No More Learning

14320 (#514) ##########################################

14320
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
All things foul on earth wax fainter, by that sun's light stricken;
All ill growths are withered, where those fragrant flower-lights
burn.
All the wandering waves of seas with all their warring waters
Roll the record on forever of the sea-fight there,
When the capes were battle's lists, and all the straits were slaugh-
ter's,
And the myriad Medes as foam-flakes on the scattering air.
Ours the lightning was that cleared the north and lit the nations,
But the light that gave the whole world light of old was she:
Ours an age or twain, but hers are endless generations:
All the world is hers at heart, and most of all are we.
OF SUCH IS THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
"O"
F such is the kingdom of heaven :)
No glory that ever was shed
From the crowning star of the seven
That crown the north world's head,
No word that ever was spoken
Of huinan or godlike tongue,
Gave ever such godlike token
Since human harps were strung.
No sign that ever was given
To faithful or faithless eyes,
Showed ever beyond clouds riven
So clear a Paradise.
Earth's creeds may be seventy times seven,
And blood have defiled each creed:
If of such be the kingdom of heaven,
It must be heaven indeed.
THE SALT OF THE EARTH
I'
F CHILDHOOD were not in the world,
But only men and women grown;
No baby-locks in tendrils curled,
No baby-blossoms blown;
Though men were stronger, women fairer,
And nearer all delights in reach,


## p. 14321 (#515) ##########################################

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
14321
And verse and music uttered rarer
Tones of more godlike speech;
Though the utmost life of life's best hours
Found, as it cannot now find, words;
Though desert sands were sweet as flowers,
And flowers could sing like birds:
But children never heard them, never
They felt a child's foot leap and run,-
This were a drearier star than ever
Yet looked upon the sun.
A CHILD'S FUTURE
W"
HAT will it please you, my darling, hereafter to be ?
Fame upon land will you look for, or glory by sea ?
Gallant your life will be always, and all of it free.
Free as the wind when the heart of the twilight is stirred
Eastward, and sounds from the springs of the sunrise are
heard;
Free - and we know not another as infinite word.
Darkness or twilight or sunlight may compass us round,
Hate may arise up against us, or hope may confound;
Love may forsake us: yet may not the spirit be bound.
Free in oppression of grief as in ardor of joy,
Still may the soul be, and each to her strength as a toy;
Free in the glance of the man as the smile of the boy.
Freedom alone is the salt and the spirit that gives
Life, and without her is nothing that verily lives:
Death cannot slay her; she laughs upon death, and forgives.
Brightest and hardiest of roses anear and afar,
Glitters the blithe little face of you, round as a star;
Liberty bless you and keep you to be as you are.
England and liberty bless you and keep you to be
Worthy the name of their child and the sight of their sea:
Fear not at all; for a slave, if he fears not, is free.
XXIV-896


## p. 14322 (#516) ##########################################

14322
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
ADIEUX À MARIE STUART
I
Q
UEEN, for whose house my fathers fought,
With hopes that rose and fell,
Red star of boyhood's fiery thought,
Farewell.
They gave their lives, and I, my queen,
Have given you of my life,
Seeing your brave star burn high between
Men's strife.
The strife that lightened round their spears
Long since fell still: so long
Hardly may hope to last in years
My song.
But still through strife of time and thought
Your light on me too fell;
Queen, in whose name we sang or fought,
Farewell.
II
There beats no heart on either border
Wherethrough the north blasts blow
But keeps your memory as a warder
His beacon-fire aglow.
Long since it fired with love and wonder
Mine, for whose April age
Blithe midsummer made banquet under
The shade of Hermitage.
Soft sang the burn's blithe notes, that gather
Strength to ring true;
And air and trees and sun and heather
Remembered you.
Old border ghosts of fight or fairy
Or love or teen,
These they forgot, remembering Mary
The Queen.


## p. 14323 (#517) ##########################################

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
14323
III
Queen once of Scots, and ever of yours
Whose sires brought forth for you
Their lives to strew your way like Aowers,
Adieu.
Dead is full many a dead man's name,
Who died for you this long
Time past: shall this too fare the same,
My song ?
But surely, though it die or live,
Your face was worth
All that a man may think to give
On earth.
No darkness cast of years between
Can darken you;
Man's love will never bid my queen
Adieu.
IV
Love hangs like light about your name
As music round the shell;
No heart can take of you a tame
Farewell.
Yet, when your very face was seen,
Ill gifts were yours for giving;
Love gat strange guerdons of my queen
When living
h, diamond eart unflawed and clear,
The whole world's crowning jewel!
Was ever heart so deadly dear
So cruel ?
Yet none for you of all that bled
Grudged once one drop that fell:
Not one to life reluctant said
Farewell.


## p. 14324 (#518) ##########################################

14324
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
V
Strange love they have given you, love disloyal,
Who mock with praise your name,
To leave a head so rare and royal
Too low for praise or blame.
You could not love nor hate, they tell us;
You had nor sense nor sting:
In God's name, then, what plague befell us
To fight for such a thing?
«Some faults the gods will give,” to fetter
Man's highest intent;
But surely you were something better
Than innocent!
No maid that strays with steps unwary
Through snares unseen,
But one to live and die for: Mary,
The Queen.
VI
Forgive them all their praise, who blot
Your fame with praise of you;
Then love may say, and falter not,
Adieu.
Yet some you hardly would forgive
Who did you much less wrong
Once; but resentment should not live
Too long
They never saw your lip's bright bow,
Your sword-bright eyes, -
The bluest of heavenly things below
The skies.
Clear eyes that love's self finds most like
A sword-blade's blue,
A sword-blade's ever keen to strike -
Adieu.


## p. 14325 (#519) ##########################################

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
14325
VII
Though all things breathe or sound of fight
That yet make up your spell,
To bid you were to bid the light
Farewell.
Farewell the song says only, being
A star whose race is run;
Farewell the soul says never, seeing
The sun.
Yet, well-nigh as with flash of tears,
The song must say but so
That took your praise up twenty years
Ago.
More bright than stars or moons that vary,
Sun kindling heaven and hell,
Here, after all these years, Queen Mary,
Farewell.
LOVE AT SEA
IMITATED FROM THÉOPHILE GAUTIER
W*
E ARE in Love's hand to-day:
Where shall we go?
Love, shall we start or stay,
Or sail or row ?
There's many a wind and way,
And never a May but May;
We are in Love's hand to-day:
Where shall we go ?
Our land wind is the breath
Of sorrows kissed to death
And joys that were;
Our ballast is a rose;
Our way lies where God knows
And Love knows where.
We are in Love's hand to-day –
Our seamen are fledged Loves,
Our masts are bills of doves,
Our decks fine gold;


## p. 14326 (#520) ##########################################

14326
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
Our ropes are dead maids' hair,
Our stores are love-shafts fair
And manifold.
We are in Love's hand to-day –
Where shall we land you, sweet?
On fields of strange men's feet,
Or fields near home?
Or where the fire-flowers blow,
Or where the flowers of snow
Or flowers of foam ?
We are in Love's hand to-day —
Land me, she says, where Love
Shows but one shaft, one dove,
One heart, one hand:
A shore like that, my dear,
Lies where no man will steer,
No maiden land.
A MATCH
I
F LOVE were what the rose is,
And I were like the leaf,
Our lives would grow together
In sad or singing weather,
Blown fields or flowerful closes,
Green pleasure or gray grief:
If love were what the rose
And I were like the leaf.
If I were what the words are,
And love were like the tune,
With double sound and single,
Delight our lips would mingle
With kisses glad as birds are
That get sweet rain at noon:
If I were what the words are,
And love were like the tune.
If you were life, my darling,
And I, your love, were death,
We'd shine and snow together
Ere March made sweet the weather


## p. 14327 (#521) ##########################################

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
14327
With daffodil and starling
And hours of fruitful breath:
If you were life, my darling,
And I, your love, were death.
If you were thrall to sorrow,
And I were page to joy,
We'd play for lives and seasons
With loving looks and treasons,
And tears of night and morrow,
And laughs of maid and boy:
If you were thrall to sorrow,
And I were page to joy.
If you were April's lady,
And I were lord in May,
We'd throw with leaves for hours
And draw for days with flowers,
Till day like night were shady
And night were bright like day:
If you were April's lady,
And I were lord in May.
If you were queen of pleasure,
And I were king of pain,
We'd hunt down love together,
Pluck out his flying-feather,
And teach his feet a measure,
And find his mouth a rein:
If you were queen of pleasure,
And I were king of pain.
ÉTUDE RÉALISTE
I
,
A Might tempt, should Heaven see meet,
An angel's lips to kiss, we think,
A baby's feet.
Like rose-hued sea-flowers toward the heat
They stretch and spread and wink
Their ten soft buds that part and meet.


## p. 14328 (#522) ##########################################

14328
ALGERYON CHARLES SWINBURNE
No flower-bells that expand and shrink
Gleam half so heavenly sweet
As shine on life's untrodden brink
A baby's feet.
II
A baby's hands, like rosebuds furled,
Whence yet no leaf expands,
Ope if you touch, though close upcurled,
A baby's hands.
Then, even as warriors grip their brands
When battle's bolt is hurled,
They close, clenched hard like tightening bands.
No rosebuds yet by dawn impearled
Match, even in loveliest lands,
The sweetest flowers in all the world-
A baby's hands.
INI
A baby's eyes, ere speech begin,
Ere lips learn words or sighs,
Bless all things bright enough to win
A baby's eyes.
Love, while the sweet thing laughs and lies,
And sleep flows out and in,
Lies perfect in their paradise.
Their glance might cast out pain and sin,
Their speech make dumb the wise;
By mute glad godhead felt within
A baby's eyes.


## p. 14329 (#523) ##########################################

14329
CARMEN SYLVA
(ELIZABETH, QUEEN OF ROUMANIA)
(1843-)
ARMEN Sylva, the charming pen-name of the poet-queen of
Roumania, is a reminiscence of the forests of Neuwied on
the Rhine, where she was born December 29th, 1843. She
belongs to an intellectual family: her great-uncle was a scientist,
whose collection of specimens of natural history is now in New
York; and her father, Prince Herman of Wied, was a man of culture,
devoted to philosophic studies. The young princess grew up in an
atmosphere well fitted to develop her natural gifts. Her temperament
was passionate, restless, and reserved; and
her imagination so active that her mother
forbade the reading of novels until she
was nineteen. She began to write verses
in her childhood; and from her sixteenth
year kept a sort of poetic diary, whose
existence however was for many years a
secret. Her early life was saddened by the
constant illness of her father and young
brother; and on the whole, sorrow is the
prevailing note in her poems.
After several years spent in travel, she
had determined to devote herself to teach-
ing, when she was married in 1869 to CARMEN SYLVA
Charles of Hohenzollern, Prince of Rouma-
nia. Elizabeth entered on her new sphere with enthusiasm; thor-
oughly acquiring the Roumanian language, and so winning the love
of her people that she is known among them as their "little mother. ”
She founded schools, asylums, hospitals, art galleries, and art schools;
and in every way strove to develop Roumanian nationality.
The death of her little daughter in 1874 led her to express her sor-
row in verse. Up to this time her poems had been simply sponta-
neous utterances; but now she began to study the art of composition
under the guidance of Alexandre, the Roumanian poet. Her poetic
labors were soon interrupted by the Turko-Russian war, during which
she devoted herself to work among the soldiers, and in the hospitals.



## p. 14330 (#524) ##########################################

14330
CARMEN SYLVA
Roumania became a kingdom in 1881. Shortly before her coronation,
Elizabeth published her first book,-a translation of Roumanian po-
ems. Her first collection of original poems appeared in 1881, entitled
'Storms. ' It contains four poems, the best of which is “Sappho. '
The following year she published Sorrow's Earthly Pilgrimage); “The
Enchantress'; Jehovah,' describing the wanderings of Ahasuerus in
search of God; “A Prayer); and (Pensées d'une Reine' (A Queen's
Thoughts),- a book of aphorisms, which won a medal of honor from
the French Acadeiny. In 1883 appeared From Carmen Sylva's
Kingdom,' — a collection of Roumanian fairy tales and legends, a sec-
ond series of which was brought out in 1887, together with «Through
the Centuries. ' Another collection, “Fairy Tales from the Pelesch,'
takes its title from the stream near the beautiful royal palace in the
Sinaja valley. To this year also belong My Rest,' a collection of
songs and lyrics, in which the Queen is at her best; and (My Rhine,'
poems on places dear to her in childhood. (My Book' – poems on
Egypt — appeared in 1885. The Songs of Toil' were published col-
lectively in 1891; but an English version of thirty songs was brought
out in New York in 1888. Most of these had previously appeared
in the Independent; and through them the Queen was first known to
the American public. These original little poems show her intense
sympathy for the poor, and at the same time illustrate her genius.
Her greatest poetical effort, the tragedy (Master Manole,' appeared
in 1892. In collaboration with Madame Kremnitz, under the com-
mon pseudonym of Idem and Ditto, she wrote the novels From
Two Worlds) (1885), Astra' (1886), «The Outpost' (1887), and Idle
Wanderings? (1887). With the help of Mademoiselle Vacaresco, the
Queen collected Roumanian legends and tales, which were published
under the title “Tales of the Dimbovitza) in 1890.
Carmen Sylva's German is pure and beautiful, and owing to her
remarkable linguistic skill, extraordinarily flexible. Her poems are
full of fire and grace, and show a true musical sense.
however, has the defect of extreme brevity; and her work generally
is impaired by her great facility and rapidity of composition.
The biographies of Queen Elizabeth are Mita Kremnitz's Carmen
Sylva' (1882); 'The Life of Carmen Sylva,' by Baroness Stackelberg
(fifth edition, 1889); M. Schmitz's Carmen Sylva' (1889); Stackelberg's
Life of Carmen Sylva,' translated by Baroness Deichmann (1890);
and Elizabeth of Roumania: A Study,' by Blanche Roosevelt (1891).
Her prose,


## p. 14331 (#525) ##########################################

CARMEN SYLVA
14331
FODDER-TIME
From (Songs of Toil': translated by John Eliot Bowen. The five following
selections from «Songs of Toil) are reprinted by permission of the Fred-
erick A. Stokes Company.
ow sweet the manger smells! The cows all listen
With outstretched necks, and with impatient lowing;
They greet the clover, their content now showing —
And how they lick their noses till they glisten!
HY
Н
The velvet-coated beauties do not languish
Beneath the morning's golden light that's breaking,
The unexhausted spring of life awaking,
Their golden eyes of velvet full of anguish.
They patiently endure their pains. Bestowing
Their sympathy, the other cows are ruing
Their unproductive udders, and renewing
At milking-time their labor and their lowing.
And now I must deceive the darling bossy,–
With hand in milk must make it suck my finger.
Its tender lips cling close like joys that linger,
And feel so warm with dripping white and flossy.
This very hand my people with devotion
Do kiss, - which paints and plays and writes, moreover,
I would it had done naught but pile the clover
To feed the kine that know no base emotion!
THE SOWER
ENEATH the mild sun vanish the vapor's last wet traces,
And for the autumn sowing the mellow soil lies steeping;
The stubble fires have faded, and ended is the reaping;
The piercing plow has leveled the rough resisting places.
B
The solitary sower along the brown field paces, —
Two steps and then a handful, a rhythmic motion keeping;
The eager sparrows follow, now pecking and now peeping.
He sows; but all the increase accomplished by God's grace is.


## p. 14332 (#526) ##########################################

14332
CARMEN SYLVA
And whether frost be fatal or drought be devastating,
The blades rise green and slender for springtime winds to
flutter,
As time of golden harvest the coming fall awaiting.
None see the silent yearnings the sower's lips half utter,
The carking care he suffers, distressing thoughts creating.
With steady hand he paces afield without a mutter.
a
THE BOATMAN'S SONG
D
OWN-STREAM 'tis all by moonlight,
Up-stream at blazing noon;
Down-stream upon the ripples,
Up-stream through sandy dune.
Down-stream, the helm held loosely,
A pipe between the lips;
Up-stream, like beast one straineth
And galls the breast and hips.
What boots it that I seem like
The river's king to-day,
If to-morrow like a beggar,
Despised, I tug away?
My pleasuring leaves no furrow
Upon the water-plain;
The marks of struggling footsteps
Long in the sand remain.
THE COUNTRY LETTER-CARRIER
T THAWS. On field and roadway the packing drifts have faded;
The service-berry drips, and the slush is deep and stale;
The clouds hang low and leaden; the evening glow is pale:
The paths gleam like a brooklet, whose bed is all unshaded.
Along the highway trudges a messenger; unaided,
He limps and halts and shivers; his bag holds little mail. -
A single wretched letter all crumpled, old, and frail —
He must push on; the village he nears now, lame and jaded.
He knocks. A timid woman admits him: “Till now, never
Had I a letter! Heavens! My boy! Quick, give it here!


## p. 14333 (#527) ##########################################

CARMEN SYLVA
14333
He's coming! Now we're happy! Her aged muscles quiver:
“God sent you here. Be seated and warm yourself; come near:
A share of my possessions are yours to keep forever. ”
The postman limps no longer, warmed by the woman's cheer.
THE STONE-CUTTER
W*
E HAMMER, hammer, hammer on and on,
Day out, day in, throughout the year,
In blazing heat and tempests drear;
God's house we slowly heavenward rear
We'll never see it done!
We hammer, hammer, hammer, might and main.
The sun torments, the rain-drops prick,
Our eyes grow blind with dust so thick;
Our name in dust, too, fadeth quick-
No glory and no gain!
We hammer, hammer, hammer ever on.
O blessed God on Heaven's throne,
Dost thou take a care of every stone
And leave the toiling poor alone,
Whom no one looks upon ?
THE POST
S"
WIFT, swift as the wind drives the great Russian Czar,
But we of Roumania are swifter by far:
Eight horses we harness for every-day speed,
But I've driven a team of a dozen at need.
Then over the bridges we hurry along,
Through village and hamlet, with shouting and song,
With a hip-hip-hurrah! swiftly onwards we go!
The birds fly above and our horses below.
When the sun burns at noon and the dust whirls on high,
Like the leaves of the forest grown withered and dry,
We hasten along, never slacking the rein.
The wild mountain riders come down to the plain :
Their hair and their cloaks flutter free in the wind;
The sheep and the buffaloes gallop behind;


## p. 14334 (#528) ##########################################

14334
CARMEN SYLVA
And hip-hip hurrah! boys, with horse and with man,
Like the tempest we pass — let him follow who can.
When winter is here, and the storm spirit's abroad,
Swift glideth the sledge o'er the snow-covered road;
Great drifts hide the inn and the sign-post from sight, -
'Tis an ocean of snow lying waveless and white;
The wolves' and the ravens' wild greetings we hear,
As we pass the ravine, and the precipice drear,
With a hip-hip-hurrah! From the road though we stray
No matter,- the horses will find out the way.
The rain falls in torrents; the stream, grown a flood,
Has shattered the bridge on our passage that stood.
The waters have risen — are rising yet more
'Tis foolhardy daring to swim to the shore.
Ten pieces of gold, and I'll venture my neck:
The carriage is floating – the box-seat's the deck;
But hip-hip-hurrah! boys, so loud are our cheers
That the water flows back, for our shouting it fears.
A jest to the lad and a kiss to the lass,
We throw, while they linger, to watch as we pass;
His laugh still resounds, and her cheek is still red,
When already our bells jingle far on ahead.
Right well does our team know their silvery chime,
And we scarce slacken speed as the mountain we climb.
Then hip-hip-hurrah! boys, - nay! slowly, beware,
For steep's the descent: we must make it with care.
At midnight, the streets of the town to the tread
Of our horses resound: all the sky's glowing red;
For crowds gather round us with torches of light,
And pine-boughs all blazing, to stare at the sight.
A crack of the whip, and a cheer and a song,
Through a circle of fire we clatter along;
And hip-hip-hurrah! through the glow and the glare,
Through flowers and folk, e'er a halt we declare.
Even if I were dead, I could never lie still:
I should hasten afield over valley and hill.
I'd take the light reins and the whip in my hand,
And scarce in the saddle I'd fly through the land.


## p. 14335 (#529) ##########################################

CARMEN SYLVA
14335
No dull, droning chant and procession for me, –
I'd turn in my coffin such doings to see;
And hip-hip-hurrah! from the bier and its gloom
I'd leap to the saddle and drive to my tomb.
DIMBOVITZA
D"
IMBOVITZA! Magic river,
Silver-shining, memory-haunted;
He who drinks thy crystal waters
Ne'er can quit thy shores enchanted.
Dimbovitza! all too deeply
Drank I of thy flowing river;
For my love, my inmost being,
There meseems have sunk forever.
Dimbovitza! Dimbovitza!
All my soul hast thou in keeping,
Since beneath thy banks of verdure
Lies my dearest treasure sleeping.
LONGING
1
LONG to feel thy little arm's embrace,
Thy little silver-sounding voice to hear;
I long for thy warm kisses on my face,
And for thy birdlike carol, blithe and clear.
I long for every childish, loving word;
And for thy little footsteps, fairy light,
That hither, thither moved, and ever stirred
My heart with them to gladness infinite.
And for thy hair I long — that halo blest
Hanging in golden glory round thy brow.
My child, can aught such longing lull to rest ?
Nay, heaven's bliss alone can end it now.


## p. 14336 (#530) ##########################################

14336
CARMEN SYLVA
CARMEN
AT
ND all which I here have been singing,
It is your very own!
From your deep heart its music bringing
To sad chords of your sorrows ringing,
Winning for you the crown.
Yours were the thoughts forever ranging,
You made the folk-tales true.
In this earth-day of chance and changing,
Of lives unfolding, deaths estranging,
Look, Soul! there too are you.
Perchance, when Death shall bring sad leisure,
And these pale lips are dumb,
Then you my words may better measure,
And in my true love take new pleasure;
Then will my meaning come!


## p.
14337 (#531) ##########################################

14337
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
(1840–1893)
Oo. . .
HE restraining and fructifying power of culture receives an
adequate illustration in the writings of John Addington Sy-
Selo monds. There are few critics of this century who approach
him in catholicity of artistic taste, and sensitiveness to the claims
of humanity above all other claims. He is a humanist in the true
sense of the word; preferring the study of man to the study of man's
works, or rather seeking always for the human element in a monu-
ment of art. He is also an exponent of the highest culture, of that
self-effectuation which is the fruit of knowl-
edge married to sympathy. In him, as in
Walter Pater, liberal education has carried
talent almost to the domain of creative
genius — almost but not quite: he remains
a critic, whose criticism is always illumi-
nation. He describes his own development
in his essay on Culture,' when he defines
culture as —

»
«the raising of intellectual faculties to their highest
potency by means of conscious training;
it is a psychical state, so to speak, which may
be acquired by sympathetic and assimilative J. A. SYMONDS
study. It makes a man to be something: it does
not teach him to create anything. It has no power to stand in the place of
nature, and to endow a human being with new faculties. It prepares him
to exert his innate faculties in a chosen line of work with a certain spirit of
freedom, with a certain breadth of understanding. ”
Mr. Symonds's life was singularly uneventful, being devoted en-
tirely to the quiet industries of scholarship. He inherited not a little
of his literary taste from his father of the same name, who was a
practicing physician at Bristol and afterwards at Clifton; and whose
(Miscellanies,' selected and edited by his son, were published in 1871.
That son was born in Bristol, October 5th, 1840. In 1860 he was
graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, winning the Newdigate prize.
On account of ill health he lived for many years at Davos-Platz in
Switzerland. He died at Rome, April 19th, 1893.
XXIV—897


## p. 14338 (#532) ##########################################

14338
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
(
The thirty-three years between the taking of his degree and his
death were occupied chiefly with study, and with the production of
works of criticism. Many of these deal with Italian men of genius;
with the period of the Renaissance, and with those personages in
whom the Renaissance spirit found most significant embodiment. An
Introduction to the Study of Dante,' published in 1872, was one of
the first fruits of Mr. Symonds's scholarship. His poetical tempera-
ment, his sensitiveness to beauty, above all, his intense interest in
human development, fitted him peculiarly to understand the temper
of Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. He entered with
full sympathy into that highly colored, highly vitalized world, which
was the product of the marriage of medieval Faust with Helen, of
the romance of Italy with the classicism of Greece.
His Renaissance in Italy) is a historical record of the development
of this world, interspersed with subtle and penetrative criticism. This
monumental book is in five parts. The first, The Age of the Des-
pots,' was published in 1875; the second, “The Revival of Learning,'
in 1877; then followed 'The Fine Arts,' Italian Literature, and
lastly in 1886, “The Catholic Reaction. The comprehensiveness of this
work is scarcely less remarkable than its conscientious scholarship,
and its subtle insight into one of the most complex periods in mod-
ern history. He portrays a great age, as it can only be portrayed,
through the medium of personality. He sees the individualism of
the Renaissance expressed in Dante, in Petrarch, and in Boccaccio;
he sees its strength in Michael Angelo, and its sweetness in Raphael.
His Life of Michael Angelo' is written in this spirit of sympathetic
criticism, so that it is less a historical record than a portrait of a
His knowledge of Renaissance conditions enabled him also to
breathe with freedom the glowing air of the England which brought
forth the phenix brood of the dramatists. His Studies of Shake-
speare's Predecessors in the English Drama' are luminous with appre-
ciation, as are also his Life of Sidney' and his “Life of Ben Jonson. '
The chivalry of renascent England is embodied in the one, its hu-
manism in the other. To Mr. Symonds the man is the age.
As was natural with a student of the Renaissance, Mr. Symonds
was also a student of Greek life and thought. His Studies of the
Greek Poets' is a unique work; because it approaches the genius of
Greece, as embodied in her singers, on the side of personality. It is
a book requiring little scholarship in the reader, and it is therefore
popular in the widest sense. It tells of the Greek poets as of men
whose individuality gave color to their age. The reader is brought
into contact with them rather than with remote historical conditions.
Over the whole record lies the beautiful light of a fine and pene-
trative sympathy. The author loses readily his nineteenth-century
man,


## p. 14339 (#533) ##########################################

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
14339
temper of the desire of the impossible, and enters with full harmony
into the mellow objective world of Greece, into its reasonableness and
its temperance. His style attains its greatest perfection in this book.
It is warm and pulsating with his sympathies.
The poetical and appreciative side of Mr. Symonds's nature was
not developed, however, at the expense of the purely intellectual and
scientific. His culture was broad enough to make of him a complete
critic, living his artistic life in the Whole as well as in the Good and
in the Beautiful. Yet he maintains that the scientific spirit, the out-
growth of the rediscovery of the world, must be subordinate to the
humanistic spirit, the outgrowth of the rediscovery of man. This
is so because man is greater than the universe in which he lives.
In his “Essays, Speculative and Suggestive,' he has embodied much
of his critical thought concerning the scientific tendencies of the cen-
tury.
He is also a subtle critic of his contemporaries. His life of Shel-
ley reveals this; as does also a chapter on Zola's La Bête Humaine,'
in which he maintains that Zola is an idealist.
« The idealism which I have been insisting on, which justifies us in calling
(La Bête Humaine) a poem, has to be sought in the method whereby these
separate parcels of the plot are woven together; and also in the dominating
conception contained in the title, which gives unity to the whole work. We
are not in the real region of reality, but in the region of the constructive imagi-
nation, from the first to the last line of the novel. If that be not the essence
of idealism, - this working of the artist's brain, not in but on the subject-
matter of the external world and human nature,- I do not know what mean-
ing to give to the term. )
>
Besides the works already referred to, Mr. Symonds published A
Study of Boccaccio,' 'A Study of Walt Whitman,' (Studies in Italy
and Greece, a volume of poems entitled Many Moods,' another
entitled New and Old, a translation of the autobiography of Ben-
venuto Cellini, a volume of essays with the title 'In the Key of
Blue,' a translation of the sonnets of Michael Angelo, (Sketches
and Studies in Italy,' Wine, Women, and Song: Mediæval Songs
in English Verse,' and a volume of sonnets entitled Vagabundi
Libellus. '


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14340
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
ITALIAN ART IN ITS RELATION TO RELIGION
From (The Renaissance in Italy)
T.
HE mediæval faiths were still vivid when the first Italian
painters began their work; and the sincere endeavor of
these men was to set forth in beautiful and worthy form
the truths of Christianity. The eyes of the worshiper should no
longer have a mere stock or stone to contemplate: his imagina-
tion should be helped by the dogmatic presentation of the scenes
of sacred history, and his devotion be quickened by lively images
of the passion of our Lord. Spirit should converse with spirit,
through no veil of symbol, but through the transparent medium
of art, itself instinct with inbreathed life and radiant with ideal
beauty. The body and the soul, moreover, should be reconciled;
and God's likeness should be once more acknowledged in the feat-
ures and the limbs of man. Such was the promise of art; and
this promise was in a great measure fulfilled by the painting of
the fourteenth century. Men ceased to worship their God in the
holiness of ugliness; and a great city called its street Glad on
the birthday festival of the first picture investing religious emo-
tion with æsthetic charm. But in making good the promise
they had given, it was needful for the arts on the one hand to
enter a region not wholly their own the region of abstractions
and of mystical conceptions; and on the other to create a world
of sensuous delightfulness, wherein the spiritual element was ma-
terialized to the injury of its own essential quality. Spirit indeed
spake to spirit, so far as the religious content was concerned;
but flesh spake also to flesh in the æsthetic form. The incarna-
tion promised by the arts involved a corresponding sensuousness.
Heaven was brought down to earth, but at the cost of making
men believe that earth itself was heavenly.
At this point the subject of our inquiry naturally divides into
two main questions. The first concerns the form of figurative
art specially adapted to the requirements of religious thought in
the fourteenth century. The second treats of the effects result-
ing both to art and religion from the expression of mystical and
theological conceptions in plastic form.
When we consider the nature of the ideas assimilated in the
Middle Ages by the human mind, it is clear that art, in order
to set them forth, demanded a language the Greeks had never


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JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
14341
greatly needed, and had therefore never fully learned. To over-
estimate the difference from an asthetic point of view between
the religious notions of the Greeks and those which Christianity
had made essential, would be difficult. Faith, hope, and charity;
humility, endurance, suffering; the Resurrection and the Judg-
ment; the Fall and the Redemption; heaven and hell; the height
and depth of man's mixed nature; the drama of human destiny
before the throne of God; — into the sphere of thoughts like
these, vivid and solemn, transcending the region of sense and cor-
poreity, carrying the mind away to an ideal world, where the
things of this earth obtained a new reality by virtue of their
relation to an invisible and infinite beyond, — the modern arts in
their infancy were thrust. There was nothing finite here or tan-
gible, no gladness in the beauty of girlish foreheads or the
swiftness of a young man's limbs, no simple idealization of nat-
ural delightfulness. The human body, which the figurative arts
must needs use as the vehicle of their expression, had ceased
to have a value in and for itself, had ceased to be the true and
adequate investiture of thoughts demanded from the artist. At
best it could be taken only as the symbol of some inner mean-
ing, the shrine of an indwelling spirit nobler than itself; just as
a lamp of alabaster owes its beauty and its worth to the flame it
more than half conceals, the light transmitted through its scarce
transparent walls.
In ancient art those moral and spiritual qualities which the
Greeks recognized as truly human, and therefore divine, allowed
themselves to be incarnated in well-selected types of physical
perfection. The deities of the Greek mythology were limited to
the conditions of natural existence; they were men and women
of a larger mold and freer personality: less complex, inasmuch
as each completed some one attribute; less thwarted in activity,
inasmuch as no limit was assigned to exercise of power. The
passions and the faculties of man, analyzed by unconscious psy-
chology and deified by religious fancy, were invested by sculp-
ture with appropriate forms, — the tact of the artist selecting
corporeal qualities fitted to impersonate the special character of
each divinity. Nor was it possible that, the gods and goddesses
being what they were, exact analogues should not be found for
them in idealized humanity. In a Greek statue there was enough
soul to characterize the beauty of the body; to render her due
meed of wisdom to Pallas, to distinguish the swiftness of Hermes


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14342
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
from the strength of Heracles, or to contrast the virginal grace
of Artemis with the abundance of Aphrodite's charms. At the
same time, the spirituality that gave its character to each Greek
deity was not such that, even in thought, it could be dissociated
from corporeal form. The Greeks thought of their gods as
incarnate persons; and all the artist had to see to, was that this
incarnate personality should be impressive in his marble.
Christianity, on the other hand, made the moral and spiritual
nature of man all-essential. It sprang from an earlier religion,
that judged it impious to give any form to God. The body and
its terrestrial activity occupied but a subordinate position in its
system. It was the life of the soul, separable from this frame of
flesh, and destined to endure when earth and all this it contains
has ended,-a life that was continued conflict and aspiring strug-
gle,— which the arts, in so far as they became its instrument,
were called upon to illustrate. It was the worship of a deity,
all spirit, to be sought on no one sacred hill, to be adored in no
transcendent shape, that they were bound to heighten. The most
highly prized among the Christian virtues had no necessary con-
nection with beauty of feature or strength of limb. Such beauty
and such strength at any rate were accidental, not essential. A
Greek faun could not but be graceful; a Greek hero was of
necessity vigorous. But St. Stephen might be steadfast to the
death without physical charm; St. Anthony might put to flight
the devils of the flesh without muscular force. It is clear that
the radiant physical perfection proper to the deities of Greek
sculpture was not sufficient in this sphere. Again, the most stir-
ring episodes of the Christian mythology involved pain and per-
turbation of the spirit; the victories of the Christian athletes
were won in conflicts carried on within their hearts and souls:
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against princi-
palities and powers," demoniac leaders of spiritual legions. It is
therefore no less clear that the tranquillity and serenity of the
Hellenic ideal, so necessary to consummate sculpture, was here
out of place. How could the Last Judgment — that day of wrath
when every soul, however insignificant on earth, will play the
first part for one moment in an awful tragedy — be properly
expressed in plastic form, harmonious and pleasing? And sup-
posing that the artist should abandon the attempt to exclude ugli-
ness and discord, pain and confusion, from his representation of
the Dies Ire, how could he succeed in setting forth by the sole


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JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
14343
medium of the human body the anxiety and anguish of the soul
at such a time? The physical form, instead of being adequate
to the ideas expressed, and therefore helpful to the artist, is a
positive embarrassment, a source of weakness.
The most power-
ful pictorial or sculpturesque delineation of the Judgment, when
compared with the pangs inflicted on the spirit by a guilty con-
science,– pangs whereof words may render some account, but
which can find no analogue in writhings of the limbs or face, -
must of necessity be found a failure. Still more impossible, if
we pursue this train of thought into another region, is it for the
figurative arts to approach the Christian conception of God in his
omnipotence and unity. Christ himself, the central figure of the
Christian universe, the desired of all nations, in whom the Deity
assumed a human form and dwelt with men, is no fit subject
for such art at any rate as the Greeks had perfected. The fact
of his incarnation brought him indeed within the proper sphere
of the fine arts; but the chief events of his life on earth removed
him beyond the reach of sculpture. This is an important con-
sideration. It is to this that our whole argument is tending.
Therefore to enlarge upon this point will not be useless.
Christ is especially adored in his last act of love on Calvary;
and how impossible it is to set that forth consistently with the
requirements of strictly plastic art, may be gathered by comparing
the passion of St. Bernard's Hymn to our Lord upon the Cross
with all that Winckelmann and Hegel have so truly said about
the restrained expression, dignified generality, and harmonious
beauty essential to sculpture. It is the negation of tranquillity,
the excess of feeling, the absence of comeliness, the contrast
between visible weakness and invisible omnipotence, the physical
humiliation voluntarily suffered by him that ruled over all the
angels, that walked on the pavements of heaven, whose feet were
clothed with stars," – it is all this that gives their force and
pathos to these stanzas:
Omnis vigor atque viror
Hinc recessit; non admiror:
Mors apparet in inspectu,
Totus pendens in defectu,
Attritus ægrâ macie.
Sic affectus, sic despectus,
Propter me sic interfectus,


## p. 14344 (#538) ##########################################

14344
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
Peccatori tam indigno
Cum amoris in te signo
Appare clarâ facie. *
We have never heard that Pheidias or Praxiteles chose Prome-
theus upon Caucasus for the supreme display of his artistic skill;
and even the anguish expressed in the group of the Laocoon'
is justly thought to violate the laws of antique sculpture. Yet
here was a greater than Prometheus, - one who had suffered
more, and on whose suffering the salvation of the human race
depended,- to exclude whom from the sphere of representation
in art was the same as confessing the utter impotence of art
to grasp the vital thought of modern faith. It is clear that the
Muses of the new age had to haunt Calvary instead of Helicon;
slaking their thirst at no Castalian spring, but at the fount of
tears outpoured by all creation for a stricken God. What Hellas
had achieved, supplied no norm or method for the arts in this
new service.
From what has hitherto been advanced, we may assert with
confidence that if the arts were to play an important part in
Christian culture, an art was imperatively demanded that should
be at home in the sphere of intense feeling; that should treat
the body as the interpreter and symbol of the soul, and should
not shrink from pain and passion. How far the fine arts were at
all qualified to express the essential thoughts of Christianity,-
a doubt suggested in the foregoing paragraphs,- and how far,
through their proved inadequacy to perform this task completely,
they weakened the hold of mediæval faiths upon the modern
mind, are questions to be raised hereafter. For the present it is
enough to affirm that least of all the arts could sculpture, with
its essential repose and its dependence on corporal conditions,
solve the problem. Sculpture had suited the requirements of
* All thy strength and bloom are faded:
Wh nath us thy state degraded ?
Death upon thy form is written;
See the wan worn limbs, the smitten
Breast upon the cruel tree!
Thus despised and desecrated,
Thus in dying desolated,
Slain for me, of sinners vilest,
Loving Lord, on me thou smilest:
Shine, bright face, and strengthen me!


## p. 14345 (#539) ##########################################

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
14345
Greek thought. It belonged by right to men who not unwill.
ingly accepted the life of this world as final, and who worshiped
in their deities the incarnate personality of man made perfect.
But it could not express the cycle of Christian ideas. The desire
of a better world, the fear of a worse; the sense of sin referred
to physical appetites, and the corresponding mortification of the
flesh; hope, ecstasy, and penitence and prayer,-imply contempt
or hatred for the body, suggest notions too spiritual to be con-
veyed by the rounded contours of beautiful limbs, too full of
struggle for statuesque tranquillity. The new element needed
a more elastic medium of expression. Motives more varied,
gradations of sentiment more delicate, the fugitive and transient
phases of emotion, the inner depths of consciousness, had some-
how to be seized. It was here that painting asserted its suprem-
асу.
Painting is many degrees further removed than sculpture from
dependence on the body in the fullness of its physical propor-
tions. It touches our sensibilities by suggestions more indirect,
more mobile, and more multiform. Color and shadow, aerial
perspective and complicated grouping, - denied to sculpture, but
within the proper realm of painting, - have their own signifi-
cance, their real relation to feelings vaguer but not less potent.
than those which find expression in the simple human form. To
painting, again, belongs the play of feature, indicative of internal
movement, through a whole gamut of modulations inapprehensi-
ble by sculpture. All that drapery by its partial concealment of
the form it clothes, and landscape by its sympathies with human
sentiment, may supply to enhance the passion of the spectator,
pertains to painting. This art, therefore, owing to the greater
variety of means at its disposal and its greater adequacy to ex-
press emotion, became the paramount Italian art.
To sculpture in the Renaissance, shorn of the divine right to
create gods and heroes, was left the narrower field of decoration,
portraiture, and sepulchral monuments. In the last of these de.
partments it found the noblest scope for its activity; for beyond
the grave, according to Christian belief, the account of the striv-
ing, hoping, and resisting soul is settled. The corpse upon the
bier may bear the stamp of spiritual character impressed on it in
life; but the spirit, with its struggle and its passion, has escaped
as from a prison-house, and flown elsewhither. The body of
the dead man — for whom this world is over, and who sleeps in


## p. 14346 (#540) ##########################################

14346
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
9
peace awaiting resurrection, and thereby not wholly dead, around
whose tomb watch sympathizing angels or contemplative genii -
was therefore the proper subject for the highest Christian sculp-
ture. Here if anywhere the right emotion could be adequately
expressed in stone; and the molded form be made the symbol
of repose, expectant of restored activity. The greatest sculptor
of the modern age was essentially a poet of Death.
Painting, then, for the reasons already assigned and insisted
on, was the art demanded by the modern intellect upon its
emergence from the stillness of the Middle Ages. The problem,
however, even for the art of painting, was not simple. The
painters, following the masters of mosaic, began by setting forth
the history, mythology, and legends of the Christian Church, in
imagery freer and more beautiful than lay within the scope of
treatment by Romanesque or Byzantine art. So far their task
was comparatively easy; for the idyllic grace of maternal love
in the Madonna, the pathetic incidents of martyrdom, the cour.
age of confessors, the ecstasies of celestial joy in redeemed souls,
the loveliness of a pure life in modest virgins, and the dramatic
episodes of sacred story, furnish a multitude of motives admira-
bly pictorial. There was therefore no great obstacle upon the
threshold, so long as artists gave their willing service to the
Church. Yet, looking back upon this phase of painting, we are able
to perceive that already the adaptation of art to Christian dogma
entailed concessions on both sides. Much, on the one hand, had
to be omitted from the programme offered to artistic treatment,
for the reason that the fine arts could not deal with it at all.
Much, on the other hand, had to be expressed by means which
painting in a state of perfect freedom would repudiate. Allegori-
cal symbols, like Prudence with two faces, and painful episodes
of agony and anguish, marred her work of beauty. There was
consequently a double compromise, involving a double sacrifice of
something precious. The faith suffered by having its mysteries
brought into the light of day, incarnated in form, and humanized.
Art suffered by being forced to render intellectual abstractions to
the eye through figured symbols.
As technical skill increased, and as beauty, the proper end of
art, became more rightly understood, the painters found that their
craft was worthy of being made an end in itself, and that the
actualities of life observed around them had claims upon their
genius no less weighty than dogmatic mysteries. The subjects


## p. 14347 (#541) ##########################################

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
14347
they had striven at first to realize with all simplicity, now
became the vehicles for the display of sensuous beauty, science,
and mundane pageantry. The human body received separate and
independent study as a thing in itself incomparably beautiful,
commanding more powerful emotions by its magic than aught
else that sways the soul. At the same time the external world,
with all its wealth of animal and vegetable life, together with the
works of human ingenuity in costly clothing and superb build-
ings, was seen to be in every detail worthy of most patient imi-
tation. Anatomy and perspective taxed the understanding of the
artist, whose whole force was no longer devoted to the task of
bringing religious ideas within the limits of the representable.
Next, when the classical revival came into play, the arts, in obe-
dience to the spirit of the age, left the sphere of sacred sub-
jects, and employed their full-grown faculties in the domain of
myths and pagan fancies. In this way painting may truly be
said to have opened the new era of culture, and to have first man-
ifested the freedom of the modern mind. When Luca Signorelli
drew naked young men for a background to his picture of the
Madonna and the infant Christ, he created for the student a sym-
bol of the attitude assumed by fine art in its liberty of outlook
over the whole range of human interests. Standing before this
picture in the Uffizzi, we feel that the Church, while hoping to
adorn her cherished dogmas with æsthetic beauty, had encour-
aged a power antagonistic to her own; a power that liberated the
spirit she sought to enthrall, restoring to mankind the earthly par-
adise from which monasticism had expelled it.
Not to diverge at this point, and to entertain the difficult
problem of the relation of the fine arts to Christianity, would be
to shrink from the most thorny question offered to the under-
standing by the history of the Renaissance. On the very thresh-
old of the matter, I am bound to affirm my conviction that the
spiritual purists of all ages - the Jews, the Iconoclasts of Byzan-
tium, Savonarola, and our Puritan ancestors - were justified in
their mistrust of plastic art. The spirit of Christianity and the
spirit of figurative art are opposed, not because such art is im-
moral, but because it cannot free itself from sensuous associa-
tions. It is always bringing us back to the dear life of earth,
from which the faith would sever us. It is always reminding us
of the body which piety bids us to forget.
Painters and sculp-
tors glorify that which saints and ascetics have mortified. The
-


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14348
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
masterpieces of Titian and Correggio, for example, lead the soul
away from compunction, away from penitence, away from wor-
ship even, to dwell on the delight of youthful faces, blooming
color, graceful movement, delicate emotion. Nor is this all: reli-
gious motives may be misused for what is worse than merely
sensuous suggestiveness. The masterpieces of the Bolognese and
Neapolitan painters, while they pretend to quicken compassion
for martyrs in their agony, pander to a bestial blood-lust lurking
in the darkest chambers of the soul. Therefore it is that piety,
whether the piety of monastic Italy or of Puritan England, turns
from these æsthetic triumphs as from something alien to itself.
When the worshiper would fain ascend on wings of ecstasy to
God the infinite, ineffable, unrealized, how can he endure the con-
tact of those splendid forms, in which the lust of the eye and
the pride of life, professing to subserve devotion, remind him
rudely of the goodliness of sensual existence ? Art, by magnify-
ing human beauty, contradicts these Pauline maxims: "For me to
live is Christ, and to die is gain;” “Set your affections on things
above, not on things on the earth;” “Your life is hid with Christ
in God. ” The sublimity and elevation it gives to carnal loveliness
are themselves hostile to the spirit that holds no truce or com-
promise with the flesh. As displayed in its most perfect phases,
in Greek sculpture and Venetian painting, art dignifies the actual
mundane life of man; but Christ, in the language of uncom-
promising piety, means everything most alien to this mundane
life,- self-denial, abstinence from fleshly pleasure, the waiting
for true bliss beyond the grave, seclusion even from social and
domestic ties. «He that loveth father and mother more than me,
is not worthy of me. ” “He that taketh not his cross and follow-
eth me, is not worthy of me. ” It is needful to insist upon these
extremest sentences of the New Testament, because upon them
was based the religious practice of the Middle Ages, more sincere
in their determination to fulfill the letter and embrace the spirit
of the Gospel than any succeeding age has been.
If then there really exists this antagonism between fine art
glorifying human life and piety contemning it, how came it, we
may ask, that even in the Middle Ages the Church hailed art
as her coadjutor? The answer lies in this: that the Church has
always compromised. When the conflict of the first few centuries
of Christianity had ended in her triumph, she began to mediate
between asceticism and the world.