longer feel quite so happy as formerly ; no 
 longer so certain what to think and to 
 care for. Therefore you, also, are beginning 
 to have a class of interests which might be 
 called " Juvenilia." 
 
 "Juvenilia!" Well, why not? And 
 why not be contented with them ? Have 
 we a recipe to cure all evils ? Can we 
 clean out the Tyne, or clean our neigh- 
 bours' souls ? And if not, why talk or 
 think about either ; when there arc things
 
 iS JUVENILIA. 
 
 which are clean, pleasant, and which require 
 only that we should enjoy them : art, 
 music, poetry, beautiful nature, delightful 
 people? If such things are "Juvenilia," 
 were it not better to cast in our lot with 
 them, and say boldly, I choose to remain 
 young ? 
 
 Not so. For do what we will, devote our- 
 selves exclusively to the pleasant and certain 
 things of this life, shut our eyes and ears 
 resolutely to the unpleasant and uncertain ; 
 we shall be made, none the less, to take part 
 in the movement that alters the world. Help 
 it to alter we must, in so far as each of us 
 represents a class, a nationality, a tendency, 
 nay, as each of us eats a certain amount of 
 food and occupies a certain amount of 
 standing-room. For the whole of all things 
 is ever moving, changing plan and form ; and 
 we, its infinitesimal atoms, are determining 
 its movements. The question therefore is, 
 in which direction shall our grain of dust's 
 weight be thrown ?
 
 JUVENILIA. Ip 
 
 This is what we require to know. Do 
 not let us swell with self-importance. It is 
 not a question of our leading any one you 
 or I, or Tom, Dick, or Harry. The 
 number of the world's leaders is small, 
 and perhaps the world's leaders are neces- 
 sarily irresponsible, biassed, blind, mere 
 forces. It is a question of being led ; and 
 in v/hich direction ; of being led towards 
 good or towards evil, in darkness or in 
 light ; for follow, in one way or another, 
 with some result, of more or less comfort or 
 misery to some one, we needs all must. 
 Therefore, it behoves us to know what 
 the world is ; what we ourselves are ; above 
 all, what we think, and why we think it. 
 
 And therefore also, my dear Carlo, we 
 must look at many things that are not 
 beautiful ; we must bring home to our 
 feelings many things that are not good ; 
 we must think out many matters that are 
 bitter and uncertain ; we must recognize 
 that we are no longer children, and that
 
 2O JUVENILIA. 
 
 we have other interests besides those which 
 I have called " Juvenilia." 
 
 The feeling comes home to one often 
 and oftener ; and in less and less expected 
 ways. It saddens, in a certain sense, and 
 makes the world less pleasant, and one's 
 companionships less satisfactory. But, on 
 the other hand, it gives to the world a 
 meaning which it never had before, this 
 seeing it no longer as a mere storehouse 
 of beautiful inanimate things, but as a 
 great living mass, ti availing and suf- 
 fering in its onward path ; and it makes 
 one feel less isolated, in a way, to recog- 
 nize all round, among creatures of different 
 habits and views from one's own, and 
 profoundly unconscious of one's existence, 
 the companionship of the desire for good. 
 Last autumn, just before that glimpse of 
 the Tyne, I was wandering about with 
 some friends about the foot of Cross Fell, 
 when we came, in a tiny hamlet, upon a 
 company of Methodist preachers. The
 
 JUVENILIA. 21 
 
 cluster of black cottages, with the brownish 
 green slopes, scarcely purpled with heather, 
 stretching away, roll after roll, without a 
 tree or a bush for landmark, gave me 
 a sense of remoteness greater than anything 
 I have ever felt before ; the very roads 
 seemed to lead nowhere, and the paths 
 to wind on, from hill-top to hill-top, with 
 always the same clouds to face them and 
 nothing else. In the middle of the village 
 green, that is, of the bit of grass round 
 the pump, with the big brownish moor- 
 land, ribbed with black walls, rising behind, 
 a dozen people, the total of the inhabi- 
 tants, were gathered round a youngish man, 
 in a long black coat, with a wide white 
 face, who was bellowing out the necessity 
 of following the call of God, of coming 
 to the light. I fear the poor man would 
 not have thought me a very satisfactory 
 listener ; and I certainly should not have 
 considered his views decisive as to the 
 nature of God and of God's light. But
 
 22 JUVENILIA. 
 
 I felt that, in a certain way, we sym- 
 pathized, he and I ; and that there was 
 a closer link between us, without two ideas 
 or tasks in common, than between myself 
 and so many of my friends, whose pictures 
 I look at, whose songs I listen to, and who 
 are so polite as to read and praise my 
 books. 
 
 Yes, certainly ; for I could have told 
 that Methodist preacher, and he would 
 have understood me, though he had never 
 perhaps seen an antique, nor heard an 
 opera, nor read a novel, what I have 
 wished to explain to you, my dear Carlo, 
 that there are in life "Juvenilia," but there 
 are other things also.
 
 THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 
 
 AN APOLOGY OF ASSOCIATION.
 
 AN APOLOGY OF ASSOCIATION, 
 
 A SENSE of indecision and self-contradic- 
 ** tion has been worrying me of late. A 
 suspicion has come to me, in moments of 
 weariness and depression (as such suspicions 
 always do come), that I might be getting 
 entangled in exaggerated, unjust notions ; 
 that I might, so to speak, be selling my 
 soul to the most cunning of all fiends, the 
 Demon of Theory. This demon is much 
 more subtle and dangerous than those of 
 his brethren who, once upon a time, 
 haggled souls out of unlucky alchemists 
 and architects in exchange for books of 
 spells and plans of cathedrals. He does 
 not frighten you with his horns and fumes 
 
 3
 
 26 JUVENILIA. 
 
 of brimstone, nor make you think twice 
 by exacting signatures with your own 
 blood, and similar alarming legal proceed- 
 ings. He merely leaves carelessly about 
 the object of your desire, the explanation 
 which will spare you all further fatigue 
 and labour, which will save you from the 
 torment of self-doubt, from the humilia- 
 tion of self-contradiction' as rapidly as will 
 a banker's letter and a cheque book save 
 the penniless wretch from the torment and 
 humiliation of bankruptcy. He himself, I 
 mean this demon, keeps studiously out of 
 the way. You find the unexpected thing 
 which solves all your difficulties, puts an 
 end to all your worries; and in all prob- 
 ability you hasten to pick it up, thanking 
 your good fortune, and wondering at your 
 stupidity in not having noticed before this 
 invaluable piece of property. The demon, 
 who sees all that is going on, laughs in his 
 sleeve. The mouse has walked into the 
 trap. For, strange as it may appear, from
 
 TFIE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 2J 
 
 the moment of your pocketing that ex- 
 planation thus cunningly thrown in your 
 way, you are, to an ever-increasing extent, 
 and for a daily-increasing number of years, 
 the property of that Theory Demon ; his 
 serf, whom he can drive to the right or the 
 left, whom he can pinch and prick and pull 
 about to his heart's content ; whom he can 
 order either to rob, or murder, or stand 
 indecorously head on the ground, heels in 
 the air; upon whose back he can ride (as 
 other demons ride on witches) to the very 
 Brocken orgy of insanity and falsehood. 
 Mind, I am speaking but too seriously. 
 Let once our vanity or laziness tempt us 
 into neglecting the doubts, the suspicious 
 little facts, which would require a careful 
 and cruel revision of our ideas, which 
 might entail the labour of seeking some 
 new explanation for a thing already ex- 
 plained, the humiliation of an admission 
 that all had been a mistake; let us but 
 give way to this temptation, and we shall
 
 28 JUVENILIA. 
 
 find ourselves, little by little, surrounded by 
 new doubts which must again be quashed ; 
 by new facts which must again be set 
 aside; by new injustices which we must 
 commit; by new lies which we must 
 tell, unless we wish the whole edifice 
 of our ideas to crash publicly to the 
 ground ; in order to be consistent we shall 
 have become habitual liars ; in order not 
 to appear liars, we shall soon appear, what 
 we shall be, fools. Oh, not to slip into 
 the bondage of the Theory Demon, to 
 remain free, and able to be, at least as 
 often as our wits will permit, the scatterer 
 of mere truth, not the kneader up together 
 of a little sense in a great deal of rubbish ! 
 The fear of possession by the fiend has 
 always been a disagreeable matter. The 
 poor monks, we know, saw fiends in every- 
 thing, and scarcely durst blow their nose 
 or wash their hands lest Beelzebub or 
 Mephistopheles might lurk in the hand- 
 kerchief or in the soap and water. And
 
 THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 2p 
 
 similarly with the Demon Theory. If 
 once you have reason to suspect that he 
 is laying traps for you, you are for ever 
 beset by doubts and discouragements. 
 You scarcely venture to handle an idea ; 
 you tremble at every liking or disliking, 
 lest it be a prejudice, that demon's in- 
 vention ; and ever and anon you awake 
 with a start of terror, and catching up 
 the explanation of things at which you 
 have been working for months, you rudely 
 pull it to pieces, till no shape is left, and 
 only a heap of disorderly facts remains. 
 Such is your condition if once the sus- 
 picion enters your mind that there is 
 danger from the Theory Demon ; and 
 such, to some extent, has been my state 
 of mind ever since it occurred to me that 
 the Theory Demon was going to snare 
 me with the subject of association, if, 
 indeed, he had not trapped me already ; 
 at which thought my mind shakes and 
 jerks to rid itself of possible meshes.
 
 JO JUVENIUA. 
 
 The matter of Association is simply as 
 follows. I have always felt and expressed 
 that in all our relations with art, associa- 
 tion that is to say, the faculty by which 
 the real presence of one object evokes the 
 imaginary presence of other objects is 
 a most dangerous and pestilent faculty, 
 leading to insincerity, injustice, and stupid 
 wastefulness, by making us think of things 
 suggested by a work of art instead of 
 attending to the work of art itself. This 
 I have thought and said, and indeed, at 
 the moment of stating my position once 
 more, it seems to me that I was perfectly 
 right. But now comes the mischief. 
 Little by little, watching my own thoughts, 
 my own living, moving, yet unstated 
 thoughts, it appears to me that this very 
 faculty of association is being highly 
 honoured in my mind ; that, in a sort of 
 quiet, half-perceptible way, those thoughts 
 of mine are attributing a great deal of 
 good to it; indeed, are making for it
 
 THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 3! 
 
 quite a fine position. The question is, 
 Which is the snare laid for me by the 
 Theory Demon the opinion that associa- 
 tion is a pestilent thing, or the opinion 
 that it is excellent, useful, and most 
 honourable ? Is the Theory Demon 
 cozening me, or trying to make justice 
 appear to lie in relentless severity towards 
 association, or perhaps more subtly by 
 causing my very fear of injustice to be- 
 tray me into unwarranted recantation ? 
 This is what has been worrying me for 
 a long while, until a circumstance, which 
 has only just taken place, and which brings 
 home to me the wonderful power of this 
 faculty of association (legitimate or ille- 
 gitimate) in our aesthetic life, has de- 
 termined me to settle the question by a 
 sort of Oriental or Mediaeval proceeding ; 
 which is, after having spoken ill of as- 
 sociation, and while not really rescinding 
 one word that I said, to write an apology 
 containing all the good things about asso-
 
 32 JUVENILIA. 
 
 elation of which I can possibly think. 
 In this way, whichever side justice lies, 
 I shall be safe not to miss it. 
 
 A week or so ago I was going up the 
 Rhine from Coblentz to Bingen, sitting, 
 not at all enraptured, on the steamboat. I 
 was neither surprised nor vexed at expe- 
 riencing none of the delight which our 
 fathers and mothers experienced on their 
 first sight of Rhineland ; I was not dis- 
 appointed, because I was perfectly prepared 
 for disappointment. I had clearly realized 
 beforehand how completely the Rhine, with 
 respect to its emotional and imaginative 
 power, is a thing of the past. The imagi- 
 native and emotional, the aesthetic habits 
 and wants of people have undergone a 
 great change since the days when the 
 Rhineland was the holy land of romanti- 
 cism. The mass of mankind scarcely knows 
 what will or what will not give it aesthetic 
 pleasure ; it requires specially endowed men, 
 painters and poets, to select and copy bits
 
 THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. JJ 
 
 of reality ; so that having seen and been 
 made to appreciate the picture, it may 
 recognize, appreciate, and, if possible, ex- 
 tend its knowledge of the original. Now 
 the Rhine, harsh as it sounds, is not the 
 sort of thing singled out and copied by the 
 artists of to-day, painters or poets. Our 
 painters do not care for the ostentatious, 
 self-conscious picturesqueness of rocks and 
 river and ruins ; they are seeking for the 
 beauty, the wonder of commonplace scenes, 
 they are striving after the tints, the sheen- 
 nay, the very darkness with which nature 
 enrobes most regally the veriest plebeian 
 of a landscape. The poets, on the other 
 hand (or perhaps I should have said the 
 poet Browning, the great showman-in-chief 
 of our imaginative puppet-show), the poets 
 no longer care for ready-made and ex- 
 tremely made-up heroism and romance ; 
 for knightly perfection draped in ana- 
 chronism, and satanic grandeur draped in 
 mystery. What interests them (and I am 
 
 3*
 
 34 JUVENILIA. 
 
 speaking not of those who merely paint 
 exquisite unreal decorations of antique or 
 mediaeval fashion, but of those who can 
 really react on our lives and tastes) is reality, 
 of past or present ; historical knowledge has 
 made them hungry of the realities of former 
 days, of the every-day life of beauty and 
 sordidness, of the rotten heroism and fiend- 
 ishness and water. In all modern art, the 
 effects which shall move and delight us, 
 the beautiful and the pathetic, are being 
 sought every day more and more by 
 realistic means ; and I, for my part, feel 
 that herein our artistic feeling has got on 
 to a far worthier road than in the days 
 of romantic poetry and painting. But, be 
 this as it may, one point is certain, which 
 is that the Rhineland has been gradually 
 pushed out of our own aesthetic and 
 emotional life, and been quietly put by 
 in the lumber - room of superannuated 
 romanticism. These points, explaining why 
 the Rhine should give me but little plea-
 
 THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 35 
 
 sure, I kept revolving in my mind ; and, 
 as I sat on the steamer between Coblentz 
 and Bingen, involuntarily conjuring up 
 other scenes, other rocks, rivers, and old 
 towns, comparing, deciding, and seeking to 
 understand my own decisions, the sense 
 became stronger and stronger in my mind, 
 as the water foamed round the paddles and 
 fell in ridges behind the ploughing keel, 
 and the awning flapped in the draught, 
 that for my own part I would willingly 
 give all this romantic Rhineland, rocks, 
 castles, nixes, robber knights, and all, for 
 a reach, pale under the pale blue sky, 
 of poplared and shingled Tuscan river, 
 for a sluggish bend of English stream, 
 flowing you scarce can tell which way, 
 under the willows, beneath the sedge 
 and meadow-sweet, through the low-lying 
 pastures. 
 
 But while such were my reasoned ideas, 
 I gradually became aware of the presence 
 within me of something different, diffusing
 
 36 JUVENILIA. 
 
 itself, and permeating my consciousness. 
 Not exactly an idea, nor yet a set of im- 
 pressions, something impossible to define, 
 because definition is not made for vagueness; 
 first within myself, warming me like a cor- 
 dial into vague pleasure, then afterwards 
 surrounding me from outside, an alUencom- 
 passing medium in which the soul floated 
 with languid enjoyment pleasurableness 
 slowly produced (as heat is slowly given 
 out by a few embers when we blow upon 
 them) by the sense that this was the Rhine- 
 land. The Rhineland, but not the Rhine- 
 land as a concrete reality, a sum total of 
 present and actually perceived and analyzed 
 impressions and ideas ; not the Rhineland 
 which was now before me, which I was now 
 criticizing, of which at this selfsame mo- 
 ment I was still duly reiterating to myself 
 that it was a thing of former days, no 
 longer in harmony with the imaginative re- 
 quirements, etc., etc., and the various other 
 subtle remarks which you have read above.
 
 THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. $J 
 
 Not this Rhineland ; quite another. A 
 Rhineland of the past, but which neither I 
 nor any other mortal had ever seen ; one 
 which used only to exist in my childish 
 fancy, and which, wholly different from the 
 reality, was gradually brought back to my 
 memory by names which I had for years 
 forgotten. A Fata Morgana Rhineland, 
 which years and years ago I had constructed 
 or rather, which had constructed itself 
 for me from the random allusions, the 
 incoherent descriptions of a servant-maid we 
 had had while living in the neighbourhood 
 of Frankfurt. 1 must have been a small 
 creature of five or six ; she was a buxom 
 thing of eighteen or nineteen, romantic, 
 poetic, and of decayed gentility, as nurse- 
 maids in Germany frequently are, or were ; 
 a native of the Rhineland, Rheingau as she 
 called it, meaning thereby merely that 
 classic portion between Bingen and Cob- 
 lentz ; all the rest of the river's course, 
 before and after, being apparently non-
 
 ^ JUVENILIA. 
 
 existent for her, as it certainly was for me. 
 Of this Rhineland of hers she was per- 
 petually telling, and to me she could never 
 tell enough. She was not from the river 
 bank itself, but from Inland, some small 
 place whose name has completely gone out 
 of my memory ; there her father was school- 
 master, her grandfather had been parson ; 
 it was the most marvellous region in the 
 whole world ; it never appeared to me as 
 having anything in common with the rest 
 of the earth. Everything was wonderful. 
 Fruit trees, the like of which did not exist, 
 covered it with miraculous blossom. Now 
 fruit blossom, the transparent, easily shed 
 pure white of the cherry ; the solid creami- 
 ness, crowned with tiny pale green leaves, of 
 thepear ; the pink-tipped,woolly, unwillingly 
 opening buds of the apple, the various 
 foam-like flowering of all the various kinds 
 of plums, fruit blossom of all kinds always 
 had, I know not whether from the difficulty 
 of obtaining it, its association with sweet taste,
 
 THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 39 
 
 or with the excitement and surprise of spring, 
 or merely from its own peculiar beauty, 
 quite a particular fascination for my child- 
 hood. Embosomed in all this were all the 
 other marvels of the girl's birthplace. The 
 father, a schoolmaster such as there never 
 was elsewhere ; the parsonage, a parsonage 
 such as there could not be more than one in 
 the world ; the parson himself, the grand- 
 father, a grandfather as other folks never 
 possessed one ; who had been alive during 
 the French Revolution (the French Revolu- 
 tion had a marvellous power over my 
 imagination), who had seen, spoken to, 
 flouted, repelled (who knows ?) Napoleon 
 when he came into Rhineland ; an old 
 gentleman whose wonderful wisdom was 
 deeply impressed on my mind, one of his 
 dicta c 'The hair of the head, the orna- 
 ment of mankind, let it hang, let it hang " 
 (" Die Haare des Hauptes, die Zierde der 
 Menschen, lass hangen, lass hangen") re- 
 maining in my memory like an oracle,
 
 4t> JUVENILIA. 
 
 Moreover, this Rhineland, this particular 
 Rhineland, was full of legends of nixens, 
 castles, treasures, nuns and knights, things 
 which all the world can (in all probability) 
 read in the sixpenny books sold at the 
 stations, but which appeared to me as 
 learned in some occult and direct manner 
 by my nurse, as the emanation of the 
 wonderful country. Of these legends there 
 was, moreover, a mysterious large volume, 
 of which (without ever having set eyes upon 
 it) I can see, brown binding, tapestry work 
 markers and all, at this very moment, so 
 often did I clamour for descriptions of it. 
 It was apparently unique, at least it never 
 seemed to occur to any one that a copy of 
 it might be procured ; vague hints were 
 thrown out that some day it should be 
 brought, I should see it and hear the stories 
 read out of it, but it never was brought ; 
 having something inscrutable and mirage- 
 like in its nature ; and it remained, and still 
 remains, a mysterious object in my imagi-
 
 THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 4! 
 
 nation, a wizard book, which, when opened, 
 lets out a cloud of diaphanous figures, 
 knights, water sprites, nuns, enchanted 
 princesses, even as other old books, when 
 clapped open, emit dust from out of their 
 pages. Round this existed the parsonage, 
 moved the father, the grandfather, uncles 
 and cousins, all unique people, in a kind of 
 sea of everlasting fruit blossom. Such was the 
 Rhineland as it existed for me : the land of 
 wonders and joys, too wonderful indeed for 
 approach ; the idea never as much as oc- 
 curring to me to wish, in my wildest wishes, 
 even to penetrate into it. Not a province, 
 not a substantial country, to which you 
 could get by two hours' railway travelling, 
 but a land east of the sun and west of the 
 moon inexplicable, unapproachable, a thing 
 to sit and wonder on. 
 
 All this, long, long, forgotten, gradually 
 returned to my memory with the name 
 (magic names, alas ! how long forgotten) of 
 Lorch, Kaub, Rhense, Bacherach, and other
 
 42 JUVENILIA. 
 
 villages by the great stream ; and, while my 
 eyes were staring at the monotonous zigzag 
 of dwarfed vines and stone walls up and 
 down the hillsides, with the battered little 
 castle here and there ; at the white towns 
 with gabled houses and extinguisher steeples 
 spread out primly at the water's edge ; at 
 the little oasis of brilliant green grass, fruit 
 trees, hedges breaking the weariness of the 
 eternal vineyard ; at the solemn grey-green 
 water, on which the huge rafts went in and out 
 like floating spars ; as the logical certainty 
 of the insufficiency of all these sights and 
 associations for us familiar with Italy, ad- 
 mirers of Whistler and readers of "My Last 
 Duchess," came clearer and clearer before 
 what ought to be called, I suppose, the 
 more intelligent portion of my mind ; the 
 rest of my mind, nay, somehow my whole 
 nature, was invaded by the consciousness of 
 that imaginary Rhineland of my childhood. 
 I felt excited, pleased, scarce knowing at 
 what ; and whenever the boats came along-
 
 THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 43 
 
 side the steamer and the cry arose " Bop- 
 pard," or cc Kaub,'' or " Lorch," the effect 
 was as if I caught distant notes of some once 
 cherished tune, thrilling me faintly, but 
 surely. 
 
 Very pleasant, I grant it ; but, after all, 
 pleasant things are not necessarily good 
 or proper : to be excessively conceited is 
 pleasant; and pleasant also, doubtless, to 
 have an opium vision of bliss ; or to think 
 that a certain number of genuflexions, a 
 certain number of Latin rhymes will gain 
 us admittance to a paradise whose sky is 
 molten gold, and whose everyflower is a living 
 jewel ; but in all these cases the pleasantness 
 to the individual between whom and the 
 truth such figments interfere, does not 
 diminish by a tittle the moral and intel- 
 lectual degradation attendant on such hallu- 
 cinations ; and the visions conjured up by 
 our faculty of association are but another 
 form of such hallucinations, and have 
 their attendant degradation. Degradation,
 
 44 JUVENILIA. 
 
 moral and intellectual, you will answer, in 
 moral and intellectual matters ; but, after 
 all, what great mischief has arisen if associ- 
 ation have its way in artistic matters ; if an 
 unreality of the fancy come between us and 
 what are, at best, but the unrealities of art ? 
 But I say that degradation it is. The king- 
 dom of beauty is, it is true, only the play- 
 ground of our lives ; but, even as children 
 may soil their frocks, or hurt their play- 
 mates, or tread down grass and flowers in the 
 course of their games ; so we also may not 
 only trample into unseemliness our aesthetic 
 playground and shatter our aesthetic toys, 
 but also, during our pastimes, become guilty 
 of injury to our neighbours' rights ; of 
 destruction of our moral garments ; of 
 various things which, when on returning 
 to our serious work and serious lessons, on 
 seeing our playthings in bits, our playmates 
 bruised and battered, our playground de- 
 vastated, and ourselves tattered and be- 
 smirched, may make us feel exceedingly
 
 THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 45 
 
 ashamed. Now, of all tricks which we 
 grown-up folk may play in our aesthetic 
 playground, there are few as mischievous 
 as that trick of association : none certainly 
 affording such opportunities for maltreat- 
 ment of others, vandalism, and wastefulness. 
 Let us look into the matter. Association 
 means the investing of one object, having 
 characteristics of its own, with the charac- 
 teristics of some other object : the pushing 
 aside, in short, of reality to make room for 
 the fictions of imagination or memory. 
 
 Now, in a work of art, or a thing of 
 nature which can afford artistic pleasure, 
 there is, as in man, woman, beast, plant, or 
 stone, nothing so important as its reality. 
 This reality, this sum total of all its 
 actually existing characteristics, means, in 
 the work of art, all the labour expended 
 upon producing it, all the good luck en- 
 joyed in finding it, all the pleasure that it 
 may give. In practical concerns, this is 
 recognized by every creature : we do our
 
 46 JUVENILIA. 
 
 best to get at the reality of man, woman, 
 beast, or plant, knowing that on that reality 
 depends all it can do for us, or that we 
 must do for it. But in all assthetical matters 
 the case is different : We do not seek for 
 the reality of the work of art, do not ask 
 ourselves what it is. The reality of a work 
 of art is that by which we recognize and 
 remember, that of which we can make a 
 copy, the identical and individual, which to 
 all men similarly constituted must appear 
 the same : the form, this form, the visible 
 shape of picture or statue, the audible 
 shape of symphony or song ; what the artist 
 has conceived, has seen or heard in his 
 mind, which he has perfected in the mere 
 conception, and then laboured to transmit 
 outwardly to us by arranging the paint on 
 the canvas, the bosses in the marble, the 
 relations of the sounds of voice and in- 
 struments. 
 
 But little knowledge of music is required 
 to realize the work of composing a sym-
 
 THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 47 
 
 phony or a mass : inventing the themes, 
 dovetailing them into each other, distri- 
 buting them in little bits to the various 
 instruments or voices, and giving to the 
 other instruments and voices something 
 which shall enhance and not impoverish 
 the effect of those main parts. And when 
 the artist has all the science and taste and 
 experience required for all this, when he 
 can drive (without lurching) the frightful 
 twenty-in-hand of counterpoint and orches- 
 tration, he yet requires, for his work to be 
 good, a thing considerably rarer than rubies, 
 and, unfortunately, not obtainable for money 
 the trifle called genius. In the same way, 
 it is good to meditate upon the fact, casually 
 mentioned to me one day by a sculptor 
 friend that a statue intended to be placed, 
 not in a niche, but on a free-standing 
 pedestal, would afford, if every point giving 
 a new relation of points were represented, 
 from twenty to twenty-five possible and 
 different photographs. This simply means
 
 48 JUVENILIA. 
 
 that the sculptor must make a statue which 
 shall present well in twenty or twenty-five 
 ways ; after which there remains the per- 
 fecting of all this in a minute detail. You 
 may sometimes go to the studio and see the 
 clay model finished, ready for casting ; re- 
 turn a week later, and you may, just as soon 
 as not, find the model still there, with per- 
 haps a whole leg and one half of the drapery 
 reduced to an unseemly lump of greenish 
 clay, which the artist is slowly working back 
 into shape, having suddenly grown discon- 
 tented with such and such a fold of drapery, 
 because, although admirable when looked 
 at in front, it made some trifling lump or 
 point which looked bad at the side. Such 
 is the reality of a good symphony or a 
 good statue ; and such is the labour which 
 even genius cannot dispense with in its 
 production. This is the reality, and this 
 is what association immediately proceeds 
 to mar. 
 
 The symphony is being performed ; and
 
 THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 49 
 
 as, bit by bit, is unfolded that complicated 
 pattern of sounds ; as passage follows pas- 
 sage, whose invention may have been a 
 flash of genius, whose arrangement an 
 agony of long unsuccessful effort, you (t 
 mean mankind in general, presumably in- 
 cluding myself) who are perhaps the mere 
 unproductive aesthete, sit blandly, a plea- 
 sant noise of music soothing or gently 
 stirring your nerves, letting your mind fill 
 (like a leaky boat) with vague thoughts 
 and emotions. The sough of wind among 
 pines, the smell of the forest ; the sheen 
 of the sunset on the sea; your dead or 
 distant friends ; the soul, its peregrinations 
 through infinity, love, and death (after Burne 
 Jones or Solomon) leading or snaring it, 
 on the way whither ? to the paradise of 
 Fra Angelico, the pink and blue Jerusalem, 
 shimmering among the gilded meadows, 
 or rather to the whirlpool of atoms, the 
 viewless seas and skies of Nirvana. Mean- 
 while things have been going by : happy 
 VOL. i. 4
 
 50 JUVENILIA. 
 
 movements and combinations ; things gone 
 in a second, but, remembering which in 
 moments of dishearten ment, the poor com- 
 poser may have smiled, and the smile may 
 have meant : " There is genius in me after 
 all." These things have gone by : past 
 your mind, your pampered soul, noticed 
 about as much as the long cricket notes 
 through a summer evening's talk ; the 
 crackling of the fire during the composition 
 of your last poem a poem, I would wager, 
 upon the power of music. 
 
 Similarly with the statue, one glance, just 
 taking in the general aspect, perhaps another 
 to see how well the stone is cut ; and then 
 you contemplate the work with that vague 
 stare which sees nothing ; you think of the 
 hero's life, and of his mighty battle-shout, 
 of his tears over his fallen comrade. Of 
 the waves on the Trojan shore, the clear 
 night over the plain dotted with watch- 
 fires ; the youth of mankind Socrates, 
 Sappho, the brutal Roman praetors, and
 
 THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 51 
 
 a whole Panathenaic procession of imper- 
 tinent associations. Meanwhile the marble 
 stands before you, neither fighting, nor 
 shouting, nor weeping; with no waves or 
 watch-fires near him, and no consciousness 
 of the youth of mankind ; a mere comely, 
 naked body, with a wisp of drapery over 
 the arm, and no personality save in the 
 name graven on the pedestal, a name 
 snatched at on its first suggestion by the 
 friend whom the sculptor has asked, " Now, 
 what is this to be called? " Thus poor in 
 sentimental or psychological qualities, but 
 rich with a hundred beauties of line and 
 curve and boss ; of light expanded here, 
 and imprisoned and fretted there ; of chisel 
 grainings, delicate like sea sand ; of bold 
 point-strokes, vigorously marking off" bone 
 or sinew ; things, all these, which make up 
 the complete reality of the work ; things 
 over which the artist may have half broken 
 his heart; and with the vaguest general 
 impression of which you depart, persuaded
 
 52 JUVENILIA. 
 
 that you alone have appreciated the statue, 
 and ready to write (as Winckelmann, who, 
 however, really saw the good points of a 
 statue, used to do) that this masterpiece is 
 altogether moulded out of the most subtle 
 abstract ideas, is, in short, the perfect em- 
 bodiment of the shapeless. 
 
 And this, all this has been the doing of 
 association ; a rare and beautiful thing has 
 been within our spiritual reach, and we have 
 not cared to stretch out to grasp it. The 
 genius and patience, the labour of months, 
 nay, rather of years, of all the previous years 
 of the artist and of those from whom he 
 learned, expended to give us an exquisite 
 and exotic pleasure ; all this has been 
 wasted, wasted as stupidly and ungratefully 
 as would be v/asted the precious fruit 
 brought with infinite care from other 
 climates, of which some captious child 
 might say, after a bite, " Thank you, I 
 prefer the unripe apples I can pick up in 
 the orchard."
 
 THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 53 
 
 What has become of my desire for jus- 
 tice, of my plans of dealing equitably 
 by saying all the good I could think of, 
 while thinking all the ill that could be 
 thought of this abominable faculty of as- 
 sociation ? I had determined to write an 
 apology, nay, a panegyric, and, instead, I 
 have written a diatribe ; the mere name of 
 association has made me acrimonious ; acri- 
 monious, but, you cannot deny it, just; 
 because this association really is ... 
 
 Well, yes ; that is just the tantalizing 
 thing about association : the more I examine 
 into its workings, the more malignant it 
 appears. And yet, when I am not trying 
 to reason it out, to do justice all round, a 
 great number of things do come into my 
 head illustrative of the beneficial effect ; 
 yes, indeed, the beneficial effect, I may 
 even (strange as it may sound) go to the 
 length of saying, the absolutely indis- 
 pensable character of this faculty of asso- 
 ciation in our aesthetic perceptions. You
 
 54 JUVENILIA. 
 
 think this an absurdity ? You think 
 association can be but detrimental in our 
 relations to art ? Well (how idiotic one's 
 own arguments do sound when some one 
 else is using them against one, to be sure !) 
 I am of opinion that without association 
 there would be no relations to art ; nay, no 
 art at all. You smile? You say (what I 
 somehow said myself, and now I can't 
 make it square any longer) that as the 
 action of opposition is that of a wave, an 
 allusion of all manner of chaotic thoughts 
 and impressions washing over the definite 
 artistic forms which are settling in our 
 mind ; it is evident that the definite artistic 
 forms run the risk of being completely ob- 
 literated. That seems to you conclusive : 
 good ; that is the very reason why the 
 action of opposition is indispensable to the 
 appreciation, nay, to the creation of artistic 
 form. You have compared the action of 
 association to that of a wave carrying 
 innumerable heterogeneous odds and ends
 
 THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 55 
 
 of thought and impression. As such, in 
 my turn, I claim it as the action which 
 is for ever making the firm soil of our 
 mind ; by collecting round the microscopic 
 present all the floatsam of the past, the 
 action which is perpetually preventing the 
 sea of constantly undulating experiences, 
 atoms of sensation and reflection for ever 
 changing place like the drops in the ocean, 
 from reabsorbing everything which might 
 become a permanently existing idea, a 
 definite emotion, a solid form. The float- 
 sam, the bits of triturated imagery and 
 feeling (already soaked and battered into 
 something unlike their original nature) may 
 be brought in too great abundance ; and 
 the wave may carry too much of that 
 strange sea froth of sentiment, a thing 
 neither solid nor fluid, and which fast im- 
 prisons and dooms to never-ending float- 
 ing and tossing everything that it once 
 encloses; and thus a something, perhaps 
 rare and precious, may go for ever churned
 
 $6 JUVENILIA. 
 
 about among the floatsam and the sea froth, 
 until, rotting, it become mere sea froth it- 
 self. The wave of association may deprive 
 us ever and anon of some addition to the 
 little islet of wisdom and beauty of our 
 lives; but had there not been that wave 
 tossing the past to the present, no solid 
 wisdom or beauty, nay, no individuality of 
 ourselves would have existed at all. This 
 is a metaphor ; you object, and there is no 
 nonsense so great as not to be made most 
 judicious by metaphorical presentation. 
 Then I will drop the metaphor, and speak 
 the dry language of fact (so often making 
 us lose those sudden revelations of analogy 
 which flash upon us in metaphor). With- 
 out association, I say, no art. In the first 
 instance, every modern psychologist who 
 has studied the origin of our aesthetic 
 faculties, will tell you that one half, and 
 that in far more complex, of the instinc- 
 tive preferences which are the rudiments 
 of all our aesthetic feelings, is referable,
 
 tHE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 57 
 
 not like the simpler kind of such rudi- 
 mentary instincts of beauty, to the greater 
 physical comfort which the eye and ear 
 experiences in the perception of certain 
 relations of colour and sound ; but to the 
 habit, due to the experience of our remotest 
 half-human progenitors, of associating ma- 
 terial pleasure, safety, or usefulness with 
 certain aspects rather than with others. 
 Were we to seek the reasons why a strong 
 and healthy human body of our own race 
 gives us a general sense of beauty which 
 we should not receive from a deformed 
 negro, we should find that the single 
 elements of line, curve, and tint were 
 probably not, in the one case, more agree- 
 able to our nerves of sight than in the 
 other case ; we should probably discover 
 that the selfsame lines, curves, and tints 
 were contained in a great number of other 
 objects of which we should call some ugly 
 and others beautiful ; and that we must 
 consequently seek the explanation of the 
 
 4*
 
 58 JUVENILIA. 
 
 sense of beauty connected with the one 
 figure, and of ugliness connected with the 
 other, in the practical generalization made 
 thousands of years ago, that a body formed in 
 one way was useful and agreeable, and formed 
 in another way useless and cumbersome; 
 in the contempt, moreover, and the sus- 
 picious loathing with which savages of a 
 slightly superior race would look upon 
 other savages of a slightly inferior race, 
 their slaves or enemies. The original 
 motive of preference has been obliter- 
 ated by centuries; just as for years we 
 may forget the original circumstance which 
 directed us to the occupation or friendship 
 which has been the all in all of our Jives ; 
 but the result of the act of association 
 which took place in ancestors living per- 
 haps before what we call Europe was 
 turned into ice fields ; the instinct of pre- 
 ference, the habit of pleasure, have become 
 part and parcel of our nature. Thus, you 
 see, there would never have been any
 
 THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 59 
 
 works of art or any people to appreciate 
 them; nay, there would not have been 
 such faculties as perceive and create the 
 beautiful, had it not been for this same 
 much abused faculty of association. Why 
 did our apelike progenitors enjoy the ap- 
 pearance of a green tree with white blos- 
 soms which did not bear eatable fruit, 
 because they remembered the greenness 
 of leaf and whiteness of blossom of a tree 
 which did bear eatable fruit? Why did 
 they not limit their likings to the real, 
 but go loving one thing for the sake of 
 another; the present for the sake of the 
 past ? They were sentimental and quite 
 deficient in intellectual discipline. But, alas ! 
 had they been less maundering and more 
 logical we should have had no Raphael, 
 no Michael Angelo ; we should care to 
 see only the things we can eat. All that, 
 you answer, is perfectly true ; but that 
 happened a long time ago ; that associa- 
 tion was useful in our remotest ancestors
 
 60 JUVENILIA. 
 
 is not a reason that it should be desirable 
 in us. After all, men and women, in early 
 times, lived in caves and on posts in lakes; 
 and had they refused to do so, the human 
 race would have come to an end, and we 
 should not be here to live in houses. But 
 is that a reason why we also should go and 
 live in caves or on posts in a lake ? Thus 
 you, chafing my spirit more and more by 
 repeating arguments which are my own, 
 and which I detest proportionately. 
 
 I continue. 
 
 But as there are cave and lake homes 
 which our ancestors did well to inhabit, 
 and there are also houses which it is 
 fit we should live in, so also are there 
 modes of association which were useful 
 in our ancestors ; and different, much 
 more modern modes of association which 
 it would be as fatal for us to regret, 
 as for us to be too grand to live under 
 roofs, and insist upon establishing our- 
 selves on floating cirrus clouds. I have
 
 THE LAKE Ot CHARLEMAGNE. 6t 
 
 compared the action of association to that 
 of the wave which brings to the nucleus 
 of solid earth all the floating things which 
 can make soil. Now, do you know what 
 makes our mind, our experience, our 
 genius ? 
 
 Do you think that we perceive, much 
 less remember, the totally unknown ? Not 
 a bit of it ; we merely constantly recognize 
 the already familiar ; what we catch hold of 
 with our mind is not that which is new, 
 which belongs to to-day ; but that which is 
 old, and belongs to yesterday : the diffe- 
 rent, the new, we take in, tolerate, enjoy, 
 only later. We wander, as it were, through 
 a vast and populous city ; those that we 
 notice and speak to are our old acquaint- 
 ance ; but the old acquaintance introduce 
 new ones, whom we admit for their sake. 
 Nay, if we sometimes look twice upon the 
 face of a stranger, if we accost a man of 
 whom we have no knowledge, it is because 
 in the face, the gait, the manner of that
 
 62 JUVENILIA. 
 
 stranger, we have recognized something of 
 the face, the gait, and the manner of some 
 one we have known before ; and if, later, 
 we come to love the new friend for qualities 
 in which he differs wholly from the old one, 
 we must not forget that we cared for him 
 at first merely for the things by which he 
 reminded us of that other. 
 
 Thus does association gather the past to 
 the present, assimilating for ever new im- 
 pressions to old ones. Within the mind of 
 all men for whom or through whom the 
 beautiful exists, there has thus come to exist 
 a perpetual coming and going, submerging 
 and rising to the surface of fragments of 
 thought, and feeling, and perception ; a 
 chaotic whirl of atoms, of broken-down 
 fragments of works of art, of shreds dyed 
 with some strange sky or wave tint of 
 nature, of mere imperfect silhouettes, and 
 of most heterogeneous dabs of colour ; 
 moreover, faces and voices of persons, 
 branches of trees, bars of melody, snatches
 
 THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. j 
 
 of verse, little shreds of mysterious and 
 momentary feelings, of love and hate and 
 hopefulness and sorrow : a perfect witches' 
 caldron full, and seething like a witch broth, 
 each atom seeking the atoms most akin to 
 itself, uniting with them, but usually to be 
 swept back again into the common whirl. 
 Every now and then a curious phenomenon 
 takes place. Whether from the accident of 
 a greater than usual homogeneousness in 
 these seething atoms, or from the accident 
 of some unusually great heat or pressure 
 exercised upon them, or from any other 
 similar cause that you can think of, there 
 arise in this chaos agglomerations which 
 are no longer chaotic ; there appear in this 
 constant change things which are stable, 
 mere bubbles at first, but gaining solidity 
 and definiteness every moment ; until at 
 length they can actually be removed out of 
 the heterogeneous and never-resting whirl, 
 and be known not merely by him in whose 
 brain they have arisen, but by others also.
 
 64 JUVENILIA. 
 
 And these things, arisen out of the chaos 
 of elements brought together by association, 
 nay, separated from that seething mass, and 
 united with other separating fragments by 
 the power of that very association again, 
 these things are what we call forms : pictures, 
 symphonies, works of art. And there is 
 no stranger thought than that of the great 
 unused, disorderly mass of sights, sounds, 
 feelings, and thoughts, whose existence is 
 proved by the production of certain definite 
 works, and which every artist has carried 
 with him, unused, into his grave. Oh, for 
 a glimpse into that splendid and inestimable 
 chaos out of which have issued the works 
 of Shelley, of Mozart, of Raphael ; for a 
 glimpse into the crepuscular places where 
 thronged the dim shapes from among whom 
 Michael Angelo called forth his sullen 
 goddesses and prophets; into the unsub- 
 stantial, fluctuating crowd whence Shake- 
 speare evoked Miranda, and Portia, and 
 Romeo, and Lear ; or into those untrodden
 
 THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 65 
 
 and intangible woods and dells whence 
 Keats bade Endymion guide his chariot. 
 
 Empty and impossible desires ; yet not 
 so empty, not so cruelly impossible as the 
 desire, the longing of those in whose mind 
 things of beauty and dignity are for ever 
 turning, are for ever seeming to unite and 
 take shape, merely to fall asunder, and be 
 absorbed once more into chaos. 
 
 Thus much for the part played by asso- 
 ciation in the actual production of beautiful 
 things. Let us see now what is its share in 
 the enjoyment of them. How great this is 
 I realized, perhaps fully, only this summer ; 
 realized it not only by a mere rilling up of 
 an empty present by a rich past, as in the 
 case of the Rhineland experience which I 
 have told you of; but by suddenly feeling 
 the vivid present accompanied, like some 
 clear melody, by the fainter but fuller har- 
 monies of the past. I had just returned to 
 England, and was walking one morning 
 across one of our south country commons,
 
 66 JUVENILIA. 
 
 all mottled yellowish with tender-sprouting 
 bracken, and rusty, inky green with gorse, 
 and all a-chirrup with young larks. It was 
 of all things the most opposed to the hills, 
 misty grey with olive, the fields all a yellow 
 shimmer of pale green vines and wheat, the 
 diaphanous tints, the sharp but unsubstan- 
 tial forms of Tuscany, whence I had just 
 come ; and it filled me with a sense like that 
 of breathing suddenly a wholly different air, 
 of moving in a different element, as those 
 must feel who rise in a balloon, or dive 
 down deep under water. Folds on folds 
 of green undulation, strips of grass and 
 common enclosed by round trees, and 
 tightened, shrunk by distance, till the 
 horizon is nothing but treetops upon tree- 
 tops, monotonous in line, for ever the same 
 shape, yet varied, painted by distance into 
 a whole scale of various greens, from the 
 brilliant pure green of the grass under foot, 
 through all manner of yellowish tints and 
 pale brown, of scarce mature or nipped
 
 THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 67 
 
 leaf, to the pure grey, nay, rather blue, of 
 the horizon. There is about that country 
 a great sense of dim and attractive distance, 
 not, as in other places, of beautiful delect- 
 able mountains which our fancy vainly 
 seeks to scale, but rather of a possibility, 
 nay, a necessity, of our imagination going 
 on for ever through that easily walked 
 sweetness. Yet, under the grey sky, 
 moister even in its little rifts of blue and 
 its white vapours, moistest, perhaps, in its 
 gleams of sun (which is colour, but not 
 light), which are yellow from the blackness 
 surrounding, this country is not without 
 a certain dreariness and austerity, in the 
 brown and rusty tones of the gorse, of the 
 thinned trees, the blighted hedges, and of 
 the seeded reed clumps ; most of all in the 
 damp chilliness of the air and sky. Walk- 
 ing across this common, I was struck by 
 something which reminded me of Brittany, 
 and immediately Brittany came before me 
 Brittany, with its resemblances and dif-
 
 68 JUVENILIA. 
 
 ferences ; with those same folds of blue- 
 green treed horizon, those same patches 
 of sombre, tarnished rusty gorse. Again, 
 Brittany, with the yellow earth of its lanes, 
 the yellow stubble (the straw being cut at 
 only half length) under the apple trees of 
 its high-lying fields, with the long rows of 
 tall rustling poplars, nested with mistletoe, 
 along the roads, with the beautiful grey 
 fcatheriness of thatch of its farms and 
 gentilhommieres. Brittany thus came back, 
 seemed to exist side by side, as a kind of 
 bass to the melody of the really existing 
 present, filling up all gaps, strengthening 
 and softening, making complete the plea- 
 surableness of that English scene. Noticing 
 this, and thinking over it later, it came 
 home to me that in our perceptions of 
 nature and of art there usually exists a kind 
 of phantom of the past, omitting which, 
 we enjoy in a less poignant way (a sort of 
 thrumming accompaniment or set of chords) 
 the resemblances and diversities between
 
 THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 69 
 
 which and the present occasion a sort of 
 half-unconscious pleasure, nay, the past 
 may exist only in the condition of a har- 
 monic, a sound which we do not disentangle 
 at all in our impressions, but which still 
 forms part of them, marking, by a recog- 
 nition of some distant and past thing, the 
 qualities of the present. For the present 
 is in itself, however vivid, too transient and 
 thin ; like a single bright coat of colour, it 
 requires, in order to remain, a layer or two 
 of the past, unseen, perhaps, but which 
 gives it body, and tone, and stability. Nay, 
 but for this intervention of the past should 
 we perceive the beautiful things of the 
 present, its patterns of lines, and colours, 
 and sounds, in a way more satisfactory than 
 that in which we perceive a single note, 
 or the taste of a fruit, or the warmth of a 
 cloak ? There are persons, and many, who, 
 going through a picture gallery which is 
 new to them, or walking through a new 
 country, will frequently complain of a sort of
 
 7O JUVENILIA, 
 
 painful sense that their minds cannot take 
 in new things sufficiently quickly. Now, 
 if you question such people, you will 
 almost invariably find that they have only 
 confused and very general impressions 
 about the galleries and countries which they 
 have previously visited. They compare 
 their brain to a thoroughly soaked sponge, 
 which can absorb no more water. But 
 their simile is false ; they suffer not because 
 there is too much past to admit the present, 
 but because they have not enough of that 
 many tinted though faded tapestry of the 
 past, into which to weave, to secure them, 
 the brilliant threads of the present. 
 
 These are the benefits which we obtain 
 in our aesthetic life from association ; nay, 
 this constant adding of old to new is our 
 esthetic life itself. Sometimes even one 
 might wish that this life were slower, that 
 impressions were fewer and further between; 
 that one might enjoy to the full the pleasure 
 of going over one's odd impressions, of
 
 THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. Jl 
 
 noting the ever-changing and fantastic effects 
 of this embroidery of new and old, of the 
 dimmed thread of years and years ago, shot 
 with the vivid purple or starlet of yester- 
 day. The fact is that our assthetic life is 
 too crowded or huddled ; we have too 
 many arts, too many schools of literature 
 of all times and nations, and we properly 
 enjoy (not even in the present impression, 
 and certainly not in the past) none of them. 
 We are like the inhabitants of certain re- 
 mote villages in the south of Italy, who, 
 until roads were made in the last century, 
 were unable to export their products and 
 unable also to consume them. We want 
 all our casks and barrels for the new wine, 
 the terrible new wine which seems to be 
 made, not once a year, but once a month, 
 nay, once a week ; and we have to empty 
 out into the gutters, like so much stale 
 water, the mellow, the delicate vintage of 
 previous years. 
 
 There now I see you laughing. Laugh-
 
 72 JUVENILIA. 
 
 ing, I suppose, because after having found 
 it so very, very difficult to say one good 
 word for association, I have now made not 
 only an apology, but a panegyric, and that 
 the only drawback I can find is that we 
 cannot so fully enjoy all the benefits of this 
 pestilent faculty. Is that it ? Well, I 
 always told you that the very disagreeable- 
 ness of my position arose from the sense 
 that so much good as well as so much harm 
 could be said of association, and that I 
 wanted to state both. Besides, after all, is 
 it of association itself that I have spoken ill ; 
 or is it not rather of the stupid wastefulness 
 of those who indulge in it out of place ? 
 Association, I have said, makes art, makes 
 our capacity of enjoying it ; nay, makes our 
 minds. Now are we not balking the very 
 end and aim of association when, in order 
 to enjoy its action in ourselves, we neglect 
 its works ? Is it not, whenever we let our 
 thoughts wander in the presence of a picture 
 or during the hearing of a symphony, as if
 
 THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. jj 
 
 we were to refuse to let a poet read us his 
 verses because we found his conversation so 
 full .of poetic charm ? Yes, indeed, it is 
 not association which is pestilent ; it is our 
 own conceit, our own stupidity, our own 
 want of self-command. 
 
 Very self-contradictory. That is your 
 verdict upon me ; and it is useless, I sup- 
 pose, to answer, cf Where is the contradic- 
 tion in saying that fire under some circum- 
 stances keeps us alive, and under certain 
 others most effectually puts an end to us ? " 
 I have said too much harm to be permitted 
 to say much good ; that is always what this 
 just world will not tolerate. Well, then, 
 to be consistent, if possible, at least in the 
 beginning and in the end of my remarks, 
 I will mention a trick sometimes practised 
 by association, and from which you per- 
 chance may have suffered, even as did the 
 Emperor Charlemagne, whose melancholy 
 tale is told by Petrarch in his epistles and 
 elsewhere, but best of all by old Burton. 
 
 VOL. i. 5
 
 74 JUVENILIA. 
 
 f< He foolishly doted," we read in the 
 second volume of the Cf Anatomy," " upon 
 a woman of mean favour and condition, 
 many years together ; wholly delighting in 
 her company, to the great grief and indig- 
 nation of his friends and followers. When 
 she was dead he did embrace her corpse as 
 Apollo did the bay tree for his Daphne, 
 and caused her coffin (richly embalmed 
 and decked with jewels) to be carried about 
 with him, over which he still lamented. 
 At last a venerable bishop that followed 
 his Court pray'd earnestly to God (com- 
 miserating his lord and master's case) to 
 know the true cause of this mad passion, 
 and whence it proceeded ; it was revealed 
 to him, in fine, that the cause of the em- 
 peror's mad love lay under the dead 
 woman's tongue. The bishop went hastily 
 to the carkas, and took a small ring thence; 
 upon the removal, the emperor abhorred 
 the corpse, and instead of it, fell furiously 
 in love with the bishop ; he would not
 
 THE LAKE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 75 
 
 suffer him to be out of his presence. 
 Which, when the bishop perceived, he 
 flung the ring into the midst of a great 
 lake, where the king then was. From 
 that hour the emperor, neglecting all his 
 other houses, built a fair house in the midst 
 of the marsh, to his infinite expense, and 
 a temple by it where after he was buried, 
 and in which city ail his prosperity ever 
 since used to be crowned." Thus the 
 legend of Aix la Chapelle ; and to Petrarch, 
 to Burton, to all our wonder-greedy fore- 
 fathers, the tale seemed marvellous and 
 eery. But, alas ! are we not most of us 
 in the same case as Burton's emperor ? 
 Have we not, many of us at least, some 
 strange lake, which to others is a mere fiat 
 swampy pond, into which the charmed ring 
 of association, taken from off some loved 
 thing, has been, we know not why, cast? 
 Even as the emperor did, so we also sit and 
 stare into the shallow grey waters ; and the 
 moving cloud reflections seem to gather
 
 76 JUVENILIA. 
 
 into familiar shapes, and the reeds moaning 
 and creeking as they sway, and the languid, 
 sleepy water lapping dully as it eats into the 
 green, crumbling, spungy ground, have 
 accents which almost bring the tears into 
 our eyes ; and we look into the dim water 
 and strain to see the bottom : for in the 
 bottom of our marsh pond, cur dreary 
 pool, without trees, or bushy banks or 
 reflected hills, our shallow sheet of water 
 spilt on to the desolate plain, lies the charm, 
 the ring, the potent mysterious something 
 which we shall never see, but always long 
 for. And the fault here belongs to asso- 
 ciation. But I must end, for I wished to 
 conclude with a word more of the evil of 
 this faculty ; and unless I stop at once I 
 may catch myself (but too late) saying that 
 perhaps after all such a Charlemagne's lake 
 may be a blessing.
 
 BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA 
 LEMMI.
 
 BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA 
 LEMMI. 
 
 WOODEN frame thick overlaid with 
 paste of sulphur applied to the face 
 of the frescoes ; the bricks deftly cut into, 
 sawed, picked away from behind ; the 
 sulphur paste frame with adhering painted 
 plaster pulled away from the broken, 
 picked, jagged old wall ; a second frame- 
 work covered with wet gypsum applied to 
 the back of each thin sheet of frescoed 
 plaster; sulphur paste delicately peeled off 
 the painted surface of the plaster, the back 
 of which remains adhering to, encased in, 
 the gypsum ; that is the operation. A 
 new back has been substituted for the old
 
 8O JUVENILIA. 
 
 wall; and the frescoes are intact, unspotted, 
 safe, framed, portable, ready for the wooden 
 cases of the packers, the seals of the officials, 
 the van of the railway, the criticism of the 
 experts, the gape of the public. Civiliza- 
 tion has driven before it even dead art, 
 even art faded to a ghost ; and the pictures 
 which some four hundred years ago Ales- 
 sandro Botticelli painted in one of the back 
 rooms of the little villa- farm outside 
 Florence, are now upon the wall of the 
 grand staircase of the Louvre. 
 
 This is what they have just done, and 
 this is what gives me annoyance. Now, I 
 sincerely think that I am quite without any 
 morbid aesthetic aversion against modern 
 times and modern arrangements: I often feel 
 how much nobler in many ways- of generous 
 thought and endeavour, which we sniff at 
 because it has become commonplace, is this 
 prosaic age of ours than many another with 
 which we associate ideas of romance ; I 
 sometimes even feel a doubt whether in
 
 BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 8 1 
 
 several branches of art itself, in its most 
 delicate branch of poetry, these modern 
 times have not given and are not giving 
 
 o o o 
 
 work more completely beautiful than the 
 work of times with more pretensions to 
 poetry and picturesqueness. I cannot 
 therefore suspect myself of morbid aversion 
 to modern things and actions. Yet this 
 particular modern action of removing the 
 frescoes from the Villa Lemmi leaves in me 
 a strong, though at first somewhat inarticu- 
 late, sense of dissatisfaction. It may be 
 right, this instinctive and vague feeling of 
 displeasure, or it may be wrong, but any 
 way there it is ; and my present object is 
 exactly to discover whether this is a selfish 
 and sentimental personal crotchet, or a 
 well-founded and honest conviction. This 
 is what I wish to do ; and in order to 
 do it, let me separate from one another 
 the various impressions of the past, the 
 various expectations of the future ; let me 
 place in some sort of intelligible order the 
 
 5*
 
 82 JUVENILIA. 
 
 fragments of scarce conscious argument, 
 which taken together make up or produce 
 the vaguely painful sense that comes over 
 me every time I remember the removal 
 of those paintings from that place. 
 
 The first question which I hit upon in 
 this ransacking of my consciousness, is one 
 in which the explanation of the whole 
 matter may possibly lie. The question is 
 simply whether the removal of those paint- 
 ings from one locality to another deprives 
 me of a particular kind of pleasure, de- 
 pendent for me upon the presence of these 
 individual frescoes, in the same manner as 
 the departure of a friend to some other 
 country would deprive me of an analogous 
 kind of pleasure obtainable only from the 
 presence of an individual friend who has 
 gone away. This seems a likely enough 
 explanation, but I do not think it is in 
 any way the true one. There are, indeed, 
 there must be to every one, a certain 
 small number of works of art which
 
 BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 83 
 
 are very much what to each of us is a cer- 
 tain small, very small number of friends ; 
 certain books or passages in books, certain 
 pictures or statues, certain pieces of music, 
 never to be able to read which again, to see 
 again or hear once more, would be at the 
 moment of first knowing that these things 
 must be, a sharp pain, and with the passing 
 of time, a sort of vague and dull nostalgia, 
 coming ever and anon in moments of weak- 
 ness and depression, like the hopeless long- 
 ing for a face we can see only through a 
 shifting mist of years, for a voice whose 
 tone we can evoke for only one scarcely 
 perceptible instant. Such works of art 
 there must be for all to whom art is any- 
 thing, although there can be but few from 
 which we can thus be wholly and utterly 
 separated ; since a poem, a picture, a piece 
 of music, are things whose identity can be 
 almost indefinitely multiplied, not things, 
 like friends, which live but once and only 
 in one place. But among such things for
 
 84 JUVENILIA. 
 
 me are not those frescoes, nay, not any 
 work of Botticelli. There are personal 
 sympathies in art as in all things, harmonies 
 more or less complete between certain 
 works and certain minds ; and Botticelli is 
 to me one of those incompleter harmonies. 
 Not but that I appreciate him : that I 
 could, I think, weigh his merits fairly 
 enough if fairness of judgment were the 
 question, and not personal sympathy. I 
 know him well, familiarly ; but he is as 
 one of those persons whom you are for ever 
 meeting without ever especially seeking, 
 familiar from sheer habit, perhaps justly 
 enough appreciated for what they are ; one 
 of those people who never give you the 
 satisfaction either of thoroughly liking or 
 thoroughly disliking them, and who at the 
 same time will not permit you to grow 
 indifferent : suddenly charming you, when 
 you are ill-disposed to them, with a look, a 
 turn of the head, an intonation of the voice, 
 and the next time as suddenly leaving you
 
 BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 85 
 
 dissatisfied, rubbing you the wrong way ; 
 till the perpetual alternation of liking and 
 not liking, of agreeable surprise and dis- 
 heartening disappointment grows mono- 
 tonous, is foreseen ; and yet even then the 
 satisfaction of utter indifference is still 
 maliciously withheld, for every now and 
 then there unexpectedly gleams out that 
 look, there vibrates that intonation which 
 charms you, which annoys you, which 
 drags you back again into the routine of 
 surprised pleasure, disappointment, mono- 
 tony, wearying, and yet too soon inter- 
 rupted to become indifferent, This is how 
 the matter stands between me and Botti- 
 celli ; he is more sympathetic and less 
 unsympathetic to me by far than certain of 
 his fellow- workers, but with them I know 
 exactly how much I shall like, how much I 
 shall dislike ; and with him, never. No, 
 not even in the same painting. I am 
 m^de capricious by his capriciousness; I am 
 never in tune, always too high or too low
 
 86 JUVENILIA. 
 
 for him. I always catch myself thinking 
 of this, that, or the other of his works ; 
 nay, of the abstract entirety of them all, 
 differently from how I felt when last time 
 I actually was in their presence, from how 
 I shall feel when I actually am in their pre- 
 sence again. Oh the woebegone Madonnas, 
 lanky yet flaccid beneath their bunched-up 
 draperies, all tied in the wrong places, nay, 
 rather strangely ligatured with coloured 
 tapes into strange puffs and strange waists ; 
 Madonnas drooping like overblown lilies, 
 yet pinched like frostbitten rosebuds, crea- 
 tures neither old nor young, with hollow 
 cheeks and baby lips, not consumed by the 
 burning soul within like Perugino's hectic 
 saints, but sallow, languid, life-weary with 
 the fever which haunts the shallow lakes, 
 the pasture-tracts of Southern Tuscany ; 
 seated with faces dreary, wistful, peevish, 
 gentle, you know net which, before their 
 bushes of dark-red roses, surrounded by 
 their living hedges of seraph children, with
 
 BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 87 
 
 faces sweet yet cross like their own faces 
 too large, too small, which ? with massive 
 jaws of obstinacy and vague eyes of dreami- 
 ness. Madonnas who half drop their babes 
 in sudden sickening faintness, Christ children 
 too captious and peevish even to cry ; poor 
 puzzled, half-pained, half-ravished angels ; 
 draperies clinging and flying about in all 
 directions ; arms twining, fingers twitching 
 in inextricable knots ; world of dissatisfied 
 sentiment, of unpalatable sweetness, of 
 vacant suggestion, of uncomfortable grace- 
 fulness, of ill-tempered graciousness, world 
 of aborted beauty and aborted delightful- 
 ness, created, with infinite strain and dis- 
 couragement, by the Florentine silversmith 
 painter, hankering vainly after the perfect 
 elegance and graciousness, the diaphanous 
 sentiment of Umbria, and trying to turn 
 the stiff necks and bend the stolid heads of 
 the strong and ugly models of Filippino, 
 Verrocchio, and Ghirlandajo ; to twine and 
 knot the scarves and draperies on their
 
 00 JUVENILIA. 
 
 thick-set bodies, to make solitary and con- 
 templative passion burn in their matter-of- 
 fact and humorous faces, as all such things 
 could be only in the delicate, exquisite, 
 morbid Umbrian boys and women of Peru- 
 gino. No, this world, thus wearisomely 
 elaborated by Sandro Botticelli, has no 
 attraction for me ; it is all bitter, insipid, 
 like certain herbs and the juice pressed out 
 of them ; I fail to see the charm, I recog- 
 nize the repulsion. And yet, even as I 
 write, there crowds into my mind a certain 
 swarm of angels, of eager, earnest, pale 
 young faces, with wavy hair streaked with 
 gold threads, and sweet lips, of which you 
 feel that through them pass clear and fresh 
 choristers' voices, voices which are so vocal, 
 so unlike pipe, or reed, or string, and yet 
 which have in their sweetness a something 
 of the bleating of young sheep, making 
 them but the sweeter ; there come before 
 me certain slim, erect, quaint, stag-like 
 figures, all draped in tissues embroidered
 
 BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 89 
 
 with roses, and corn, and gilly- flowers, and 
 others with delicate wreathed tresses droop- 
 ing on to delicate and infinitely crinkled, half 
 transparent white veils, and certain others 
 yet, with slim and delicate arms, curved-in 
 waists, and slender legs and feet, themselves 
 wreathed, entwined, swaying like some 
 twisted sprays of wind-flowers round some 
 tall and bending wind-shaken reed : 'with 
 the recollection of them comes a sense of 
 spring, of trees still yellow with first be- 
 ginnings of leaf, of meadows with the first 
 faint dyes of their later dark-yellow and 
 indigo patternings, of fields green with 
 corn, and grey with still dry branches, of 
 warm sun and cold air, and the sweet un- 
 ripeness of the early year ; and amidst all 
 this, emerging from this vague tangle of 
 impressions, a strange face, an erect long 
 neck, with strange straight joining eye- 
 brows, and thin curled lips, defiant, laugh- 
 ing, fascinating, capricious, capriciousness 
 concentrated, impersonate ; the capricious-
 
 90 JUVENILIA. 
 
 ness of the art, of the man, of myself, 
 the capriciousness which will, if I leave 
 these phantoms and go once more to the 
 reality of Botticelli's works, make me meet 
 again only slim and flaccid Madonnas, 
 sickly, puling children, and angels all 
 peevishness and airs and graces. 
 
 Such are my individual feelings towards 
 Botticelli's art, and this incompleteness of 
 sympathy between the great Florentine who 
 tried to be an Umbrian and myself or, if 
 you prefer, my misappreciation of the 
 peculiar exquisiteness and fascination of his 
 v/ork must make it clear that my sense of 
 dissatisfaction at the removal of his two 
 frescoes from the Villa Lernmi cannot be 
 due to the fact that in losing them I am 
 being deprived of something analogous to 
 the power of seeing and talking with a very 
 dear friend. Moreover, this Florence in 
 which I live is full of Botticelli's works, 
 gocd and bad ; and among those remaining 
 are paintings of his superior to the frescoes
 
 BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 9! 
 
 of the Villa Lemmi, and more distinctly 
 attractive to me than they are. So that 
 there can be on my part no sense of depri- 
 vation connected with those two particular 
 frescoes. And furthermore, I must make 
 a confession which will help to clear away 
 any erroneous explanations which may still 
 be in the way of the correct one ; and that 
 confession is, that less than two months 
 hence I shall be in Paris, in the Louvre, 
 with every opportunity of seeing those two 
 Botticellis again ; and that together with 
 the knowledge of this I have the know- 
 ledge of the fact that being there, in Paris, 
 in the Louvre, I shall feel no particular 
 craving to look upon those two frescoes 
 once more. Nay, I even foresee a certain 
 avoidance of them ; a something more than 
 indifference to their being near at hand, 
 within sight ; an almost repugnance to see 
 them in their new place. So that I am 
 obliged to come round again, and seek my 
 explanation elsewhere. Looking again in
 
 92 JUVENILIA. 
 
 my consciousness, the next thing I find is a 
 very strong impression of the time when I 
 saw those frescoes first, of the succeeding 
 visits to them, or rather a vivid group of 
 impressions which used to be connected in 
 my mind with the few words <{ the Botti- 
 cellis at the Villa Lemmi." And as but 
 very few people who lived in Florence or 
 came hither even knew of the existence of 
 these frescoes, discovered not ten years ago, 
 and still unnoticed by the guide - book 
 makers and you may happen not to be 
 among that small number and as, more- 
 over, it is now a matter of the past ; I 
 think I had better, in order to understand 
 myself and be understood, try and give 
 you an idea of the Villa Lemmi and the 
 going there. 
 
 You followed, for some twenty minutes, 
 the road towards Sesto Fiorentirio, the 
 castle of Petraia and the other places which 
 lie at the foot of the Monte Morello, whose 
 bleak flanks, shadowing the passing clouds,
 
 BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 93 
 
 are patterned grey on grey, like some huge 
 folds of greyish watered silk ; then you 
 turned off by another high road towards 
 the old Medicean villa of Careggi, where 
 Lorenzo died, whose castle-like machicola- 
 tions and overhanging roof are just visible 
 among the trees, while behind rise the little 
 slopes of the Terzolle valley, grey with 
 olive at the base, dark green and feathery 
 with pine woods at the top, and all dotted 
 with white farms and villas. Thus past 
 one or two villa gates, and then you left 
 the high road suddenly for a little rough 
 short cut, with white walls, rudely pat- 
 terned and overtopped by the whitish olive 
 branches, on either side ; in front rose, 
 against a screen of dark cypress plumes, a 
 little old white house, with heavily grated 
 windows and a belvedere tower, opened out 
 into a delicate pillared loggia, whence the 
 pigeons swooped in flocks into the adjacent 
 fields. That was Villa Lemmi. But you 
 passed the old doorway, surmounted by th
 
 94 JUVENILIA. 
 
 stone escutcheon of Albizi or Tornabuoni, I 
 know not which, and knocked at a wooden 
 door, which being opened, a peasant woman 
 or a little bare-legged brat led you into a 
 kind of farmyard. Past the big mulberry- 
 tree just yellowing into leaf, and the rose 
 and currant bushes ; under the stable arch- 
 way, by the side of the dark cowshed, 
 whence came lowing sounds and scent of 
 hay and dairy ; through a yard where the 
 lemon- trees stood in big earthen jars, and 
 the linen hung over the grass on the drying 
 lines ; and thence into the cool, dark, 
 cloistered court of the villa a court whose 
 brick pavement was patterned with yellow 
 and greenish lichen, and in which one's 
 steps sounded drearily ; but where the farm 
 maid was drawing water out of the well in 
 the centre, and the farm children were 
 swinging on ropes from the pillars, making 
 the arches resound with laughter and 
 screams. On the first floor a narrow para- 
 peted balcony ran round one side of this
 
 BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 95 
 
 court, and along this you followed the 
 peasant woman clattering in her wooden 
 clogs, with two or three little brown boys 
 and girls, with broad little faces running 
 into a sudden point, and hair cropped or 
 tightly tied in a top-knot, like the children 
 who sing and play, kick their legs and en- 
 twine their arms in Luca della Robbia's 
 choir parapet high-reliefs. Then up a 
 sudden step, a narrow door unlocked, and 
 you entered a small, low room, the former 
 scullery of the villa, where, about ten years 
 ago, some kitchen-maid scraping at the wall 
 with her knife laid bare a sudden patch of 
 paint, a shot purple and red bit of drapery, 
 a gold-streaked lock of hair ; till, scraping 
 well and iil, they scraped into existence two 
 unguessed frescoes, and out of existence 
 perhaps two for ever lost ones. Of the 
 two frescoes, now in a very different place, 
 the one shows four young women, advan- 
 cing in hesitating and faltering procession, 
 long, slender, with doubled-girdled, puffing
 
 96 JUVENILIA. 
 
 garments, green and mauve and white ; and 
 sweet, soft wistful young heads, vacil- 
 lating, pouting red lips, and vague, shy 
 grey eyes and loosened light hair, giving I 
 know not what, perhaps some effaced 
 flower, dropping it, with dainty, supple- 
 wristed hands, into a folded cloth held by 
 one dressed in the straight, stiff, fold less 
 russet skirt of a Florentine matron ; to the 
 back a half rubbed out portico, a many 
 jetted fountain ; and to the side a little 
 curly brown boy with iridescent wings 
 holding an obliterated escutcheon ; the 
 whole closed in by a group of pointed 
 pillarets half covered with plaster. The 
 second fresco represents a company of 
 damsels, in richly-hued antique garb, seated 
 in a circle in a laurel grove ; their garments 
 once delicately embroidered with threads of 
 gilding. One holds a globe ; another, 
 large featured like a statue and of bronzed 
 complexion, rests an architect's square upon 
 her shoulder ; below reclines another with a
 
 BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 97 
 
 hand organ and a tambourine ; on a raised 
 throne in the middle sits a half-veiled lady- 
 holding a bow. Towards her, into this 
 goodly company of sciences and arts, a 
 nymph, a muse, with loosened yellow hair 
 and wistful pointed face, is leading the 
 young Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, 
 stately yet timid ; a noble and charming 
 figure in scholar's gown of blue and purple 
 shot silk, his fair long hair combed neatly 
 from under a scarlet cap ; a sweet and 
 thoughtful face, thin and pale, with high 
 arched nose and pale eyes, under much- 
 curved, fanciful brows ; a something be- 
 tween the scholar, the saint, and the page 
 in his demure boyish elegance ; a thing of 
 courts as well as of the study. 
 
 These were the frescoes. One looked 
 at them ; then, between thus doing, looked 
 also out of the little window, over the 
 shimmering olives, the bright green corn, 
 to where the pines and cypresses of the hill- 
 side detached their featheriness against the 
 
 VOL. i. 6
 
 98 JUVENILIA. 
 
 sky, and the white houses and tower of 
 Fiesole, and its tiers and tiers of villas, rose 
 high in the distance. And then, when one 
 had given the last glance to the frescoes, 
 and the woman had locked the door behind, 
 one descended into the garden, or farmland ; 
 where, against the walls of the old villa, 
 under its bowed-out window gratings, were 
 spaliered any amount of the delicate May 
 roses, of intensest pink, and a scent which 
 made one think of the East, of the rose- 
 gardens of Pcestum, of the paladin Orlando 
 filling his helmet with crushed rose-leaves 
 lest he might hear and be seduced by the 
 song of the birds in the garden of the en- 
 chantress Falerina, where the Lamia wound 
 her green coils through the grass, under 
 the orchard trees, and the sirens sat and 
 wove garlands in the clear blue depths of 
 the lake. 
 
 Among the confused general impression 
 left by many a visit to the frescoes and the 
 garden, there remains distinct the remem-
 
 BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 99 
 
 brance of one particular late afternoon of 
 spring at the Villa Lemmi. Going away 
 from seeing the frescoes, we stepped on to 
 the rusty old twisted iron balcony, and 
 looked out on to the green country, drip- 
 ping and misty with the afternoon's rain. 
 A large cherry - tree, its white blossom 
 thinned by budding leaves, was immediately 
 below the balcony ; then an expanse of 
 fresh, bright green corn, bealen down by 
 the rain, broken by the pale, scarce bud- 
 ding mulberry-trees, and dotted with farms 
 and villas, undulating away upwards into 
 the olive and cypress covered hills of 
 Careggi ; away, paler bluish, greener, and 
 bounded like a lake by the blue slopes of 
 Signa, with here and there a screen of pop- 
 lars, an isolated black cypress, or a project- 
 ing square belfry, the sky and sunset 
 gleaming through its pillars. The sun was 
 setting ; emerging, round, immense, rayless, 
 golden, from beneath a bank of vapours, 
 which gradually rolled aside ; descending,
 
 IOO JUVENILIA. 
 
 yellow among livid cloud and blue cold 
 sky, until it disappeared behind the grey 
 hills simulating a bank of clouds, or the 
 clouds piled up in semblance of a ridge of 
 hills, I know not which, down the Arno ; 
 leaving, as soon as it had disappeared, a 
 bright speck, a spark, a glowing ember, on 
 the top of the cloud hill, which grew and 
 sent forth red feathery vapours of flame, 
 turning the light grey cloud which hung 
 above it, clear on the pale blue sky, into 
 the flamelit cloud of smoke hanging over a 
 volcano ; filaments of red flame combed 
 like hair at the narrow base, solid masses of 
 turbid smoke - like vapour above. The 
 ember left by the sun glowed redder and 
 redder, sending, slowly and gradually, long 
 yellow rays across the western sky ; the 
 glow died gradually away ; the white mists 
 wrapped the foot of the Apennine ; the 
 volcano red departed slowly from the cloud 
 hills blue and cold ; only the lower edge of 
 a grey cloud, wet and distinct above the
 
 BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. IOI 
 
 high blue sky, still reddened and gilded by 
 the departed blaze. A great greyness and 
 dampness and stillness came over every- 
 thing at last, till the sky remained white 
 and livid, resting on shoals of heavy 
 vapours. Even thus, four hundred years 
 ago, Botticelli may also have watched the 
 sun set as he left his work in the little quiet 
 farm villa, before hurrying back to the city, 
 or sauntering across the fields to the castel- 
 lated Careggi yonder, where the Magnifi- 
 cent Lorenzo supped and discussed Plato 
 and improvised verses about falcon hunts, 
 comic paladins, or antique nymphs with 
 Pico and Pulci and Politian. 
 
 This sort of impression used to hang to 
 the words, " the Villa Lemmi Botticellis ; " 
 words which have now become meaningless, 
 a mere momentary label, no better than a 
 mere number, for the two frescoes just set 
 up in the Louvre. And it is, I think, this 
 change, this loss, which I vaguely resent 
 every time I think of the removal of the
 
 IO2 JUVENILIA. 
 
 frescoes. Not merely for myself, since 
 after all I have enjoyed, possessed the past, 
 am by so much richer than my neighbours. 
 Not even merely for those who come too 
 late, to whom the Villa Lemmi will be 
 unknown and the frescoes no better than 
 any other paintings in the huge gallery ; 
 since for such persons will still remain other 
 places, if not as perfect as the Villa Lemmi, 
 yet akin to it : convents high among the 
 barren grey hills overlooking the Sienese 
 Maremma, where Signorelli and Sodoma 
 painted while the wind moaned, as it moans 
 now, through the thick cypresses and the 
 pines which fill the ravine below Monte 
 Oliveto ; quiet little scuole of Venice, 
 where you seek after the long row through 
 the tortuous canals, after the sad green and 
 grey and brown streakings of wall and 
 water, the purple robes and gold-woven 
 linen, the bronzed faces and auburn heads 
 of the altar-pieces of Carpaccio and Bellini ; 
 secluded corners of Norman and Breton
 
 BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. IO3 
 
 towns, where the cathedral stands, with 
 delicate thistles and dog-rose and hawthorn 
 carved in its crumbling grey stone, and 
 plants as delicate as they, stone pinks and 
 long-seeded grasses grow in the crannies of 
 its buttresses and belfry, round which circle 
 the rooks ; the cornfields and apple-orchards 
 as near by as the black carved and colon- 
 naded houses of the town : places where 
 art still keeps its old, familiar, original 
 framework of reality, of nature, of human 
 life. The dissatisfaction with which I am 
 filled is the dissatisfaction at no one par- 
 ticular loss, but at a whole tendency whose 
 result is loss, which consists in wantonly 
 ridding ourselves of our most precious 
 artistic possessions ; and of which this 
 episode of the removal of the Villa Lemmi 
 frescoes is but one instance among many. 
 
 I have said that this modern tendency de- 
 prives us of our most valuable artistic posses- 
 sions; and this will doubtless seem rather an 
 insane speech. For what is the aim of all
 
 1O4 JUVENILIA. 
 
 modern efforts (however bungling, perhaps, 
 in single instances), if not to save from 
 destruction and to render accessible as 
 great as possible a proportion of the works 
 which former artistic times have bequeathed 
 to us ? Towards this purpose every 
 cultured nation spends much of its time 
 and money and brains ; galleries are being 
 built on all sides, statues are being dug for 
 wherever any are buried, pictures are being 
 bought up whenever there are any for sale ; 
 Vandalism in the shape of defacing restora- 
 tion or absolute destruction is being watched 
 for and pounced upon in every place where 
 it may be suspected ; the whole world is 
 busy in trying to save whatever artistic 
 things have been left us by more productive, 
 but also much more destructive times. 
 
 So much for the mere physical, economic, 
 practical side of the matter. But corre- 
 sponding with it is a quite extraordinary 
 intellectual side : an activity, unknown 
 before our days, in teaching people to
 
 BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 105 
 
 understand the spirit in which all these 
 different works of art have been produced, 
 the historical conditions by which they have 
 been affected, the whole genealogy and rules 
 of precedence of schools and artists : art 
 is not only physically, but intellectually 
 housed, it is as safe from the imbecile 
 misinterpretation of former times as it is 
 from the bullets of former generations of 
 soldiers, the stones of former generations 
 of street-boys, the smoke of long-snuffed- 
 out altar candles. All this is evident, 
 palpable, irrefutable, and all this means that 
 mankind is growing daily more anxious to 
 preserve its artistic properties. Evident, 
 palpable, irrefutable ; far be it from me to 
 attempt to disprove it. But there is an 
 artistic possession more valuable than any 
 picture, statue, cathedral, symphony, or 
 poem whatsoever - - indeed, the most 
 precious artistic property that we possess. 
 It is the power, the means, the facility, due 
 to the condition both of our minds and of 
 6*
 
 ]O6 JUVENILIA. 
 
 works of art, of assimilating art into life. 
 Such assimilation means not only the enjoy- 
 ment at the actual moment of seeing 
 picture or statue, of hearing poem or 
 symphony ; but also (what is of more 
 importance) the wealth of garnered-up 
 impression which remains to us when the 
 picture or statue has been long out of sight, 
 the words of the poem have long been 
 forgotten, the chords of the symphony have 
 for years ceased to vibrate. For in the life 
 of each of us there is, or might be, a sort 
 of unseen treasury of beautiful things ; we 
 have the power if we choose of carrying 
 with us many a precious immaterial thing, 
 many a tapestry wrought by ourselves out 
 of the threads, imperishably tinted, taken 
 from poem or picture, with which we may 
 deck ourselves when fate leads us into mere 
 whitewashed mental lodgings, or squalid 
 moral gaols ; many a beautiful nicknack 
 of thought or feeling, or fragmentary form, 
 which remain to us when we are beggared
 
 BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 
 
 of all else ; and again, many a thing which 
 will enhance the already excellent things, 
 which will be as unseen lutes or viols with 
 which to make music through the silent 
 spring evening meadows, the silent autumn 
 woods. A great stock of wealth, all con- 
 tained in a tiny, nay, invisible thing, much 
 more valuable than any purse of old 
 Fortunatus : a stock also, and mind this, 
 of real wealth, not of the mere delusions 
 with which in our weakness we try some- 
 times to sweeten our life, the dreams of 
 passion and worship, to enjoy which we 
 must waste our precious time in sleep, 
 merely to wake up poorer and sadder than 
 before. This we have, or might have ; 
 and to obtain it we require not merely to 
 enjoy art superficially, momentarily, but to 
 assimilate it into our nature, to make its 
 impressions our own. But this possibility 
 of assimilation of art into life cannot be 
 obtained by the mere wishing ; it depends 
 upon conditions which we can produce, and
 
 IO8 JUVENILIA. 
 
 which we can also, and frequently do, 
 prevent. As recognition means previous 
 knowledge, so does assimilation mean a 
 certain homogeneousness between that which 
 absorbs and that which is absorbed ; and 
 this seems to be the case far more in 
 intellectual and moral matters than in mere 
 physical ones. Completely new impressions 
 are not perceived, since the very organs of 
 perception are formed by the repetition of 
 a but slightly varying act of perceiving ; 
 the harmonic combinations which seem 
 most obvious to our ears would probably 
 have left but a completely muddled impres- 
 sion on even the most musical of the men 
 of antiquity. Hence it is that if artistic 
 impressions are to be assimilated into our 
 life, there must already exist in our life a 
 habit of impression akin to those given 
 wholesale by art ; and also that there must 
 be in the manner in which artistic impres- 
 sions are presented to us something familiar, 
 something analogous to the manner in
 
 BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 109 
 
 which we obtain the ordinary inartistic 
 impressions of life. There must, for such 
 assimilations of art into life, be a rudiment 
 of art already in life, and a habit of life 
 still clinging to art. 
 
 The rudiment of art exists in our life 
 from the very nature and origin of art ; 
 since those instincts which make us appre- 
 ciate the complex things of art have origi- 
 nated and developed during our contact 
 with the things of reality ; we love, in 
 nature, those lines, colours, shapes, and so 
 forth, which art later combines for us on a 
 larger scale ; we love the elements of the 
 work before the work itself is dreamed of. 
 Thus the first condition for real artistic 
 assimilation is already partly fulfilled from 
 the very origin and history of our artistic 
 perceptions. And quite of late, in our 
 own country particularly, there has been a 
 half-instinctive, half-deliberate attempt at 
 supplying that much of the necessary 
 familiarity with beautiful form and colour
 
 IIO JUVENILIA. 
 
 which is not provided by the hills and 
 clouds and trees all about us. For, as 
 during the best period of Antiquity and 
 the Middle Ages, with that flower of 
 theirs which we call the Renaissance, the 
 extraordinary activity of perception of 
 form and colour produced not merely the 
 imperishable works of independent and 
 useless art, but also a great amount of 
 beauty in all manner of humble, useful 
 things ; so, by a sort of reversing of 
 phenomena, the laboriously acquired ap- 
 preciation of the qualities of great works 
 of art has in our time produced among 
 a minority a greater irritability of artistic 
 perception, a dissatisfaction with ugliness 
 in common household properties, which 
 has made people seek to surround them- 
 selves no longer with the hideous furniture, 
 hangings, and utensils of twenty years ago, 
 but with copies of those of the days when 
 the sense of beauty which built cathedrals 
 and painted Sixtine frescoes had its way
 
 BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. Ill 
 
 also with the meanest chairs and tables 
 and pots and pans. There are, indeed, 
 some persons whom a smattering of 
 modern ideas concerning the spontaneity 
 of all things has made suspicious and 
 contemptuous of this sudden preoccupa- 
 tion about the shapes of chairs and tables, 
 and the colours of carpets and chintzes ; 
 and who, because this movement is the 
 result of deliberate study, and therefore 
 artificial, predict that it must for this 
 reason be sterile. But the processes to 
 which we owe so many now apparently 
 spontaneous things, transplantation, irri- 
 gation, cropping, grafting, are all of them 
 perfectly deliberate and artificial acts ; and 
 as in point of fact all progress has origi- 
 nated in a minority, and the sole condition 
 of its success is that the majority should 
 be prepared to accept it, I think that this 
 modern attempt at aesthetic improvement 
 will certainly result, if not in improving 
 our own art, at least in making us far
 
 112 JUVENILIA. 
 
 more appreciative of the art of other 
 times. For just as it seems doubtful 
 whether a person who has always con- 
 templated with perfect satisfied familiarity 
 a sofa or wall-paper of hideous design and 
 abominable colour, will really enjoy in a 
 statue by Praxiteles or a picture by Titian 
 design or colour which is beautiful ; so 
 also is it probable that a person accus- 
 tomed from childhood to beautiful tones 
 and colour in the carpet and walls of his 
 room, will be far more likely to seek in 
 statue or picture not psychological pro- 
 blems, historic evidence, or romantic (and 
 usually utterly gratuitous) suggestion, but 
 the kind of beauty with which he is familiar 
 in homely things, and of which these great 
 works are merely the most splendid de- 
 velopment. With this desire to introduce 
 beauty into ordinary things is intimately 
 connected another tendency of our day, but 
 which has a moral as well as an artistic bearing 
 the noble tendency to make beauty acces-
 
 BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 113 
 
 sible and familiar to every educated person. 
 Art, when limited to such works as can be 
 bought only by the very rich, becomes 
 little better than the concomitant of French 
 cookery, dresses from Worth, and hideously 
 set diamonds : an object of ostentatious 
 luxury ; whereas if only a little of the 
 artistic power concentrated in such work 
 could be bestowed upon things of easy mul- 
 tiplication, small price, and ordinary use, 
 it would not only bring pleasure into many 
 lives in which pleasure is as scarce as 
 flowers in a close, smoky town, but also 
 train innumerable men and women into 
 an habitual perception of beauty, without 
 which they must wander through all the 
 galleries provided for them by the nation 
 with mere vacant, unfamiliar wonder, and 
 leave them as poor of durable artistic im- 
 pressions as they entered them. There 
 are, doubtless, many things for which the 
 writer must always envy the artist, greater 
 f.-eedorn and charm of impression, and
 
 114 JUVENILIA. 
 
 the ineffably delightful sense that he is 
 reproducing and not merely reminding, 
 showing and not merely suggesting; yet 
 the writer has a more than compensating 
 satisfaction in the thought that if pleasure 
 he can give at all, he will give it to 
 thousands of distant, unknown, pleasure- 
 poor people ; and this sort of feeling can 
 nowadays, when little is to be done in the 
 way of public monuments, be got by the 
 artist only by condescending or in reality 
 rising to the level of such designing as can 
 either be largely diffused for household 
 properties or as can be indefinitely multi- 
 plied and put within reach of all, as in 
 illustrations, Christmas cards, toy-books, 
 and similar humble things. But of this, and 
 of the far more honourable position occupied 
 by men like Mr. Randolph Caldecott or Mr. 
 Walter Crane than by many a fastidious 
 genius who produces works worthy of Gior- 
 gione or of Velasquez, in order that they 
 may grace the smoking-room of an " h "-less
 
 BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. I 15 
 
 cotton spinner, or the staircase of a Jewish 
 broker, much more should be said than 
 I can say in this place. 
 
 I let myself be tempted into digression 
 upon a subject in which the moral dignity 
 of art, or rather of artists, seems to me 
 greatly concerned, just at the moment 
 when I had pointed out that of the two 
 conditions necessary for the assimilation 
 of artistic impressions into life, the one, 
 namely, that the rudimentary perceptions 
 of form and colour beauty should already 
 be familiar to us before we go to great art, 
 was not only partially provided by our 
 natural surroundings, but further and most 
 importantly facilitated by the recent move- 
 ment in favour of giving beauty of form 
 and colour to the necessaries which sur- 
 round our daily home life. But there 
 remains the other condition, whose fulfil- 
 ment seems to me almost as necessary for 
 the real absorption of art into life the 
 condition that there should be in our
 
 Il6 JUVENILIA. 
 
 manner of receiving artistic impressions 
 something analogous to that absence of 
 strain, that familiarity with which we un- 
 consciously assimilate the other impressions 
 of our lives. Now, it so happens that the 
 tendency of our time is towards rendering 
 more and more difficult the fulfilment of 
 this second condition, and that this is due 
 to that self-same interest in art which has 
 been so beneficial in beautifying common 
 things ; by the same droll, but quite ac- 
 countable, self-contradiction which makes 
 enthusiasts for old architecture combine to 
 protect the horrid disfigurement of historic 
 buildings by the architects of the seven- 
 teenth and eighteenth century because they 
 are in terror of the possible disfigurement 
 thereof by the architects of our own day ; 
 the protection against modern Vandalism 
 being freely extended to the Vandal work 
 of the past. For this comparatively recent 
 preoccupation about art has, while tending 
 to surround ordinary men and women with
 
 BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. llj 
 
 beautiful furniture and accessories, at the 
 same time induced a perfect habit of re- 
 moving works of art from their natural 
 and often beautiful surroundings in order 
 to place them in a kind of artificial stony 
 Arabia of vacuity and ugliness. I should 
 call this the modern gallery-and-concert ten- 
 dency. We are so horribly afraid that a 
 picture should get damaged by the smoke 
 of the candles on the altar whence its 
 Madonna, seated on her carpeted throne 
 before the lemon spaliers, and its viol-and- 
 tute-playing angels rise almost fairy-like 
 from among the freshly-cut sweet peas and 
 roses, the scarlet pomegranate, and bright 
 pink oleander blossoms in the coarse jars 
 before it ; we are so horribly afraid that 
 smoke or sacristan (both freely taken into 
 account by the painter) should possibly 
 injure this picture, that we hasten to buy 
 it, new frame it, stick it up under the 
 glaring light of a gallery, among six dozen 
 other pictures which either kill or are
 
 IlB JUVENILIA. 
 
 killed by it, with perhaps the additional 
 charm of a plate glass, which reflects the 
 outlines of the benches and chairs and the 
 beautiful faces of the gaping or loafing 
 visitors. And in our fervent appreciation 
 we thus make it infinitely more difficult 
 for the work of art to be appreciated. 
 No, not appreciated ; I have used the 
 wrong word. We do appreciate our works 
 of art ; we know all about the filiation of 
 the schools and the characteristics of the 
 epoch ; we know, every ignoramus of us, 
 that, after all, there are only three or four 
 Leonardos and two Giorgiones in the wide 
 world, that all the other exquisite things 
 are <c mere school-work, or by some imi- 
 tator of the seventeenth century." We 
 know that we must not let our feelings 
 cozen us with respect to antiques ; that, 
 after all, we have only five or six utterly 
 battered pieces of stone which can be un- 
 hesitatingly proved to be the statues men- 
 tioned by Pausanias, all the rest being the
 
 BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 119 
 
 less talked of the better. All this we 
 know, and the going to a gallery becomes 
 daily more like a solemn sitting in judg- 
 ment or listening to evidence ; we grow 
 every day more and more appreciative. 
 
 But do we enjoy more and more, or less 
 and less ? Enjoy freely and simply ; let 
 the impressions sink deiiciously into us ; 
 keep them clinging to us as the unfading 
 perfume of certain Eastern essences ? I 
 think, if we ask ourselves honestly, we 
 shall find that we do so daily less and less. 
 We shall find that even as some of our 
 moments of keenest musical pleasure have 
 been during the casual hearing, in a church 
 into which we have strayed, from a window 
 as we passed along the street, some familiar 
 melody sung certainly not by Madame 
 Patti, played certainly not by Joachim 
 or Rubinstein ; so also the impressions 
 of full artistic enjoyment are strongest, not 
 from mornings in the Elgin Room or the 
 Louvre, but from an hour or so of ram-
 
 120 JUVENILIA. 
 
 bling through some old town like Verona, 
 or Padua, or Siena, where we have found 
 some picture by Girolamo dai Libri, or 
 Moroni, or Sodoma isolated over an altar, 
 in the place, among the cheap finery, the 
 tarnished finery, in the solitude and silence 
 for which it was painted by its artist. 
 
 But we are too persuaded of the aw- 
 ful value of art to leave it where it can 
 be quietly enjoyed ; instead of letting it 
 crumble into vague impressions which are 
 the rich and fruitful soil of our mind, 
 we like to embalm art, to mummify it 
 splendidly, to let it grow into a useless, 
 utterly inorganic, unassimilated piece of 
 grandeur. The fact is that instead of 
 considering a fine statue or picture or piece 
 of music as something very akin, in mode 
 of impressing us and value, to a fine group 
 of trees, or a fine sheet of water, or 
 a fine cluster of clouds, we have con- 
 tracted an almost unconscious but in- 
 tensely strong habit of considering such
 
 BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 121 
 
 things from an historical, scientific, state- 
 record point of view : as a papyrus of 
 Pharaoh or a prepared cobra in a glass 
 jar. Hence we have for our artistic heir- 
 looms scruples exactly like those we should 
 have about such scientific grimcracks. If 
 a papyrus is incomplete, we do not set 
 our learned men to patching it ; and if a 
 statue is hideously mutilated, we do not 
 let our artists restore it ; entirely over- 
 looking the fact that the only value of 
 the papyrus is in the authenticated facts 
 it hands down from antiquity, whereas the 
 only value of the statue is the beauty 
 which that unrepaired mutilation may easily 
 have marred. I am far from thinking 
 that the Renaissance was right in having 
 modern arms given to figures which had 
 quite balance and completeness enough 
 without such restorations ; I am thinking 
 at present of the question of noses and 
 their absence ; and I am well aware that 
 I shall be set down as an utter Vandal 
 VOL, i. 7
 
 122 JUVENILIA. 
 
 for suggesting the mere question whether 
 the worst restoration is not a less barbarity 
 for us to inflict than the deliberate con- 
 demnation of some noble antique head to 
 continue for ever a partial eyesore ? Yet, 
 feeling myself already a Vandal, I am 
 hardened to the accusation, and I put 
 forward my suggestion, which is as fol- 
 lows : No modern nose could disfigure 
 or alter an antique head one-millionth part 
 as much as that hideous wound (as in our 
 lovely Demeter of the British Museum) 
 which not only alters the whole relations 
 of the features and distorts the most 
 beautiful face by its unseemly rough flat- 
 ness and its stump between eyes and 
 mouth, but gives a loathsome sense of 
 disease as completely distorting of the in- 
 tellectual aspect of an antique as the 
 physical mutilation is of its visual beauty. 
 Nor do I know whether a collection of 
 Phidian and Praxitelian gods and god- 
 desses, looking like so many maimed and
 
 BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 123 
 
 scrofulous creatures out of Orcagna's 
 Triumph of Death, would have pleased 
 a Greek ; nor whether in our prudery 
 about restoration we are not in reality 
 respecting less the genius of the great 
 masters who planned whole, entire, healthy 
 figures, than a ragamuffin's hand which 
 defaced their work. Be this as it may, 
 our modern fear of restoration greatly 
 increases, instead of diminishing, the 
 natural difficulty of assimilating impressions 
 of beauty. It is left to our minds to recon- 
 struct the mutilated statues ; and after the 
 greatest strain in this direction, we go away 
 with the impression not so much of sane, 
 living beauty, as of depressing, puzzling, 
 and often actually revolting imperfection. 
 
 Another form of this modern apprecia- 
 tion of art, which makes art more and 
 more difficult to assimilate into life, is the 
 indignation of many people at such hotch- 
 potch things as operas ; because in every 
 opera there is so much that is wholly
 
 124 JUVENILIA. 
 
 unmusical, or of small musical value ; 
 because an opera is not the same serious 
 concern as an oratorio or a concert. It 
 is perfectly true, as for instance Mr. 
 Edmund Gurney has pointed out, that 
 there is no possibility of making an opera 
 into a well-blended mixture of several 
 arts. But just for that reason there is 
 in this incongruous hotch-potch a power 
 of bringing art into life much greater than 
 there is in oratorio or concert. The strain 
 of a concert, of the mere attention of the 
 ear for two hours, while the mind and 
 eye remain idle, is aesthetically wrong : 
 it taxes instead of refreshing the musical 
 sense ; it is good for people who want 
 to know what certain music is like, not 
 for people who want to enjoy it. In the 
 opera, on the contrary, the musical im- 
 pressions are separated into groups by 
 other sesthetical impressions or by im- 
 pressions of real life : the melodies may 
 be taken or left at will, a sine qua non
 
 BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 125 
 
 this of all assthetical enjoyment ; they 
 are not forced upon us whether 
 we be fit to enjoy them or not. An 
 opera is a sort of little epitome of life : 
 you move, look about, follow an action 
 with eyes and mind, look at faces, dresses, 
 and movements, take in words and sights ; 
 see and chat with your friends ; and if, 
 with all this, you listen to the music, it 
 is freely, as you would listen to the sound 
 of birds among the numerous impressions 
 of a walk in the country. It is quite 
 wonderful how a little cheap plot, a little 
 cheap scenery, dress and gesticulation, a 
 little cheap words, a little talk with a 
 neighbour or watching of unknown faces, 
 how all this trumpery refreshes, enables 
 one really to assimilate music. The 
 explanation is that in this case our life, 
 into which the music (if it is to be of 
 any use) is to be absorbed, is going on, 
 has all its powers of assimilation due to 
 easy and general excitement. In the case
 
 126 JUVENILIA. 
 
 of a concert our minds are tied as with a 
 ligature : we may plunge our soul in music, 
 but our spiritual life-blood is stagnant, and 
 we are neither warmed nor refreshed. The 
 difference between an opera and a concert 
 is that between a town, with all its trivial 
 details and its statues and pictures here and 
 there, and an awful expanse of gallery. 
 
 Hence I have called this modern 
 tendency towards isolating art of life, the 
 gallery-and-concert tendency ; and it is 
 very principally as a signal example of 
 this gallery-and-concert tendency that 
 I resent the removal of the Botticellis 
 from the Villa Lemmi. The villa with 
 its frescoes was like some quiet evening 
 with open windows, when the music is 
 interrupted by conversation ; and when 
 the sough of the trees and the chirping 
 of the crickets outside, the noise of the 
 children on the stairs within, keeps up a 
 sense that besides art nature exists and 
 life goes on. Of course such matters are
 
 BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 117 
 
 often purely economical : a man cannot 
 be expected to forego many thousands 
 of francs for the sake of the superior 
 artistic pleasure of a very few strangers, 
 nor can a nation be expected to be so 
 civilized as to prefer possessing frescoes 
 among exquisite surroundings hundreds of 
 miles off, to possessing those same frescoes 
 among arid surroundings within a few 
 yards. No one can blame the owner of 
 Villa Lemmi for selling his frescoes, nor 
 the French Government for buying them. 
 But those should be blamed to whom the 
 kind of action typified by this Villa 
 Lemmi business is a matter of great pride 
 and self-congratulation, a sort of triumph 
 of civilization : the daily increasing class 
 of people who care for art, but who see 
 nevertheless in any statue or picture still 
 unmolested in its original church villa, 
 merely a sort of huge assthetic specimen, 
 which must be immediately uprooted or run 
 through with a pin, that it may as soon
 
 128 JUVENILIA, 
 
 as possible enrich some artistic herbarium, 
 or collection of dead butterflies. 
 
 Meanwhile the little villa near Careggi 
 looks as if nothing more wonderful or 
 important than the reaping of the corn, 
 the bleaching of the wheat, the birth of 
 an additional calf or farmer's brat, had 
 taken place since this time last year. The 
 red cart is drawn up outside the old gate 
 with its stone escutcheon, while the vege- 
 tables from the garden or the barrels from 
 the vineyard on the hillside are being piled 
 into it ; and the row of bells on the 
 horse's brass-studded harness jingle as he 
 shakes his fly-worried head ; the cows are 
 still being milked in the dark stable by 
 the pale-green mulberry-tree ; the vines 
 still pruned on the spalier along the 
 blackened wall ; the roses still blow, and 
 shed their pink petals on the strawberry 
 beds all round the house ; the brass pitcher 
 still goes up and down on its wire through 
 the lichen-stained, cloistered court ; the
 
 BOTTICELLI AT THE VILLA LEMMI. 129 
 
 peasant children still swing between the 
 columns ; the old villa, with its square 
 tower opened into a pillared loggia, looks 
 just the same among the green cornfields 
 and dark cypresses, against its background 
 of olive-grey hills. The same as it did 
 last year ; the same, most likely, as it did 
 four hundred years ago. It has lost its 
 frescoes ; but, for all the greatness of 
 Botticelli, it has lost less than have lost 
 those poor, hustled, jostled paintings, 
 expatriated, exiled on to that Louvre stair, 
 case. And, though it be quite forgotten 
 and neglected henceforward, the Villa 
 Lemmi has lost less than have we, good, 
 self-satisfied people, in losing the sense 
 that a painting is better in a farmhouse 
 where it can be enjoyed, than in the most 
 superb gallery where it will be over- 
 looked.
 
 ROCOCO.
 
 ROCOCO. 
 
 A POLITE editor has recently sent me, 
 in recognition of certain studies I once 
 made of Italian eighteenth-century things, 
 a copy of a fine new edition of the com- 
 plete fairy plays of Carlo Gozzi. I feel 
 flattered, and greatly obliged. But I feel 
 also within myself an odd, mixed feeling, 
 half pleasurable, half sad, as if an old play- 
 fellow had suddenly thought of presenting 
 me with some particular sweet or some 
 particular toy for which I may have had 
 a passion now long forgotten in my 
 childhood. Most children at least, I wish 
 to believe it are consumed by violent 
 passions less material than those which are 
 satisfied at the pastrycook's or the fruit-stall.
 
 JUVENILIA. 
 
 Passions, strong, ideal, all-absorbing, such 
 as can exist, perhaps, only when our fancy 
 has not yet been messed and muddled away 
 over realities ; and is able to spread its 
 wings freely, unconscious of the frontier 
 of the possible and the impossible. At 
 that time of life we are probably already 
 in possession of whatever reasoning power 
 and passion we may ever possess ; what is 
 missing is merely experience. We are like 
 people born blind, and whom an operation 
 has suddenly given I cannot say restored 
 to sight : we see things and their quali- 
 ties, colours and shapes ; but we do not 
 perceive, we do not yet feel, the propor- 
 tions and the distances that exist between 
 them. The moon is up there in the 
 heavens : big, round, white, bright ; and 
 we put out our hand to snatch it. We see 
 things without the intellectual connection 
 furnished by experience ; but as we are 
 fully possessed of logic and imagination, 
 we weave round everything a mystic net-
 
 ROCOCO. 135 
 
 work of unreal relations half understood, 
 mysterious, which has the strange sparkle 
 of those thinnest of all cobwebs, called, in 
 France, threads of the Virgin, that are 
 stretched, intangible, white, flaming with 
 dew diamonds, on every hedge in early 
 autumn. It is at this moment of our life 
 that we experience those imaginative pas- 
 sions, inexplicable, dumb, almost tragically 
 serious, for some historic personage, at 
 whose very name we redden or shed tears ; 
 for the people of the Middle Ages, as they 
 exist in the novels of Scott, of Ainsworth, 
 and G. P. R. James ; for the Indians of 
 Chateaubriand, of Fenimore Cooper, and 
 Aymard. Passions, all these, which we 
 conceal from all grown-up folk, because 
 we know they would make fun of them ; 
 and we feel that, in this case, making fun 
 would be something like sacrilege. 
 
 To me, who had remained, like the 
 Prince Parzival of Wolfram and of Wag-
 
 Ij6, JUVENILIA. 
 
 ner, a child and an idiot long after the 
 legitimate period, there came, after the 
 usual passions for Joan of Arc and Marie 
 Antoinette, after the more fervid passion 
 for the Natchez, the Sioux, and especially 
 the inconvenient and entrancing Mohicans 
 a passion, be it said, which made me 
 walk along the beach looking pathetically 
 in the direction where America probably 
 lies or swims after all these childish pas- 
 sions, there came then to me an unaccount- 
 able passion for the people and things of 
 the eighteenth century, and more particu- 
 larly of the eighteenth century in Italy. 
 How it arose would be difficult to explain ; 
 perhaps mainly from the delight which I re- 
 ceived from the melodies of Mozart and 
 Gluck, picked out with three fingers on 
 the piano. I followed those sounds ; I 
 pursued them, and I found myself in the 
 midst of the Italian eighteenth century. 
 
 I found myself in the midst of the Italian
 
 eighteenth century. I have selected that 
 form of words with the intention of your 
 taking it literally. I really did find my 
 way into that period, and really did live in 
 it ; for I began to see only the things be- 
 longing thereunto ; and I had little or 
 no connection with anything else. The 
 eighteenth century existed for me as a 
 reality, surrounded by faint and fluctuat- 
 ing shadows, which shadows were simply 
 the present. Things presented them- 
 selves to me only from their eighteenth- 
 century side, real or very often imag- 
 inary. I meditated over such houses as 
 had probably been built in the last cen- 
 tury ; or, if they were visibly older, I 
 directed my attention upon such portions 
 of their existence as lay in that time; I 
 didn't care a pin about the Renaissance, 
 or Antiquity, or the Middle Ages. In 
 Rome the scene of all this my particular 
 predilection was the little shell - shaped 
 square of Sant' Ignazio, where the semi-
 
 138 JUVENILIA. 
 
 circle of houses, each with its plaster laurel- 
 branch and shell, its little balconies of 
 twisted iron, seems arranged as a back- 
 ground for a comedy by Goldoni. 
 
 Behind our house, under the wall of the 
 Pincian, there were still the ruins of the 
 old Aliberti Theatre ; and many are the 
 half-hours I spent leaning on the kitchen 
 balcony and dreaming of the songs of Per- 
 golisi and Paisiello which had once sounded 
 among the broken and burnt-out walls of 
 that famous theatre ; songs which I nearly 
 succeeded in hearing, accompanied by the 
 creaking of the bucket journeying along its 
 iron wire, the final plop when it dived into 
 the well, the screams of the children playing 
 in the garden, and the snatches of song of 
 the maids washing up the dishes. 
 
 And then in spring, wandering under the 
 huge ilexes, or on the anemone-starred grass 
 of the majestic Roman villas, I would think 
 of the rows of gilded coaches that used to 
 draw up before the little palace, of the
 
 ROCOCO. 139 
 
 companies of ladies and cavaliers, in powder 
 and patches, who had once formed bright 
 spots of colour on the blackness of the 
 avenues. Or, if the something so supremely 
 spring-like, the something in those flowering 
 pastures beneath the pines and the bay- 
 trees that inevitably suggests Proserpine 
 and the valley of Enna, brought up to my 
 mind more pastoral images, the shepherds 
 and shepherdesses were always little figures 
 of Dresden china with embroidered waist- 
 coat and andrlenne. 
 
 I began to study that period to read 
 the books, even the newspapers, of the 
 last century, which seemed to me full of 
 actuality. The dingy bookstalls, the rows 
 of useless and dirty old books exhibited for 
 sale along the walls of palaces and churches, 
 had for me a magical attraction. I became, 
 I may boast, a remarkably well-educated 
 young person of the end of the eighteenth 
 century, perfectly up to all the last new
 
 140 JUVENILIA. 
 
 things of that time, and able to cut a very 
 pretty figure, discussing encyclopedism, rival 
 composers and singers, nay, even personal 
 tittle-tattle, in the salon of some Arcadian 
 muse. 
 
 But I was not satisfied with reading. I 
 should have liked to see, to hear; if not 
 directly, at least through the mediumship 
 of some one who had seen and heard the 
 things of those days. There was in me 
 a vague hope of being able to come nearer 
 to that century, of finding, in some mystic 
 way and mystic place, a hidden corner 
 thereof. I was tremendously interested in 
 very old people, hoping that they might 
 bring me into contact with the days of their 
 childhood ; for I forgot all that immense 
 sea of nineteenth century in which their 
 few impressions of earlier times must have 
 got drowned, or at least discoloured ; and 
 many disappointments did not quell my 
 ardour in seeking out these precious half- 
 living relics of my beloved period. The
 
 ROCOCO. 141 
 
 disappointments were numerous. But, on 
 the other hand, how delightful when this 
 or that old creature said, "When I was 
 a child they used still to act Metastasio's 
 plays ; " or, " My father used to talk of 
 the way Pacchierotti sang at Lucca in 
 1780"! What a moment that was when 
 my dear old singing master suddenly re- 
 membered that he had heard Cimarosa sing 
 some of his own comic songs ! 
 
 My dreams of a sort of St. Brandan's 
 Isle, containing somewhat of the life of 
 my dear eighteenth century, were, I need 
 scarcely say, never realized. But every 
 now and then I came upon some little corner 
 whence that century seemed to have only 
 just departed, leaving in the atmosphere 
 a faint smell of musk and hair-powder. 
 
 Such a place was the little villa (I fancy 
 now turned into a cafd concert /), surrounded 
 by a pretty bit of garden which had once 
 been the Parrhasian Grove of the Roman
 
 142 JUVENILIA. 
 
 Academy of Arcadian Shepherds. The 
 house was full of old portraits ; the ne- 
 glected garden was bright in May and 
 June with flowers sprung, so to speak, 
 from the bulbs and slips planted in former 
 days an elegy which you touched with 
 your hand and trod under foot. 
 
 Another such place was the former convent 
 of San Giacomo Maggiore at Bologna, con- 
 verted into a music school by the prefects 
 of Napoleon. How many happy hours 
 have I not spent in those halls, in those re- 
 fectories and cells, from whose walls looked 
 down a crowd of composers and singers 
 and noble amateurs in bobwigs or pigtails, 
 doing the dignified or the graceful, leaning 
 on their harpsichords, a music-roll in their 
 hands, smirking fatuously at the forgetful 
 world ! For me a visit to that place was 
 a visit of ceremony ; I invariably took a 
 fresh pair of gloves. You could not present 
 yourself badly got up before all those dis- 
 tinguished and delicately dressed people,
 
 ROCOCO. 143 
 
 And, of course, in that crowd of poets 
 and composers, and singers and fine ladies, 
 there was always one particular person 
 whom I worshipped, growing perfectly 
 crimson with rage every time that he or 
 she was lightly spoken of in some old 
 memoir or letter. I knew them very well, 
 these delightful objects of my adoration, 
 but only from a distance, on account of 
 the excessive respect and admiration, which 
 made me as timid as a half-fledged boy 
 coming for the first time into a drawing- 
 room full of ladies. 
 
 The result of all this fantasticating, cf 
 this unconsciously acted romance, was 
 naturally enough a real and genuine ro- 
 mance, I mean a romance on paper. I 
 conceived a grand historico-musical novel, 
 on the model of Consuelo, but only far, far 
 more beautiful and interesting. There was 
 to be a little German Court of the early
 
 144 JUVENILIA. 
 
 eighteenth century, a crazy Elector, a 
 philanthropic and despotic minister, a per- 
 fidious favourite dwarf, some delightful 
 ladies, and an Italian singer, the hero and 
 Deus ex machind of the whole : a perfect 
 eighteenth-century ideal of the Telemaque, 
 Sir Charles Grandison, and Re Pastore 
 sort. Round these persons moved a 
 crowd of politicians, of philosophers, of 
 poets, and of villains, all of whom dis- 
 cussed during chapters and chapters the 
 " Theory of Sensations " of Locke and 
 Helvetius, the musical reforms of Gluck, 
 the "Contrat Social " of Rousseau ; subjects 
 that in my eyes were palpitating with activity. 
 This novel was my companion during 
 several years my companion, be it under- 
 stood, only in my own head. I wrote 
 little of it, and with extreme slowness, 
 perpetually adding and altering. There 
 was no hurry. All my life was before 
 me wherein to write this masterpiece ; and 
 it would be a well-employed life. Why
 
 ROCOCO. 145 
 
 begin at once ? Was there not plenty of 
 time ? 
 
 Thus I argued. But there was a possi- 
 bility which had not entered into my calcu- 
 lations. A horrible possibility ! to which 
 I can barely bring myself to allude ; a 
 possibility the thought of which would 
 have been a profanation. The possibility 
 that, as time went by, I might . . . No. 
 The thought never dawned in my mind. 
 I remained perfectly loyal. I continued to 
 believe most sincerely in my eighteenth- 
 century novel, and my duty of writing it. 
 But somehow, I cannot tell how, it so 
 happened that I began little by little to 
 take an interest also in things which had 
 no connection with the eighteenth century. 
 I persevered in my rococo studies, but to 
 them I gradually added others, studies, for 
 instance, of the art of Antiquity and the 
 Renaissance. 
 
 And gradually, insidiously, I became 
 
 VOL. i. 8
 
 146 JUVENILIA. 
 
 absorbed in them. I went on thinking 
 about the eighteenth century, but no longer 
 in the same way. I determined to write a 
 book about it, but the book was no longer 
 that famous novel. It became necessary 
 to explain to the world that this despised 
 eighteenth century was most important in 
 the history of art ; that, in the domain of 
 music and the drama, it takes rank among 
 the great artistic periods of the world's 
 history, along with the times of Pericles 
 and of Leo X. 
 
 Pericles ; Leo X. ; history of art ; artistic 
 periods ! how little did I understand at that 
 moment the meaning of all this sudden 
 eruption of philosophical and historical 
 Hegelian verbiage ! I really imagined that 
 I loved the eighteenth century as much as 
 ever. Alas, all this phraseology of modern 
 criticism signified that my much - loved 
 century had ceased to be alive, that it had 
 become, in my eyes, a mere corpse, and 
 that I was preparing to dissect it ! It sig-
 
 ROCOCO. 147 
 
 nified that I looked at it no longer from 
 within, but from without ; that in issuing 
 from the eighteenth century, I had emerged 
 also out of childhood ; that the days of 
 great imaginative passions, of Joan of Arc 
 and Marie Antoinette, of Sioux and Mohi- 
 cans, were gone by for ever.
 
 PROSAIC MUSIC AND POETIC 
 MUSIC.
 
 PROSAIC MUSIC AND POETIC 
 MUSIC. 
 
 HE blaring trumpets of the Prologue 
 in Heaven, the thundering hymns of 
 the Epilogue, were still shrilling and rumb- 
 ling in my ears, like the echoes of a distant 
 storm ; my fancy was crowded with all 
 that phantasmagoric jumble and jostle of 
 mediaeval and antique things, Faustus, 
 Helen, the devil, the witches, the sirens 
 and oreads, of Boito's Mefistofele ; when I 
 went to hear for the second time an opera 
 I am very fond of, the Matrimonio Segreto. 
 To hear within forty-eight hours an opera 
 by Boito and an opera of Cimarosa's, is an 
 aesthetic experience such as presents itself
 
 152 JUVENILIA. 
 
 rarely. It means a meeting of incongruous 
 and hostile things, rather like that very 
 adventure of Dr. Faustus and Helen of 
 Troy, of whom we have been speaking. 
 
 'Tis a fantastic experience, this meeting 
 of the arch-modern with the old-fashioned, 
 of an art literally of the future, seeking for 
 new horizons and countries unexplored, and 
 an art which might be called of the more 
 than past fitting into some verbal conju- 
 gation which means " a thing that has been 
 and never will be again," unknown to our 
 miserable grammars. A fantastic experi- 
 ence in itself, and one which results rather 
 in disconnected bizarre impressions, than in 
 such critical theories as are manufactured 
 with ruler and compasses. You are there- 
 fore requested to expect in the following 
 remarks neither logical sequence nor 
 aesthetic principles. Should you persist in 
 so doing, you would be disappointed, like 
 those friends of Hoffman's crazy Kapell- 
 meister Kreisler, who, having dropped the
 
 PROSAIC MUSIC AND POETIC MUSIC. 1 53 
 
 snuffers into his piano and broken the 
 principal strings, had the happy thought 
 of describing in words the things he had 
 intended to suggest with his notes. 
 
 That blast of the seven trumpets, those 
 strange shivered chords, the earthquake 
 rumble of all that orchestra, and the an- 
 them which issues out of it all, strong and 
 placid like a rift of blue sky when the 
 clouds have been torn asunder after the 
 blackness of the storm ; this cosmic or 
 seraphic drama, fitter for Dante than for 
 Goethe, goes to my brain as goes only one 
 other thing a fragment of a psalm by 
 Benedetto Marcello, poet and composer, 
 imaginative and aristocratically eclectic artist, 
 artistic ancestor of Arrigo Boito. 
 
 Then there is that serenade, that invoca- 
 tion of the siren, which we must imagine 
 those two demi-goddesses singing, not as 
 on the stage (for the stage is the death of 
 8*
 
 154 JUVENILIA. 
 
 all poetic conceptions), stupidly standing 
 before the footlights, but wandering with 
 interlaced hands through some island gar- 
 den, some orchard inundated by the moon, 
 and surrounded by the misty moonlit sea ; 
 the tremulousness of the moonlight, the 
 throb of the sea, the thrill of the hidden 
 insects, the alternate slumbering and 
 awakening of the wanderer's fancy, all 
 contained in that duet. But there is some- 
 thing more beautiful still and more fasci- 
 nating. I mean that duet in the prison be- 
 tween Faust and the poor crazy Margaret, 
 that tranquil wavelike swaying upon those 
 two or three notes, which widens like the 
 circles in the water, from one modulation 
 gently to the other, while the words de- 
 scribe, what the music seems to give, the 
 lapping of the tide on that shore untrodden 
 by all earthly cares. 
 
 Poetic music this, suggestive ; and which, 
 besides its own beauty, seems to give us 
 something more, and more exquisite than
 
 PROSAIC MUSIC AND POETIC MUSIC. 155 
 
 itself. No ; not more exquisite, but more 
 subtle and elusory. 
 
 The long and the short of the matter, in 
 all that confusion of the Matrinwnio Segrcto, 
 is simply thi's, that an old noodle, who is 
 also as deaf as a post, wants to marry his 
 daughter, already secretly married to the 
 shop-boy, to an English nobleman called 
 Milordo Robinson, an extraordinary grass- 
 hopper being with green coat-tails down to 
 his heels, and a starched necktie up to his 
 eyes ; while, on the other hand, the same 
 counter-jumping young hero is being made 
 red-hot love to by the sister of his em- 
 ployer, a toothless and sentimental Tabitha. 
 Hence endless mistakes and misunderstand- 
 ings, with consequent tremendous bickerings, 
 rages, blows, laughter, feminine shrillnesses 
 and masculine bellowings. As to the poetic 
 element, it enters into the business to much 
 the same extent as it would in reality that 
 is to say, not at all. And here I may
 
 156 JUVENILIA. 
 
 parenthetically remark, that in the way of 
 poetic suggestiveness, except in so far as it 
 is distilled by our modern brains on con- 
 tact with the past, there is not much to 
 be squeezed out of the good folk of the 
 eighteenth century. 
 
 And yet ... while I watch these 
 domestic battles of a respectable shop- 
 keeper's household of the year 1792 : this 
 love-making of what looks like an abigail 
 in striped skirt and coloured apron, and a 
 footman in topboots and a pigtail ; all this 
 while I feel something moving about in my 
 fancy, which something or other is not 
 prose, is not caricature ; nay, which is, 
 putting it quite plainly, poetry. No ; I 
 was wrong. It is not poetry, it is music. 
 Counter -jumping Adonis of a Paolino, 
 hero of measuring staff and scissors ; Caro- 
 lina, vulgar little shopkeeper's daughter 
 some curious metamorphose seems to be 
 at work upon you. In that famous air, 
 cc Before Aurora appears in the heavens"
 
 PROSAIC MUSIC AND POETIC MUSIC. 157 
 
 (no more is said about Aurora, but instead, 
 a great deal about travelling carriages, 
 whips, postillions), and in that duet where, 
 with the tallow candle in one hand and the 
 shabby portmanteau in the other, the 
 young people prepare to slip out of the 
 paternal house ; in these, and in ever so 
 many melodies and fragments of melody, 
 there is something undefinable, something, 
 strange to say, which makes the same im- 
 pression as those phantasmagoric visions of 
 Mefistofele ; something that at bottom, 
 is of identical natural, something we call 
 music, and feel inclined to call poetry. 
 
 * ->:-. %-. * * 
 
 It really does seem at times as if there 
 existed between us and the men of the late 
 eighteenth century a perfect abyss ; one 
 wonders whether the series of human lives 
 has really been uninterrupted. This is 
 especially the case in all matters imagina- 
 tive ; for, as I have already remarked, those 
 amiable great-grandfathers and great-grand-
 
 158 JUVENILIA. 
 
 mothers were possessed of little poetic 
 fancy, or if they had it, contrived to put it 
 successfully under a bushel. This reflec- 
 tion has arisen in my mind from a compari- 
 son between the subject of to-night's opera, 
 the Matrimonio Segreto, and the opera of 
 two days since, namely Mefistofele. 
 
 Yes, you will answer, but is not one of 
 these comic and the other serious ? Quite 
 true, but this makes no difference. A comic 
 piece can have as much poetry in it as a 
 serious one (all Shakespeare's comedies, and 
 Musset's, are there to prove it) ; and the 
 eighteenth century was equally flat and un- 
 imaginative in both styles. Nay, it is odd 
 that the most imaginative subject that ever 
 fell into the hands of an eighteenth century 
 composer, happened to be that of a comic 
 opera, Doit Giovanni, a tragi-comedy of 
 savage and fantastic Spanish comicality, re- 
 duced to utter prose first by Moliere, then 
 by Goldoni, and finally by Mozart's libretto 
 writer, D'Aponte.
 
 PROSAIC MUSIC AND POETIC MUSIC. 159 
 
 In short, I defy any one to show me an 
 opera libretto of the eighteenth century 
 which is imaginative in the same sense as 
 Mefistofele. Metastasio's opera librettos 
 have a poetic quality, dramatic interest, 
 pathos, even grandeur ; but they have 
 nothing imaginative, although he hunted for 
 subjects not merely in Plutarch and Hero- 
 dotus (whose names he always put at the 
 end of the Cf argument," learnedly contracted, 
 with those of Sanchoniathon, Berosus, 
 Ocellus Lucanus, like Dr. Primrose's 
 friend, lest any one should think he did not 
 work sufficiently hard for his salary of 
 Court Poet), not merely in Plutarch and 
 Herodotus, but also in Ariosto and Tasso. 
 On the other hand, Gluck and his librettist 
 Calsabigi, both of them furious reformers, 
 pre-Wagnerian Wagnerists, were never 
 struck with the idea, which every fifth-rate 
 composer would have to-day, of using up 
 in their opera the barbaric, fantastic, and 
 gruesomely imaginative element contained in
 
 l6o JUVENILIA. 
 
 the massacre of Orpheus by the frantic 
 Maenads. Orpheus and Eurydice are sent 
 home quietly, at the end of the third act, 
 like a newly-married couple returning 
 from their honeymoon. 
 
 All those good composers of the eigh- 
 teenth century, from Carissimi, their pre- 
 cursor, to Rossini their latest representative, 
 manufactured their music as other men 
 manufacture soap or cloth (and much in 
 the same way, f may add, as were manu- 
 factured also the cathedrals of the Middle 
 Ages and the frescoes of the Renaissance), 
 at so much a day. Sometimes they put into 
 the business more conscience or more genius, 
 and sometimes less ; but they worked on, 
 all of them, in the same happy unconscious- 
 ness of any imaginative suggestiveness. And 
 when the public or the manager wished it, 
 these great masters of delicate melody, of 
 magisterial counterpoint (at least in their 
 sacred music), were quite pleased to set 
 afresh, once, twice, or even three times, the
 
 PROSAIC MUSIC AND POETIC MUSIC. l6l 
 
 same libretto, the same words, as they were 
 quite willing (except for natural human 
 laziness) also to overhaul or exchange the 
 music written specially for some situation, 
 because it did not suit their singers to sinj 
 those particular pieces. 
 
 What an abyss between a man like Boito 
 and these musical bricklayers, tailors, cob- 
 blers of the last century ! Nevertheless, 
 we must believe Hegel, a sort of Council 
 of Trent in all aesthetic matters, and who 
 taught, what all professors of aesthetics 
 are bound to teach, namely, that music is 
 tJie romantic art above all others, that is to 
 say the art where the concern for the sub- 
 ject, for the poetical suggestion, for what 
 the Germans call lubalt, entirely lords it over 
 any concern for the mere form. 
 * * * 
 
 (( Canta Sirena Canta Sirena " this 
 tune of Mefistofele, knocking about in my 
 memory, suddenly comes in collision with 
 the theme of the second finale of the
 
 l62 JUVENILIA. 
 
 Matriomonio Segreto. This is indeed poetic 
 and suggestive art, romantic art, this of 
 Boito's. After all, Hegel doubtless knew 
 what he was talking about. Poetic, ro- 
 mantic, suggestive But suggestive of what ? 
 Of the siren, to be sure, and the full moon. 
 But, after all, where is the siren ? where is 
 the full moon? In the words. As to the 
 music, it would be difficult to point out in 
 what particular arrangement of notes there 
 is any allusion to a siren or a full moon ; in- 
 deed it might be hard to convey either of 
 these two items to the mind of the audience, 
 if that audience happened not to understand 
 the words. 
 
 What is more is that I have a similar 
 difficulty in finding in the arrangement of 
 notes which constitutes the second finale of 
 the Matrimcnio Segreto any indication of the 
 marriage of a shop-boy and a shop-keeper's 
 daughter, and of their consequent flight 
 down the paternal stairs with a tallow candle 
 in one hand and a portmanteau in the other;
 
 PROSAIC MUSIC AND POETIC MUSIC. 1 63 
 
 still less any indication of the presence 
 of papa, snoring unsuspectingly in bed. 
 Nay, if some poet of my acquaintance 
 would only be so obliging as to fit a couple 
 of verses about sirens and full moons to the 
 tune of this duet, I really see no reason 
 why . . . No. The thought is odious. 
 No self-respecting creature could assert that 
 these notes, associated during ninety years 
 with the difficulties of a shop-boy and a 
 shop-keeper's daughter, with the tallow 
 candle, the portmanteau, and the snoring of 
 papa Geronimo, might, if only you clapped 
 on a few verses about the siren and the 
 full moon, serve equally in evoking the 
 vision of that June moonlight when Helen of 
 Troy and her women, moonbeams vaguely 
 humanized, wander about among the Cen- 
 taurs and Sphinxes, the Dryads and Nereids 
 of the classic Walpurgis night. 
 
 ***** 
 In that case, wherein consists the poetry ? 
 Wherein lies that something ideal and super-
 
 164 JUVENILIA. 
 
 natural which we feel in Boito's opera, if 
 that phantasmagoric vision of Heaven and 
 Hell, of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, 
 is not evoked by the music, but by the 
 words ? Wherein consists the poetry ? 
 The poetry of this opera, which treats of 
 necromancers and angels and sirens, lies 
 simply, to my mind, in the something 
 wherein lies also the poetry of that other 
 opera, dealing with deaf papas, flirtatious 
 old spinsters, shop-boys, and runaway mar- 
 riages : in a very prosaic circumstance the 
 fact that the music is beautiful. 
 
 After which very unpoetical and exces- 
 sively unphilosophical remark, I had better 
 banish from my mind the melodies both of 
 Boito and of Cimarosa, and take down 
 that volume of " Vorlesungen iiber die 
 .ZEsthetik," in which Hegel demonstrates in 
 the most satisfactory manner that music is 
 the art where concern for the form is most 
 completely subordinated to concern for the 
 subject.
 
 APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 
 
 A 
 CHAPTER ON ARTISTIC ANACHRONISM
 
 APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 
 
 A 
 CHAPTER ON ARTISTIC ANACHRONISM. 
 
 AISE up and hollow out your two 
 hands, so as to exclude from your 
 eyes all the vague, flickering shadows ; 
 so as to concentrate what little light you 
 can upon that luckless unlit fresco over 
 the prison cell window of the Signature 
 Room of the Vatican. At first we can see 
 scarcely anything except the spots of light 
 dancing before our eyes ; but gradually the 
 black wall seems to scoop itself out, to 
 deepen, till the mass of blurs take shape, 
 and becomes the ghost-haunted slopes of 
 Parnassus. Vaguely still, and for ever 
 sucked back into the darkness, flickers forth
 
 168 JUVENILIA. 
 
 the company of poets : bearded, regal men, 
 with filleted, gem-like heads, and robed 
 youths with laurel wreaths in their long 
 hair ; and the Muses seated with lyre and 
 flute, in gowns of white and green and 
 tawny red ; and glimmering white in the 
 midst of all, on the summit of the hill, 
 beneath the straight-stemmed laurels, with 
 the streams bubbling and the flowers open- 
 ing between his naked feet, King Apollo, 
 seated with his bow in his hand and his 
 fiddle against his cheek. We look, and 
 laugh, and ask ourselves why in the world 
 Raphael should have chosen to paint Apollo 
 as a fiddler ? Why indeed ? Well, I have 
 a notion that I can explain to you why 
 Raphael painted Apollo as a fiddler, and I 
 will try and expound my idea ; but on one 
 condition, that afterwards, in return, we 
 shall do our best to explain why, Apollo 
 having been painted as a fiddler, that cir- 
 cumstance should have made you laugh. 
 Why Raphael painted Apollo playing,
 
 APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 169 
 
 not upon lyre or cithara, or any other 
 imaginable antique instrument, but upon a 
 fiddle upon, of all things, the most 
 modern, unantique of instruments, an 
 instrument born of the Middle Ages, and 
 raised to importance only in Raphael's own 
 time this is a question which has exercised 
 the ingenuity of a variety of ingenious 
 persons. Some have supposed that Raphael 
 wished to indicate that Apollo was not only 
 the god of poetry, but of music ; and that 
 he gave him, therefore, in contradistinction 
 to the lyres and citharas and psalteries, 
 instruments used solely to accompany lyrical 
 declamation and therefore symbolical of 
 poetry, handled by the Muses, the one 
 instrument which seemed most purely 
 musical, most disconnected with mere verse 
 recitation the violin. Others have ima- 
 gined that the fiddle was placed in the hands 
 of Apollo as a delicate or indelicate piece 
 of favour-currying with some musical 
 minion, some viol-playing page of Pope 
 VOL. i. 9
 
 I7O JUVENILIA. 
 
 Leo X. ; perhaps even that same lad, with 
 dark wistful face, and long straight hair, 
 whose portrait Raphael painted, bow in 
 hand, dressed in green velvet and fur. 
 Others have put forward yet other explana- 
 tions, with which we need not be troubled. 
 Explanations of this sort people have felt 
 bound to make, because the most obvious 
 explanation of all the explanation of the 
 similar vagaries of Benozzo representing 
 Babylon with Strozzi palaces and Chinese 
 pagodas, of Pinturicchio painting Ulysses 
 returning in the dress of a Sienese man-at- 
 arms to a weaving Penelope apparelled like 
 the lady of any Petrucci, Tolomei, or Pic- 
 colomini of his day ; nay, of Uccello 
 painting a chameleon as a monster half 
 camel, half lion the simple explanation of 
 blissful ignorance, cannot go any length to 
 explain the fiddling Apollo of Raphael. 
 
 For Raphael was of all men the least 
 likely to be guilty of a sin of ignorance. 
 He was, above any artist of his time, of
 
 APOLLO THE FIDDLER. Ijl 
 
 the literary, learned, or at least dilettante- 
 learned, temperament. In the vague 
 accounts we obtain of this rather pale- 
 coloured and faintly-drawn man of genius, 
 almost the sole strongly marked characteris- 
 tic is the noble-patron-of-learning sort of 
 interest, the refined, accomplished, scholarly- 
 gentleman delight in antiquities. It is true 
 that many other artists of the Renais- 
 sance had as great, if not greater, a passion 
 for antiques as Raphael, but none, it would 
 seem, from the same reasons. For them 
 the antique was a mere subject of study. 
 If Mantegna spent fortunes, and sold houses 
 and orchards, in order to buy mutilated 
 statues and battered bas-reliefs and half- 
 obliterated coins ; it was that to the intense, 
 fantastic master of Mantua these things 
 were as the ores and smelting-ovens of an 
 alchemist. It was that he sought, in the 
 broken, rust-stained marbles, what Leonardo 
 sought in fanciful geometrical problems, 
 and Michael Angelo in dead limbs and
 
 172 JUVENILIA. 
 
 flayed bodies a sort of magic, omnipotent 
 spell, a sort of ineffable elixir of life the 
 secret of perfect proportion. But it was 
 not so with Raphael : a student of Tuscan 
 nudities, a dexterous imitator of Michael 
 Angelo, he was yet at bottom an Umbrian, 
 bred in the workshop, the manufactory of 
 disembodied yearning saints, of Perugino ; 
 and the antique, although he studied it as 
 he studied everything else, was never to 
 Raphael a supreme teacher or a final pro- 
 blem. His love for all things antique, his 
 constant alacrity to buy or have copied any 
 ancient marbles that came within reach, his 
 anxiety for the preservation of the ancient 
 buildings of Rome, all this was merely the 
 result of a sort of humanistic tendency, a 
 sort of intellectual busybodyness, seeking 
 for a vent in a man of far less literary 
 training than many of his contemporary 
 artists ; an interest, in short, academic and 
 archaeological, in antiquities for their own 
 sake, such as was shared by his nobler and
 
 APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 173 
 
 more learned friends, Bembo and Castig- 
 lione and Sadoleto and Fedra Inghirami, 
 and in less degree by all the poeticules and 
 prelatry of the court of Leo X. Raphael, 
 therefore, cannot be supposed to have been 
 ignorant of the antique instruments which 
 might be placed in the hands of Apollo ; 
 nor to have been ignorant (at least for any 
 length of time) of the fact that the fiddle 
 was not an antique instrument. He, who 
 certainly took a vast deal of scholarly 
 advice for his Vatican frescos, who must 
 have heard whole lectures on antique philo- 
 sophy and poetry before he was able to 
 compose The School of Athens and Mount 
 Parnassus, could not have put a fiddle into 
 the hands of Apollo from the mere stolid 
 ignorance, the happy-go-lucky indifference, 
 which made both Signorelli and an unknown 
 pupil of Squarcione coolly sketch, the one 
 an Apollo, the other an Orpheus, fiddling 
 away in the face of all archaeology. 
 
 If, therefore, an anachronism was com-
 
 174 JUVENILIA. 
 
 mitted by Raphael, by the preeminently 
 archaeological painter, it was certainly not 
 without a motive. No, not exactly a 
 motive, for a motive is self-conscious, and 
 consciously restricted to one particular case. 
 Rather a habit, unconscious and general, 
 influencing in one case because it influenced 
 in all cases. Raphael gave a fiddle to 
 Apollo, not because the giving of the fiddle 
 had any particular meaning in his eyes, but 
 because the giving of the fiddle was conso- 
 nant with the manner of conceiving subjects 
 which Raphael shared with all the painters 
 of his day ; which the painters of his day 
 shared with all the men and women of the 
 Renaissance; and which the men and women 
 of the Renaissance shared with the men 
 and women of ancient Greece, of the 
 Middle Ages, of Elizabethan England, of 
 every country and every time which has 
 possessed a really great and vigorous art 
 sculpture, painting, poetry, or music : the 
 habit of conceiving of all subjects given to
 
 APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 175 
 
 the artist as the mere material or pretext 
 for a decoration, a show, a pageant ; a 
 pageant of sculptured or painted forms, of 
 grouped and linked sounds, of images and 
 emotions ; a pageant to pass before the 
 mind, ostensibly to tell some story or 
 honour some person, really merely to 
 delight, even as some great mystery play, 
 with its processions of richly apparelled and 
 grandly mounted soldiers, its cavalcades of 
 mummers and musicians, its companies of 
 singing choristers, its flower-wreathed poles 
 and painted banners and flaring torches, Its 
 wheeled stages hung with arras and cressets, 
 and peopled with strangely arrayed figures, 
 may have passed, to do honour to some 
 prince, or to enforce some religious lesson, 
 slowly through the streets of a mediaeval 
 city. 
 
 To us such a conception of artistic sub- 
 jects seems far-fetched, artificial, nay, almost 
 impossible ; yet it is in reality by far the 
 earlier, the more natural, the more really
 
 176 JUVENILIA. 
 
 artistic. The desire for realizing an already 
 known event, for imitating an already 
 extant character, for placing before the 
 imagination a fac-simile of something ex- 
 isting outside it, or for showing to the 
 bodily eyes what was visible already to the 
 memory ; this desire for pitting together 
 the artificial and the natural is, in point of 
 fact, one of very late growth. It did not 
 exist as long as events and characters 
 seemed sufficiently interesting from their 
 more practical bearing ; as long as the past 
 was too active a factor in the present and 
 future to require any further reason for 
 remembrance. It could not exist as long 
 as artistic means were fully employed in 
 satisfying men's fancy or expressing men's 
 cravings ; it could not exist as long as the 
 artificial and the real were both sufficiently 
 important to dispense with the interest due 
 to comparison between them ; nay, such 
 comparison between the reality and the 
 artistic representation required a lazy and
 
 APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 177 
 
 objectless activity of the reason, which was 
 impossible in a time when the reason, over- 
 burdened with practical problems, had little 
 leisure for play, and when the artistic crav- 
 ings and activities were too rigorous to be 
 its passive playthings. Above all, the 
 purely intellectual reasoning enjoyment of 
 watching how far art will differ from nature 
 could not exist as long as the mechanical 
 powers, the powers of responding to the 
 artistic wants of mankind, were still grow- 
 ing in their constant efforts after the yet 
 unaccomplished. 
 
 There is in all the art of great periods 
 a sad absence of logic ; at least of the logic 
 which we expect. Mere chronicle and 
 mere portraiture put aside, the exposition 
 of an event or of a character is generally 
 embedded in a perfect arabesque of poetical 
 or pictorial digressions. In a play, which 
 is, after all, only the imitation of the man- 
 ner in which we suppose any given events 
 to have taken place, there is in Antiquity 
 
 9*
 
 178 JUVENILIA. 
 
 a series of musical and lyrical interruptions, 
 a series of odes upon extremely indifferent 
 subjects sung at the most critical moments 
 by people who would either not be present, 
 or be thinking of anything rather than 
 choruses ; there is in the Elizabethan 
 period a constant arabesquing off into most 
 elaborate lyrical imagery, of digressing into 
 complete chapters of philosophy ; all things 
 which we disregard from a sort of inherited 
 familiarity with the style, but which would 
 astonish us greatly if we had never before 
 read anything like " Prometheus Bound " 
 or f c Macbeth " ; astonish and shock us as 
 much as some intelligent child or peasant 
 would be astonished and shocked by the 
 orchestral preludes, the roulades, the fugues 
 accompanying the conspiracies and murders 
 of our opera stage. Indeed, an opera, 
 with its symphonies, its airs, its quintets 
 and sextets, its choruses, its ballets, its 
 whole tissue of unrealities woven over a 
 few threads of realism, is perhaps the only
 
 APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 179 
 
 artistic form of our day in which we can 
 study the unrealistic, pageant-like art of 
 past times ; the only modern thing which 
 can make us realize, with its innumerable 
 incongruities and impossibilities, endured 
 for the sake of mere artistic pleasure, the 
 sort of serious masquerade, the solemn 
 mummery of the plastic and poetic art of 
 former days. 
 
 People did not ask for realization ; they 
 did not ask to be shown an artistic fac- 
 simile of a character or of an event. The 
 public which crowded Blackfriars or the 
 Globe Theatre did not ask for a realization 
 of a tyrant as Becky Sharp is the realization 
 of an adventuress ; they did not ask for a 
 realization of a tale of murder as any novel 
 of Emile Gaboriau is its realization : they 
 merely wished to be interested and de- 
 lighted ; and a certain proportion of rough 
 psychologic portraiture, a certain propor- 
 tion of loosely narrated story, a certain 
 amount of passionate expression, of philo-
 
 l8O JUVENILIA. 
 
 sophic rhetoric, of poetic magnificence, of 
 trap-door and magic-lantern horror, did 
 succeed in interesting and delighting them : 
 and the whole strange compound of de- 
 veloped and half-developed elements was 
 called, as the case might be, Macbeth, 
 Hamlet, or the Duchess of Malfy. And 
 the same with painting. The most subtle 
 Florentine public did not ask for a reali- 
 zation of a Scripture story, or an episode 
 in history, as Alma Tadema's Cf Ave Caesar," 
 or Morelli's "Raising of Jairus's Daughter," 
 may be considered as realizations of events, 
 as representations of men and women, and 
 place and costume, and look and gesture 
 of the whole occurrence, in short, such as 
 it probably looked. They were satisfied, 
 the people of the Renaissance, with a figure 
 or two which they could recognize as St. 
 Peter, or St. Paul, or the Proconsul, or the 
 priest of Apollo, with the traditional 
 costume belonging to them, the general 
 expression of exhortation or prayer, or
 
 APOLLO THE FIDDLER. l8l 
 
 command or terror, which might convey to 
 their mind some idea of their action ; and 
 then they were satisfied that Masaccio or 
 Filippino or Ghirlandaio should surround 
 the whole scene of altercation or of miracle 
 with a group of Greek soldiers, of mediaeval 
 men-at-arms, of robed scholars and magis- 
 trates, of ladies in brocaded stomachers, and 
 nymphs in antique draperies, of pretty 
 dandies in kilted tunics and striped hose, 
 of people with baskets, and dogs and horses 
 and musical instruments, all looking in no 
 particular direction, with plenty of vine 
 trellises, perspectived streets, peacocks, bas- 
 reliefs or imitation dolmens, with arches of 
 rock overgrown with trees and framing 
 views of towered towns in the distance. 
 
 Was it stupidity on the part of the men 
 for whom Shakespeare wrote, of the men 
 for whom Masaccio, or Botticelli, or Signo- 
 relli painted ? I should not care to tax 
 them with that ; or if it were, their stupi- 
 dity had better results than our wisdom.
 
 1 82 JUVENILIA. 
 
 I do not think that they had all these things 
 done from mere ignorance or dulness. I 
 think they had merely a different system, a 
 different habit of viewing artistic matters. 
 They did not require that all the items of 
 play or picture should be portions of an 
 organic logical growth, that each part should 
 depend upon another, and the whole pro- 
 duce a single logical impression, any more 
 than, when you make a nosegay or garland, 
 you expect all the flowers and leaves to 
 be homogeneous : lilies do not grow on 
 melon plants, nor poppies on oak leaves ; 
 yet as a combination of form and colour, 
 as a decoration, a garland such as the Rob- 
 bias were wont to imitate in their altar- 
 pieces is certainly preferable to a garland 
 made all of one flower, or of one sort of 
 flower. I have said " as a decoration," 
 and this brings me to the fact that the art 
 of all great periods is, in point of fact, 
 nothing but a decoration ; for just as men 
 made their dwellings delightful by stamping
 
 APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 183 
 
 leather with blue and gold patterns (which 
 are certainly not what leather naturally 
 presents) and hanging it on the walls ; by 
 weaving the dyed threads of wool and silk 
 into strange figures and devices ; by cutting 
 holes into wood and filling them up with 
 bits of ivory or mother-of-pearl ; by setting 
 together all manner of various marbles in 
 shapes such as no quarry could ever show ; 
 by carving in wood, and painting on plaster, 
 all sorts of shapes, just like enough to beasts 
 and flowers to show that there never was 
 beast or flower like them: as men united 
 together things and forms from all parts of 
 the world and all orders of creation, and 
 altered and assorted them to beautify their 
 houses ; so also men took elements of 
 thought and feeling and form, things which 
 delighted the eye, and things which appealed 
 to the fancy, and united them together 
 into quaint and gorgeous arabesques, with 
 which they patterned their lives. And if 
 we consider for a moment, and put aside
 
 184 JUVENILIA. 
 
 all our own habits of considering art as a 
 semi-scientific product, we shall acknow- 
 ledge how much more natural and spon- 
 taneous is such arabesque of form and 
 fancy than our own modern attempt to 
 adorn, to decorate our Jives with the 
 museum cases, the rows of pricked and 
 pinned butterflies, and stuffed animals of 
 psychological analysis ; to stencil it over 
 with the tables of dates and geological 
 maps of logical realism ; whence it is that 
 our lives, for all the attempts we make to 
 adorn them, preserve to the last so dreary 
 a look of schoolrooms and laboratories. 
 Thus we must understand that in the art 
 of the past there is no more logical homo- 
 gencousness than in the arabesques of a 
 carved chest or a painted plate ; things are 
 juxtaposed and combined with reference 
 only to pleasantness of effect. Hence it 
 is that we constantly meet in the paintings 
 of the Renaissance, and even of the Middle 
 Ages, what appear to us contradictions in
 
 APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 185 
 
 the telling of a story, jumbles of time and 
 place, broken up or hopelessly muddled 
 allegory. But in reality only a fragment 
 of story was expected to be told, only a 
 small amount of unity of time and place 
 to be observed, only a scrap of allegory to 
 be carried through ; what seems to us the 
 contradiction, the jumble in story or alle- 
 gory, no longer belongs to the story or the 
 allegory ; is something else, possibly as 
 foreign to them as the miniature angels 
 along the gilded border, or the griffons 
 and satyrs upon the carved frame. These 
 things were not intended to logically 
 coalesce, they merely pictorially harmonized. 
 The gentlemen in furred robes and ladies 
 in high coifs, who knelt at the foot of the 
 cross, the pages holding the caparisoned 
 horses, and the half- naked St. Johns and 
 red-hatted St. Jeromes of Van Eyck's and 
 Memling's pictures were not supposed to 
 be really co-existing with the fainting 
 Virgin, the sobbing Magdalen, the bleeding
 
 1 86 JUVENILIA. 
 
 Redeemer ; the cross was not really sup- 
 posed to be erected in front of a Dutch 
 castle farmhouse, with fowls cackling by its 
 barn door, palfreys crossing its drawbridges, 
 and ducks swimming in its moat. All this 
 was neither narrative, nor representation, 
 nor allegory, but a little of each and all, 
 combined into one beautiful-looking pic- 
 ture, into one confused, suggestive, moving, 
 delighting pageant of the imagination. For 
 the agony on the cross, the anguish of the 
 Virgin and her attendants, touched people's 
 hearts ; the knights and ladies and horses 
 impressed their imagination ; the barn-door, 
 the drawbridge, the ducks, the rabbits, the 
 twenty familiar irrelevant details, tickled 
 their fancy ; the singing angels sounded 
 delightful ; and the whole to us so incon- 
 gruous picture was enjoyed like some 
 great play, in which there is tragedy and 
 comedy, and pastoral and allegory, all 
 mixed together, and the whole effect of 
 which is delightful.
 
 APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 1 87 
 
 Such, therefore, was the spirit in which 
 even that strangely modern-minded, reason- 
 ing, psychological, archaeological Raphael 
 must have conceived his works. And in 
 this lies the explanation of that anomaly 
 of the fiddling Apollo. It is difficult to 
 indicate, with however much sense of their 
 unconsciousness and vagueness, the vague, 
 unconscious thoughts and feeling which 
 form the background of all conscious 
 artistic creations. As soon as ever we 
 speak of them they appear definite, con- 
 scious ; they are no longer the real thing. 
 We can therefore only vaguely suggest the 
 sort of confused conception which Raphael 
 may have had of his Parnassus. In the 
 first place, and of entirely overbalancing 
 importance, the sense of a great piece of 
 pictorial composition of perspective, draw- 
 ing, colour, and so forth ; then the sense of 
 an allegory of poetry, of personified ab- 
 stractions ; then, again, the sense of certain 
 individuals, of certain personalities these
 
 150 JUVENILIA. 
 
 two purely intellectual conceptions very 
 much mixed up and entirely driven into the 
 shade, or, more properly speaking, absorbed 
 into the all-important pictorial conception. 
 Thus there would come to be a similar 
 confusion in the conception of the details 
 of the work. There would be an idea of 
 Apollo of an antique personality, an in- 
 dividual belonging to a definite period of 
 time; then an idea of poetry personified, 
 of poetry in general, modern as well as 
 ancient, not belonging at all to any par- 
 ticular epoch ; then again of music, and of 
 music in all probability as something 
 modern the music which Raphael had 
 heard, not the music which he had not 
 heard. A nebulous, eddying sort of jumble, 
 united, solidified, cast into definite shape 
 by the predominant thought of a young 
 man, a naked young man, a model yes, 
 seated thus, with his arm thus. The real 
 lad, peasant or colour-grinder, the real, 
 distinct form, fills the mind of Raphael ;
 
 APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 189 
 
 he takes a piece of paper and rapidly 
 scrawls a figure, the figure of the boy 
 whom he sees in his memory, whom he 
 sees perhaps as a present reality ; quick, 
 the outline of his swaying body, of his 
 firmly planted legs, of his upturned, side- 
 long face ; and then who shall tell how ? 
 from the subsidiary conceptions of the 
 work, from the intellectual notions of his 
 meaning, come his surroundings the 
 roughly sketched Muses, in antique 
 draperies, belonging to the idea of him as 
 Apollo, as the antique reality; the rapidly 
 indicated figures of the poets of Father 
 Allighieri and Messer Francesco Petrarca, 
 and perhaps even of Messer Piero Aretino 
 as part and parcel of the idea of poetry, of 
 poetry in general, old and new, embodied in 
 this youth ; and finally, as a recollection of 
 the something musical which enters into the 
 vague whole, there comes into Raphael's 
 head, and emerges from under his pencil, 
 with some recently heard tune starting
 
 190 JUVENILIA. 
 
 suddenly into his memory, the final touch 
 the fiddle. 
 
 So the work is done : the anachronism 
 is committed ; yet without either uncon- 
 sciousness of its being an anachronism, or 
 consciousness of its being one ; without 
 either ignorance or absurdity. And when 
 the men of the Renaissance, the prelates 
 and courtiers, the humanists and antiquaries, 
 come and look upon the work, they do not 
 laugh, they do not ask the meaning, they 
 do not question about anything. For in 
 their minds exists the same decorative 
 arabesque as in that of Raphael. An an- 
 tique god, a personified art, a remembered 
 tune, a bit of narrative of how King 
 Apollo was wont to sit upon Parnassus ; a 
 bit of allegory of poets grouped according 
 to their styles and merits, in company with 
 the personified branches of the art ; a bit 
 of realism, a recollection of heard music, 
 a fiddle ideas running confusedly into each 
 other, pleasing, amusing, reminding; above
 
 APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 19! 
 
 all, a noble piece of work, a noble group, 
 grandly perspectived, nobly drawn, har- 
 moniously coloured. 
 
 But it is different with us ; with us who 
 understand so much about all the condi- 
 tions under which art was produced, and 
 who sympathize with them so little. We 
 come into that prison-like hall of the Sig- 
 nature, we blink and wink in the half-light, 
 we screen our eyes from the shadows, till 
 the frescoed Parnassus gradually emerges 
 from out of the dark wall. We look, 
 appreciate, admire, enjoy (or think we 
 enjoy), and then we laugh. At what ? 
 At Apollo, or at his fiddle ? Surely not 
 at Apollo. He is but a single figure, very 
 simple and simply worked, not elaborate 
 either in form or in expression, yet perhaps 
 conveying a greater impression of genius 
 than all the dozens of Madonnas, Perugine 
 and Florentine and Roman, than all the 
 great ceremonious allegories like the 
 " School of Athens " and the cf Dispute of
 
 JUVENILIA. 
 
 the Sacrament," than all the Michelange- 
 Jesque nudities of the "Burning of the 
 Borgo," with that terrible perfection of 
 drawing and composition and expression, 
 that terrible balance of good qualities, 
 pictorial and psychological, which so often 
 makes Raphael less interesting than many a 
 one-sided, unintelligent little Lombard, or 
 Umbrian, or Venetian. He is but a sim- 
 ple, human-looking god, yet perhaps more 
 poetical, and poetically charming, with his 
 slightly raised young head, singing, quite 
 gently and sotto voce as yet, humming over 
 the song he has just composed and will 
 sing anon quite loud and joyous to the 
 Muses more poetically charming, perhaps, 
 this fiddling Apollo of Parnassus, than 
 almost any marble Apollo of antiquity; 
 than the little Lizard-hunter, a lithe and 
 supple young lizard himself, of Praxiteles ; 
 than the young Florentine Apollino, the 
 delicate poet-boy, with hair dressed by 
 some admiring Muse ; than the long-robed
 
 APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 193 
 
 laurel-crowned Musagetes of fluttering, 
 half-theatrical inspiration, the divinization 
 of the improwisatore, of the male or semi- 
 masculine Corinne ; than the sombre pro- 
 phetic Pythian (Cassandra's ill-omened 
 lover, certainly) leaning his half-draped 
 chest upon his cithara, wearily pillowing 
 his braided head upon his arm ; nay, even 
 than the wizard statue of the Belvedere, 
 which, for all our wiser judgment, for all our 
 archaeology and all our knowledge of Elgin 
 marbles, does still give us a little shock of 
 surprise, a little shudder of delight, every 
 time that we, the contemptuous moderns, 
 come face to face with him. No, certainly, 
 we cannot be laughing at Raphael's Apollo. 
 Is it then at the fiddle ? But why laugh at 
 the fiddle? There is nothing absurd in a 
 fiddle. If the good Saxon name shock 
 you, call it, if you will, poetically, viol ; 
 or musically, violin, tenor, alto according 
 to the pitch you judge it to have. To the 
 eye the instrument handled by Apollo, 
 VOL. r. 10
 
 194 JUVENILIA. 
 
 though lacking the subtle curve, the sharp 
 scooped flank of the perfected riddle of 
 Amati, or Guarneri, or Stradivari, is even 
 in its pre-Cremonese ungainliness more 
 elegant in shape, and much more graceful 
 of manipulation, above all, infinitely finer 
 in tone than any lumbering antique stringed 
 thing. To the imagination, on the other 
 hand, it does not, or need not, present 
 any grotesque images. There is nothing 
 grotesque in the recollection of one of 
 Haydn's quartets or one of Tartini's 
 sonatas ; nothing undignified or unpoetical 
 surely in the thought that just such an 
 instrument as this once rested against the 
 moonlit armour, and whined beneath the 
 reddened fingers of Volker the Fiddleman, 
 as he sat with Hagen of Tronegg on the 
 bench outside Queen Chriemhilt's hall, 
 holding watch over the dreadful chamber 
 where Huns and Burgundians lay slaugh- 
 tered beneath the charred and fallen rafters ; 
 nothing unpoetic in the thought that just
 
 APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 195 
 
 such an instrument as this is played on the 
 carpeted steps of the Venetian altar-pieces 
 by the angels at the feet of the Virgin, 
 enthroned in solemn drapery of wine-lee 
 and clove crimson in her tapestried niche, 
 beneath the dangling silver lamps and the 
 garlands of melons and lilies and green 
 leaves slung in heavy festoons. You do 
 not laugh at the fiddle of Morone or 
 Bellini's angels ; you do not laugh at the 
 fiddle of the Niebelung knight; you do 
 not laugh at the fiddle for which Hadyn 
 or Mozart composed. Why then laugh 
 at this fiddling Apollo of Raphael's? In 
 reality we are laughing neither at Apollo 
 nor at the fiddle, but at the anachronism, 
 the anomaly of their being thus united 
 the antique god and the mediaeval play- 
 work. We are laughing at the mere name, 
 the droll meeting of incongruous words, 
 "Apollo the Fiddler." And as the name 
 sinks into our mind there crowds forward 
 a vague jumble of grotesque ideas of
 
 Ip JUVENILIA. 
 
 Heinrich Heine's tales of exiled gods, of 
 Bacchus turned convent cellarer, and Jove 
 selling rabbit-skins on Heligoland, and 
 Mercury turned Dutch skipper, with pig- 
 tail instead of winged cap, and knobbed 
 cane instead of Caduceus. Apollo the 
 Fiddler ! and there emerges from out 
 of this confusion a vision of Apollo 
 wandering from fair to fair, and from 
 pothouse to pothouse, with his fiddle on 
 his back ; of Apollo screwing his pegs and 
 waxing his bow among the clatter of plates 
 and glasses, the cries of water-melon and 
 pumpkin-seed sellers, the gabble of pedlars 
 over their tapes and fans and mirrors, the 
 shuffle and scramble and hum and yell of 
 a village holiday; the vision of the god 
 seated calmly, with dangling legs, on the 
 side of some wooden stage, fiddling away 
 in concert with earthly pipers and drum- 
 mers until the curtain shall be drawn aside 
 from some mystery play of <c Joseph and 
 his Brethren," or cc The Three Kings from
 
 APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 197 
 
 the East ; " from some grand display of 
 giantesses, or painted negroes, or camels 
 bestridden by wrinkled, red-jerkined mon- 
 keys. Why should we be thus haunted by 
 grotesque images? why should we laugh 
 where the men of the Renaissance merely 
 enjoyed? Those humanists surely knew as 
 well as we do what were and were not 
 antique instruments ; those men for whom 
 the greatest art was produced surely knew 
 as well as we do what was artistically right 
 and what artistically wrong. Yet we laugh, 
 and they did not. For, as we have already 
 seen, those men did not let their knowledge 
 of how things are or have been in reality, 
 interfere with their enjoyment of how 
 things are represented in art ; they designed 
 ornaments where we only label specimens ; 
 they did not habitually and perpetually, 
 almost unconsciously and automatically, 
 judge of all things from a scientific point 
 of view. 
 
 From a scientific point of view ? This
 
 Jpo JUVENILIA. 
 
 assertion takes you somewhat aback, does 
 it not, my friend ? You, at least, you 
 imagined, were safe from such an imputa- 
 tion. For you happen to be peculiarly 
 unscientific, particularly artistic. You are 
 (and not without a little pride thereat in 
 your heart of hearts) a person whose ar- 
 tistic and imaginative nature is for ever 
 being ruffled by the scientific spirit of the 
 age. You hate all explanation, analysis ; 
 you recoil, almost as from some gritty or 
 clammy contact, from the theories which 
 attempt to explain your likings and dis- 
 likings ; you are, even by your own con- 
 fession, just a trifle cowardly in the presence 
 of ideas and facts ; you wish merely to feel 
 and imagine, and to keep the luxurious 
 sense of mystery and wonder. You are 
 proudly conscious that your real home was 
 not modern London, but ancient Athens 
 or mediaeval Florence ; and being thus 
 cruelly exiled into a land of desolation, you 
 strive to build out of all manner of frag-
 
 APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 199 
 
 ments of beauty and fancy, and fashion, out 
 of all manner of broken-down, long-in- 
 herited sounds and sights and images, some 
 sort of retreat, half hermitage, half-pleasure 
 dome, where your soul can loll at its ease, 
 secluded, peaceful, high above the smoke 
 and smut and rattle of modern ideas. You 
 have, in short, a vague, uncomfortable, 
 instinctive aversion to science. And yet 
 you, even you, are in this case, and in a 
 thousand similar cases, judging and even 
 condemning art from the point of view 
 of science. 
 
 When we say science, we must define. 
 There is science of all kinds, and some 
 kinds have no possible chance of intruding 
 into the domain of art. And, strange to 
 say, these latter happen to be the very 
 sciences you dislike most : those physical 
 sciences, physiology, optics, acoustics, which 
 teach other folk (for you decline being 
 taught) why certain linear forms by re- 
 quiring a painful adjustment of the visual
 
 2OO JUVENILIA. 
 
 muscles, and certain colour combinations 
 by causing an excess of stimulus to the 
 retinal nerves, and certain sequences and 
 meetings of sounds by disintegrating with 
 opposed movements the delicate mechanism 
 of hearing, give us, each in its way, an 
 impression called ugliness ; while certain 
 other combinations of lines, of colours, and 
 of sounds, induce the pleasurable sense of 
 beauty: these natural sciences, which thus 
 impertinently and coarsely explain the 
 causes of artistic likings, do not attempt 
 to influence those likings and dislikings 
 themselves. For art deals only with the 
 very surface of Nature ; with that which 
 she reveals to the naked eye and the un- 
 aided ear, with the combinations which 
 require for their perception neither scalpel 
 nor alembic nor logical mechanism of ana- 
 lysis. Our artistic sense of right and 
 wrong is safely based in the structure of 
 our organism, which science may explain, 
 but which science cannot replace. It is
 
 APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 2OI 
 
 from no knowledge of cell or tissue, of 
 bone or muscle, of anything inside the 
 human body, that we know when that 
 body is comely and when it is uncouth. 
 Our perception of line and colour, perhaps 
 a collateral sense of weight and resistance, 
 perhaps even a long engrained, long un- 
 analytic, long instinctive, nay, automatic 
 sense of fitness for the purposes of life 
 all these various senses, combined into 
 what we call artistic perception, taught the 
 Greek sculptors where to seek models for 
 Aphrodite or Apollo long before the first 
 profane knife had ever pried into the mys- 
 teries hidden beneath the mere grand curves, 
 the supple broken lines, the beautiful sur- 
 face of the human body. Knowledge of 
 beauty, knowledge of the fair shapes and 
 tints of man, and beasts, and plants, and 
 rocks, and skies ; knowledge of the sweet 
 harmonies or melodies to be got out of 
 pipe, or string, or throat knowledge of 
 beauty, though knowledge, most indis- 
 10*
 
 2O2 JUVENILIA. 
 
 putably, is no more scientific knowledge 
 than is the knowledge of virtue or vice. 
 Science, with its analysis, can teach us what 
 hidden reasons of physical benefit or injury, 
 of social progress or degradation, have 
 made us such as to prefer beauty to 
 ugliness, good to evil ; but science was 
 not born when our remotest ancestors 
 already preferred beauty to ugliness, good 
 to evil, and thought that the preference, 
 the knowledge, was the pressure of some 
 guiding angel's hand, the mysterious voice 
 of some unseen divinity. This sort of 
 science, therefore, physical and physico- 
 mental, which explains the functions by 
 the structure and the structure by the 
 function of things, has therefore no power 
 of meddling with art ; for the sculptor 
 knows before the anatomist when a limb 
 is misshapen ; and the musician has per- 
 ceived that a chord is insupportable long 
 before the physicist can begin analyzing his 
 air waves.
 
 APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 
 
 No ; it is not those coarse matter-of-fact 
 physical sciences which can and do imper- 
 tinently interfere with art. It is those far 
 vaguer, less scientific sciences, historical 
 and geographical, which with their charm 
 of colour and incident, their stimulus to 
 fancy and emotion, have become one of the 
 luxuries of your life, making you forget 
 almost that they are sciences at all ; as in 
 some picturesque museum, where furniture 
 and plate are grouped into habitable rooms, 
 and armour and musical instruments look 
 as if only now thrown aside ; or in some 
 great greenhouse, where spreading palms 
 and huge ferns hide the glass and ironwork, 
 and flowering parasites half impede the 
 way, you may forget that all these things 
 are so many scientific spoils, so many speci- 
 mens collected and arranged by historian 
 or geographer. 
 
 These geographic and historic sciences, 
 which you look upon as if they were scarcely 
 sciences at all, have in reality no connection
 
 2O4 JUVENILIA. 
 
 whatever with our perceptions of beauty 
 and ugliness ; their range of explanation 
 does not contain any of the phenomena 
 of artistic preference. As the physical 
 sciences explain the structural reasons of our 
 pleasure or displeasure at certain artistic 
 forms, so the geographico-historical sciences 
 explain why given countries and ages have 
 produced one kind of artistic form rather 
 than another. The one set of sciences ex- 
 plains the impression being received by the 
 spectator ; the other set of sciences explains 
 that impression being conveyed by the artist. 
 But the geographico - historical sciences, 
 which teach us that the Greeks modelled 
 beautiful naked figures because they greatly 
 practised athletic exercises ; and that the 
 Venetians were excellent colourists because 
 they lived in sea-marsh land and traded 
 with the East ; these geographico-historic 
 sciences approach less near to the real artistic 
 problems of right and wrong than do those 
 physical sciences that teach us, that owing to
 
 APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 05 
 
 the configuration of our eye, the bosses of 
 Greek sculpture and the tints of Venetian 
 draperies are specially agreeable to us. Yet, 
 while physiology, optics, acoustics, never 
 venture upon interfering in our artistic 
 judgments ; the geographico - historical 
 sciences, which cannot even explain the 
 physical basis of our artistic impressions, 
 are for ever stepping in and telling us that 
 in a picture, a statue, or an opera, this, that, 
 or the other is right or wrong. Nay, it is 
 they, these irrelevant sciences of date and 
 place, which, while our artistic preceptions 
 are perfectly delighted, will cry out that we 
 ought to condemn some anachronism ; it 
 is they which, in the midst of our admira- 
 tion for Raphael's Parnassus, evoke that 
 whole procession of ludicrous images, and 
 burst out laughing at the Fiddling Apollo. 
 Yes ; and they have made us laugh at 
 many other things. At Mozart and Ros- 
 sini's Romans and Assyrians singing rou- 
 lades and declaiming accompanied by or-
 
 JUVENILIA. 
 
 chestral flourishes, like so many Corydons 
 and Chloes, in the Forurn or at Nineveh ; 
 they will make us laugh at half the paint- 
 ings of the Renaissance ; they may make 
 us laugh some day at Shakespeare's jumble 
 of Athenian dukes and London tradesmen 
 and fairy-land fairies. The laughing is, 
 however, the least harm they have done ; 
 for, after all, when we have laughed at 
 Raphael or Mozart or Shakespeare, we are 
 still obliged to enjoy and to admire. We are 
 not smitten blind or deaf for our sacrilege ; 
 and the great artists are avenged by our 
 ignominiously returning to the very things 
 we scorned. But our scientific habits, our 
 habits of always knowing how and when 
 and where everything happened, have made 
 us believe that it is a special mission of 
 modern art to make up for the anachron- 
 isms and anomalies of former days by be- 
 coming in a way the illustrator, with colours, 
 sounds, and words, of the reality of things 
 as we now suppose it to have been. His-
 
 APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 2C>7 
 
 torical painting, which in former days had 
 nothing whatever to do with history, and 
 calmly presented us with Romans and 
 Egyptians and Hebrews in slashed jerkins 
 and pointed shoes, has in our time become 
 historical in all good sooth ; poetry, which 
 used to put into the hearts and mouths of 
 men and women of distant countries and 
 bygone ages the passions and words of the 
 poet and his own contemporaries, now ela- 
 borates and studies and imitates sentiments 
 which we fortunately can no longer even 
 conceive, words of which the real sense has 
 happily grown obsolete to us. Nay, music, 
 which would seem the most ungeographic 
 and unhistorical of all arts, has succeeded, as 
 critics tell us, in giving us " historic opera ; " 
 and even, as an enthusiastic Frenchman de- 
 clared about the " Aida " of Verdi, in de- 
 lighting us no longer with mere empty 
 melodies and harmonies, but with the vision 
 of ancient Egypt, with its pyramids and 
 mummies, its priests and its warriors, its
 
 2O8 JUVENILIA. 
 
 desert sand and Nile mud, and all the mys- 
 teries of its mixed mysterious races. All 
 this may seem exaggeration, and indeed, 
 when such aims and pretensions are dis- 
 tinctly formulated, there are few of us in 
 whom they will not occasion a smile. Yet 
 in point of fact we are constantly acting and 
 judging according to these ideas ; painters 
 turn their studios into perfect museums, and 
 wander all over Syria and Egypt before 
 attempting some subject which to Michael 
 Angelo or Leonardo would have presented 
 nothing beyond a problem of anatomy 
 or of light and shade. Musicians collect 
 and print huge volumes of the rude chants 
 of distant peoples and times, in order that 
 composers, when on the point of writing 
 an opera, may know exactly where to look 
 for the proper local colour. And as to 
 poets have they not turned of late into 
 perfect rhymed Michelets and Froudes, 
 requiring for their proper criticism no longer 
 literary critics, but keepers of State Records?
 
 APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 209 
 
 What harm is there in all this ? you may 
 ask. Granting its uselessness, is it not a 
 mere amusing mania ? Not so ; and for 
 several reasons. First, because art must 
 suffer in its essentials as soon as it is made 
 subservient to some extra-artistic interest ; 
 because all this elaborate doing of things 
 scientific prevents the simple doing of things 
 artistic. For when a painter, well versed 
 in Oriental realities, has made of what some 
 ignoramus of Florence or Venice or Ant- 
 werp would have made into a grand display 
 of beautiful figures, faces, and draperies, a 
 something closely resembling, in its rows of 
 flopping, veil-muffled, and shawl-huddled 
 Egyptians or Syrians, a number of clothes 
 bags in process of being emptied, the art 
 of painting and the aesthetical cravings of 
 mankind are not very much the gainers 
 thereby. When a musician introduces into 
 an opera elaborate imitations of the music 
 of centuries and peoples who had no real 
 music at all, his work is not much improved
 
 2IO JUVENILIA. 
 
 thereby. Worst of all, when a poet has 
 reproduced effects, modes of thought and 
 feeling, he has not only given us things 
 with which neither he nor his reader can 
 sympathise, but he has at the same time 
 cheated us of the expression of his own and 
 our real emotions, which, in their quivering 
 reality, can force the sympathy even of men 
 to whom these emotions may have grown 
 obsolete and strange. But this is not all : 
 in thus attempting to make art the mere 
 illustrator of science, we shall in the first 
 place violate the inherent organic conditions 
 of art ; and then, as sole reward, give it, 
 in exchange for the stability and imperish- 
 ableness of artistic form, the fluctuating, 
 changing impersonality of scientific fact. 
 For, with regard to the nature of art itself, 
 we must remember, or understand, what 
 daily observation ought long since to have 
 impressed upon us, that there is as com- 
 plete an organic necessity in the sequence 
 of style upon style and form upon form as
 
 APOLLO THE FIDDLER. Ill 
 
 there is in the sequence of the seasons of 
 the year and their respective products, or 
 in the growth of the child into the youth 
 and the youth into the man ; and that thus 
 all spontaneous, really vital and valuable 
 art must always present a certain homogen- 
 eousness of form and character, a certain 
 limitation in its capacities, which prevents 
 the adoption of the forms and characters 
 of another time or another place : for art, 
 to be good, or rather when art is good 
 that is to say, when art is vital men can 
 imagine, write, paint, only the things which 
 they see and feel, men can work only in the 
 style which belongs to their race and to 
 their generation : to ask, therefore, for a 
 correct expression or imitation of feelings, 
 fancies, or forms of other races and other 
 generations, is simply to demand what no 
 art in its vital condition, in its condition of 
 really valuable function, can by any pos- 
 sibility give. And could living art thus 
 become the scientific reproducer of efforts,
 
 212 JUVENILIA. 
 
 feelings, and forms, could any art worthy 
 of the name exchange its own powers of 
 satisfying our aesthetic wants, for the power 
 of bringing home to us some scientific fact, 
 some conception of distant or long-ended 
 things ; could it do this, what would be its 
 reward ? We have spoken of the stability 
 and imperishableness of artistic form as 
 contrasted with the fluctuating, changing 
 impersonality of scientific fact : this phrase 
 may have seemed to some an impertinence, 
 to others an absurdity. Yet if we look 
 into matters, we shall have to confess the 
 truth (a bitter truth to the mere critic) that 
 no purely scientific works can ever live, 
 that no purely scientific book can ever con- 
 tinue to be read, that only artistic excellence 
 endures. 
 
 For the man of science, be he naturalist 
 or ethnologist or metaphysician, gives only 
 a certain number of new facts, or a certain 
 magnitude of new system ; his successor in- 
 herits those facts and that system increases
 
 APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 
 
 the one, enlarges the other ; so that the 
 second comer is always the richer and more 
 valuable than the first, and the third than 
 the second. The most valuable scientific 
 book is necessarily the most recent, because 
 it contains all the truth contained in its pre- 
 decessors, and more, and also less error. The 
 books of the very greatest scientific minds 
 of the past are now read only by specialists 
 studying the development of some particu- 
 lar science or idea. Harvey discovered the 
 circulation of the blood, Newton gravita- 
 tion, Smith the relations between price and 
 supply and demand. Nothing can diminish 
 their glory for having discovered those facts, 
 but those facts no longer belong exclusively 
 to them : they have been developed, cor- 
 rected by others, and can be found elsewhere 
 than in their books, and found more com- 
 plete than in them. We venerate these men, 
 but we do not read their books. If we want 
 to know about gravitation, or about supply 
 and demand, we turn, not to the "Prin-
 
 214 JUVENILIA. 
 
 cipia " or to the ff Wealth of Nations," but 
 to the most recent text-book of physics or 
 political economy by some living mediocrity. 
 The same fate awaits Helmholtz, Darwin, 
 Spencer, Huxley, and all the discoverers of 
 facts or laws. We all talk of Descartes, 
 yet how wretchedly poor does not his great 
 book appear to us ! mere truisms which we 
 knew before we were born. The same 
 applies to Vico, to Montesquieu, to all 
 those who have revolutionized thought. The 
 man who made the very first plough was 
 certainly one of the most ingenious of 
 mortals, yet who would care to use such an 
 instrument ? and who would care to employ 
 Stephenson's first railway engine, or Ark- 
 wright's first loom ? Yet their makers were 
 men of genius, while the makers of the 
 latest, most desirable improvements in 
 engines and looms may be mere craftsmen. 
 Now the case is immediately changed as 
 soon as the place of the relative elements, 
 truth and usefulness, is taken by the positive
 
 APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 215 
 
 element beauty. For a truth is assimilated 
 and grows, an invention is assimilated and 
 grows ; but a work of art, when once 
 beauty has been attained, does not grow.- 
 You may repeat and re-repeat, and alter and 
 re-alter it ; you may destroy it, but you 
 cannot develop it : its value is positive ; 
 time passes, and it is as delightful to the 
 man of the nineteenth century as it was to 
 the man of the fifth century before Christ. 
 If you would benefit by what was done 
 by Homer, by Shakespeare, by Phidias, 
 Michael Angelo, or Mozart, you must have 
 recourse to themselves. No addition can be 
 made to their works ; and it is noteworthy 
 that the only books which are permanently 
 reprinted are books of mere belles-lettres, 
 which may be four thousand years old ; the 
 only objects which are constantly being 
 copied, without attempt at alteration, are 
 not useful mechanisms, but works of art. 
 You may take a plaster cast of a statue of 
 the time of Pericles ; but who would care
 
 2l6 JUVENILIA. 
 
 to have an exact fac-simile of a revolver 
 made twenty years ago ? If scientific works 
 continue to be read, it is because the element 
 of eternity, the element of beauty, has en- 
 tered into them ; the scientific ideas may be 
 old, but the artistic forms are not. We 
 may know more of philosophy than Plato, 
 or Bacon, or Pascal, but we have not got 
 the power of writing as they did. And if 
 any modern historian or philosopher be read 
 two hundred years hence, it will be not as 
 a man of science, but as an artist. A con- 
 solation this, and a great one, for nowadays 
 much of what artistic instinct remains 
 is taking refuge in critical writing. Our 
 men of thought and research, Ruskin, 
 Michelet, Carlyle, will be known as great 
 artists to future generations, which will 
 have let the memory of many of our artists 
 die out as that of mere obsolete and mis- 
 taken men of science. 
 
 We have wandered a good way from our 
 original starting-point, and some of you
 
 APOLLO THE FIDDLER. 11J 
 
 may ask, What has all this to do with 
 Raphael's Apollo ? We started with asking 
 ourselves how it came about that a learned 
 man like Raphael, an artist above all his 
 contemporaries, studious, thoughtful, nay, 
 archaeological, should have deliberately com- 
 mitted the anachronism of placing a fiddle 
 in the hands of Apollo. We found that, 
 in so doing, Raphael had merely followed 
 the habit of his time, which considered 
 artistic representation in a manner quite 
 different from ours. And, proceeding to 
 examine our own manner of viewing art and 
 its functions, we found that, on the whole, 
 the old way, which at first seemed to us 
 so childish, illogical, and far-fetched, was 
 simpler, more natural, and more efficacious 
 than our own ; that perhaps the illogical 
 men of the Renaissance had more sense of 
 artistic logic, of the logic of keeping every- 
 thing to its right place and work, than we 
 have ; and that there is more anomaly in 
 painting ' archaeological pictures, writing 
 
 VOL. I. II
 
 2l8 JUVENILIA. 
 
 historical tragedies, and composing geogra- 
 phical operas, than there was in showing 
 Apollo among the Muses and Poets, fiddling 
 away on the summit of Parnassus.
 
 UNWIN BROTHERS, 
 
 THE GRESHAM PRESS, 
 
 CHILWORTH AND LONDON.
 
 A Irj J!i (5 '"" ''"I "'" Mill I/ill | 
 
 from ^ h was borrowed 
 
 APR 1 z Z004
 
 Unr