No More Learning

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


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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
-


## p. 14348 (#542) ##########################################

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. Intent on absorbing all existent
>


## p. 14349 (#543) ##########################################

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
14349
elements of life and power, she conformed her system to the
Roman type, established her service in basilicas and pagan temples,
adopted portions of the antique ritual, and converted local genii
into saints. At the same time she utilized the spiritual forces of
monasticism, and turned the mystic impulse of ecstatics to account.
The Orders of the Preachers and the Begging Friars became her
militia and police; the mystery of Christ's presence in the Eucha-
rist was made an engine of the priesthood; the dreams of Paradise
and Purgatory gave value to her pardons, interdictions, jubilees,
indulgences, and curses. In the Church the spirit of the cloister
and the spirit of the world found neutral ground, and to the
practical accommodation between these hostile elements she owed
her wide supremacy. The Christianity she formed and propagated
was different from that of the New Testament, inasmuch as it
had taken up into itself a mass of mythological anthropomorphic
elements. Thus transmuted and materialized, thus accepted by
the vivid faith of an unquestioning populace, Christianity offered
a proper medium for artistic activity. The whole first period
of Italian painting was occupied with the endeavor to set forth
in form and color the popular conceptions of a faith at once un-
philosophical and unspiritual, beautiful and fit for art by reason
of the human elements it had assumed into its substance. It was
natural, therefore, that the Church should show herself indulgent
to the arts, which were effecting in their own sphere what she
had previously accomplished; though purists and ascetics, holding
fast by the original spirit of their creed, might remain irreconcil-
ably antagonistic to their influence. The Reformation, on the
contrary, rejecting the whole mass of compromises sanctioned
by the Church, and returning to the elemental principles of the
faith, was no less naturally opposed to fine arts; which after giving
sensuous form to Catholic mythology, had recently attained to
liberty and brought again the gods of Greece.
A single illustration might be selected from the annals of
Italian painting, to prove how difficult even the holiest minded
and most earnest painter found it to effect the proper junction
between plastic beauty and pious feeling. Fra Bartolommeo,
the disciple of Savonarola, painted a Sebastian in the cloister
of S. Marco; where it remained until the Dominican confessors
became aware, through the avowals of female penitents, that this
picture was a stumbling-block and snare to souls. It was then
removed, and what became of it we do not know for certain. Fra


## p. 14350 (#544) ##########################################

14350
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
Bartolommeo undoubtedly intended this ideal portrait of the mar-
tyr to be edifying. St. Sebastian was to stand before the world
as the young man, strong and beautiful, who endured to the end,
and won the crown of martyrdom. No other ideas but those of
heroism, constancy, or faith, were meant to be expressed: but the
painter's art demanded that their expression should be eminently
beautiful; and the beautiful body of the young man distracted
attention from his spiritual virtues to his physical perfections.
A similar maladjustment of the means of plastic art to the pur-
poses of religion would have been impossible in Hellas, where
the temples of Erôs and of Phoebus stood side by side; but in
Christian Florence the craftsman's skill Sowed seeds of discord
in the souls of the devout.
This story is but a coarse instance of the separation between
piety and plastic art. In truth, the difficulty of uniting them
in such a way that the latter shall enforce the former lies far
deeper than its powers of illustration reach. Religion has its
proper end in contemplation and in conduct.
Art aims at pre-
senting sensuous embodiment of thoughts and feelings with a
view to intellectual enjoyment. Now, many thoughts are in-
capable of sensuous embodiment; they appear as abstractions to
the philosophical intellect or as dogmas to the theological under-
standing. To effect an alliance between art and philosophy or
art and theology, in the specific region of either religion or spec-
ulation, is therefore an impossibility. In like manner there are
many feelings which cannot properly assume a sensuous form;
and these are precisely religious feelings, in which the soul
abandons sense, and leaves the actual world behind, to seek her
freedom in a spiritual region. Yet while we recognize the truth
of this reasoning, it would be unscientific to maintain that until
they are brought into close and inconvenient contact, there is
direct hostility between religion and the arts. The sphere of the
two is separate; their aims are distinct: they must be allowed to
perfect themselves each after its own fashion. In the large phi-
losophy of human nature, represented by Goethe's famous motto,
there is room for both, because those who embrace it bend their
natures neither wholly to the pietism of the cloister nor to the
sensuality of art. They find the meeting-point of art and of reli-
gion in their own humanity; and perceive that the antagonism of
the two begins when art is set to do work alien to its nature,
and to minister to what it does not naturally serve.


## p. 14351 (#545) ##########################################

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
14351
THE INVASION OF ITALY BY CHARLES VIII. OF FRANCE
From "History of the Renaissance in Italy)
was in the
W* French found themselves, –a land whose marble palaces
were thronged with cut-throats in disguise, whose princes
poisoned while they smiled, whose luxuriant meadows concealed
fever, whose ladies carried disease upon their lips ? To the cap-
tains and the soldiery of France, Italy already appeared a splen-
did and fascinating Circe, arrayed with charms, surrounded with
illusions, hiding behind perfumed thickets her victims changed to
brutes, and building the couch of her seduction on the bones of
murdered men. Yet she was so beautiful that, halt as they might
for a moment and gaze back with yearning on the Alps that they
had crossed, they found themselves unable to resist her smile.
Forward they must march through the garden of enchantinent;
henceforth taking the precaution to walk with drawn sword, and
like Orlando in Morgana's park, to stuff their casques with roses
that they might not hear the siren's voice too clearly. It was
thus that Italy began the part she played through the Renais-
sance for the people of the North. The White Devil of Italy'
is the title of one of Webster's best tragedies. A white devil,
- a radiant daughter of sin and death, holding in her hands
the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and tempting the
nations to eat,- this is how Italy struck the fancy of the men of
the sixteenth century. She was feminine, and they were virile;
but she could teach and they must learn. She gave them pleas-
ure; they brought force. The fruit of her embraces with the
nations was the spirit of modern culture, the genius of the age
in which we live.
Two terrible calamities warned the Italians with what new
enemies they had to deal. Twice at the commencement of the
invasion did the French use the sword which they had drawn
to intimidate the sorceress. These terror-striking examples were
the massacres of the inhabitants of Rapallo on the Genoese Rivi-
era, and of Fivizzano in Lunigiana. Soldiers and burghers, even
prisoners and wounded men in the hospitals, were butchered, first
by the Swiss and German guards, and afterwards by the French,
who would not be outdone by them in energy. It was thus that
the Italians, after a century of bloodless battles and parade cam-
paigning, learned a new art of war, and witnessed the first act


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JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
of those Apocalyptic tragedies which were destined to drown the
peninsula with French, Spanish, German, Swiss, and native blood.
Meanwhile the French host had reached Parma; traversing,
all through the golden autumn weather, those plains where mul-
berry and elm are married by festoons of vines above a billowy
expanse of maize and corn. From Parma placed beneath the
northern spurs of the Apennines, to Sarzana on the western
coast of Italy, where the marbles of Carrara build their barrier
against the Tyrrhene Sea, there leads a winding barren mountain
pass.
Charles took this route with his army, and arrived in
the beginning of November before the walls of Sarzana. Mean-
while we may well ask what Piero de' Medici had been doing,
and how he had fulfilled his engagement with Alfonso. He had
undertaken, it will be remembered, to hold the passes of the
Apennines upon this side. To have embarrassed the French
troops among those limestone mountains, thinly forested with
pine and chestnut trees, and guarded here and there with ancient
fortresses, would have been a matter of no difficulty. With like
advantages, 2000 Swiss troops during their wars of independence
would have laughed to scorn the whole forces of Burgundy and
Austria. But Piero, a feeble and false tyrant, preoccupied with
Florentine factions, afraid of Lucca, and disinclined to push for-
ward into the territory of the Sforza, had as yet done nothing
when the news arrived that Sarzana was on the point of capitu-
lation. In this moment of peril he rode as fast as horses could
carry him to the French camp, besought an interview with
Charles, and then and there delivered up to him the keys of
Sarzana and its citadel, together with those of Pietra Santa,
Librafratte, Pisa, and Leghorn. Any one who has followed the
sea-coast between Pisa and Sarzana can appreciate the enormous
value of these concessions to the invader. They relieved him of
the difficulty of forcing his way along a narrow belt of land,
which is hemmed in on one side by the sea, and on the other by
the highest and most abrupt mountain range in Italy. To have
done this in the teeth of a resisting army and beneath the walls
of hostile castles would have been all-but impossible. As it was,
Piero cut the Gordian knot by his incredible cowardice, and for
himself gained only ruin and dishonor. Charles, the foe against
whom he had plotted with Alfonso and Alexander, laughed in
his face, and marched at once into Pisa. The Florentines, whom
he had hitherto engaged in an unpopular policy, now rose in fury,


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JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
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expelled him from the city, sacked his palace, and erased from
their memory the name of Medici except for execration. The
unsuccessful tyrant, who had proved a traitor to his allies, to his
country, and to himself, saved his life by flying first to Bologna
and thence to Venice, where he remained in a sort of polite cap-
tivity – safe, but a slave - until the Doge and his council saw
,
which way affairs would tend.
On the oth of November, Florence after a tyranny of fifty
years, and Pisa after the servitude of a century, recovered their
liberties, and were able to reconstitute republican governments.
But the situation of the two States was very different. The Flor-
entines had never lost the name of liberty, which in Italy at
that period meant less the freedom of the inhabitants to exercise
self-government than the independence of the city in relation to
its neighbors. The Pisans on the other hand had been reduced
to subjection by Florence; their civic life had been stifled, their
pride wounded in the tenderest point of honor, their population
decimated by proscription and exile. The great sin of Florence
was the enslavement of Pisa; and Pisa in this moment of anarchy
burned to obliterate her shame with bloodshed. The French,
understanding none of the niceties of Italian politics, and ignor-
ant that in giving freedom to Pisa they were robbing Florence
of her rights, looked on with wonder at the citizens who tossed
the lion of the tyrant town into the Arno, and took up arms
against its officers. It is sad to witness this last spasm of the
long-suppressed passion for liberty in the Pisans, while we know
how soon they were reduced again to slavery by the selfish sis-
ter State, herself too thoroughly corrupt for liberty. The part of
Charles - who espoused the cause of the Pisans with blunder-
ing carelessness, pretended to protect the new republic, and then
abandoned it a few months later to its fate - provokes nothing
but the languid contempt which all his acts inspire.
After the flight of Piero and the proclamation of Pisan lib-
erty, the King of France was hailed as savior of the free Italian
towns. Charles received a magnificent address from Savonarola,
who proceeded to Pisa, and harangued him as the chosen vessel
of the Lord and the deliverer of the Church from anarchy. At
the same time the friar conveyed to the French King a court-
eous invitation from the Florentine republic to enter their city
and enjoy their hospitality. Charles, after upsetting Piero de'
Medici with the nonchalance of a horseman in the tilting-yard,
XXIV-898


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14354
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
and restoring the freedom of Pisa for a caprice, remained as
devoid of policy and as indifferent to the part assigned him by
the prophet as he was before. He rode, armed at all points,
into Florence on November 17th, and took up his residence in
the palace of the Medici. Then he informed the elders of the
city that he had come as conqueror and not as guest, and that he
intended to reserve to himself the disposition of the State.
It was a dramatic moment. Florence, with the Arno flowing
through her midst, and the hills around her gray with olive-
trees, was then even more lovely than we see her now. The
whole circuit of her walls remained, nor had their crown of
towers been leveled yet to make resistance of invading force
more easy Brunelleschi's dome and Giotto's tower and Arnol-
fo's Palazzo and the Loggie of Orcagna gave distinction to her
streets and squares. Her churches were splendid with frescoes
in their bloom, and with painted glass over which as yet the
injury of but a few brief years had passed. Her palaces, that
are as strong as castles, overflowed with a population cultivated,
polished, elegant, refined, and haughty. This Florence, the city of
scholars, artists, intellectual sybarites, and citizens in whom the
blood of the old factions beat, found herself suddenly possessed
as a prey of war by flaunting Gauls in their outlandish finery,
plumed Germans, kilted Kelts, and particolored Swiss. On the
other hand, these barbarians awoke in a terrestrial paradise of
natural and æsthetic beauty. Which of us who has enjoyed the
late gleams of autumn in Valdarno, but can picture to himself
the revelation of the inner meaning of the world, incomprehens-
ible yet soul-subduing, which then first dawned upon the Breton
bowmen and the bulls of Uri ? Their impulse no doubt was to
pillage and possess the wealth before them, as a child pulls to
pieces the wonderful flower that has surprised it on some mount-
ain meadow. But in the very rudeness of desire they paid a hom-
age to the new-found loveliness of which they had not dreamed
before.
Charles here as elsewhere showed his imbecility. He had
entered and laid hands on hospitable Florence like a foe. What
would he now do with her ? -reform the republic - legislate-
impose a levy on the citizens, and lead them forth to battle?
No. He asked for a huge sum of money, and began to bargain.
The Florentine secretaries refused his terms. He insisted. Then
Piero Capponi snatched the paper on which they were written,


## p. 14355 (#549) ##########################################

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
14355
>
»
and tore it in pieces before his eyes. Charles cried, "I shall
sound my trumpets. Capponi answered, “We will ring our
bells. ” Beautiful as a dream is Florence; but her'sombre streets,
overshadowed by gigantic belfries and masked by grim brown
palace fronts, contained a menace that the French King could
not face. Let Capponi sound the tocsin, and each house would
become a fortress, the streets would be barricaded with iron
chains, every quarter would pour forth men by hundreds well
versed in the arts of civic warfare. Charles gave way, covering
with a bad joke the discomfiture he felt: Ah, Ciappon, Ciappon,
voi siete un mal Ciappon! The secretaries beat down his terms.
All he cared for was to get money. He agreed to content him-
self with 120,000 florins. A treaty was signed, and in two days
he quitted Florence.
Hitherto Charles had met with no serious obstacle. His in-
vasion had fallen like the rain from heaven; and like rain, as
far as he was concerned, it ran away to waste. Lombardy and
Tuscany, the two first scenes in the pageant displayed by Italy
before the French army, had been left behind. Rome now lay
before them, magnificent in desolation: not the Rome which the
Farnesi and Chigi and Barberini have built up from the quarried
ruins of amphitheatres and baths, but the Rome of the Middle
Ages; the city crowned with relics of a pagan past, herself still
pagan, and holding in her midst the modern Antichrist. The
progress of the French was a continued triumph. They reached
Siena on the second of December. The Duke of Urbino and
the lords of Pesaro and Bologna laid down their arms at their
approach. The Orsini opened their castles. Virginio, the captain-
general of the Aragonese army and grand constable of the
kingdom of Naples, hastened to win for himself favorable terms
from the French sovereign. The Bagliono betook themselves to
their own rancors in Perugia. The Duke of Calabria retreated.
Italy seemed bent on proving that cowardice and selfishness and
incapacity had conquered her. Viterbo was gained; the Ciminian
heights were traversed; the Campagna, bounded by the Alban
and the Sabine hills, with Rome a bluish cloud upon the low-
lands of the Tiber, spread its solemn breadth of beauty at the
invader's feet. Not a blow had been struck when he reached
the Porta del Popolo, upon the 31st of December, 1494. At three
o'clock in the afternoon began the entry of the French army.
It was nine at night before the last soldiers, under the flaring


## p. 14356 (#550) ##########################################

14356
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
light of torches and flambeaux, defiled through the gates, and
took their quarters in the streets of the Eternal City. The
gigantic barbarians of the cantons, flaunting with plumes and
emblazoned surcoats, the chivalry of France splendid with silk
mantles and gilded corslets, the Scotch guard in their wild cos-
tume of kilt and philibeg, the scythe-like halberds of the Ger-
man lanzknechts, the tangled elf-locks of stern-featured Bretons,
stamped an ineffaceable impression on the people of the South.
On this memorable occasion, as in a show upon some holiday,
marched past before them specimens and vanguards of all those
legioned races which were soon to be too well at home in every
fair Italian dwelling-place. Nothing was wanting to complete the
symbol of the coming doom but a representative of the grim,
black, wiry infantry of Spain.
THE GENIUS OF GREEK ART
From (Studies of the Greek Poets. Published by Harper & Brothers
TH
HE Greeks had no past; "no hungry generations trod them
down: ” whereas the multitudinous associations of immense
antiquity envelop all our thoughts and feelings. “O Solon,
Solon,” said the priest of Egypt, "you Greeks are always child-
ren! »
The world has now grown old; we are gray from the
cradle onwards, swathed with the husks of outworn creeds, and
rocked upon the lap of immemorial mysteries. The travail of
the whole earth, the unsatisfied desires of many races, the
anguish of the death and birth of successive civilizations, have
passed into our souls. Life itself has become a thousandfold
more complicated and more difficult for us than it was in the
springtime of the world. With the increase of the size of na-
tions, poverty and disease and the struggle for bare existence
have been aggravated. How can we, then, bridge over the gulf
which separates us from the Greeks? How shall we, whose souls
are aged and wrinkled with the long years of humanity, shake
hands across the centuries with those young-eyed, young-limbed,
immortal children? Can we make criticism our Medea, — bid the
magnificent witch pluck leaves and flowers of Greek poetry and
art and life, distilling them for us to bathe therein, and regener-
ate our youth like Æson?


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JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
14357
Like a young man newly come from the wrestling-ground,
anointed, chapleted, and very calm, the Genius of the Greeks
appears before us. Upon his soul there is yet no burden of the
world's pain; the creation that groaneth and travaileth together
has touched him with no sense of anguish, nor has he yet felt
sin. The pride and the strength of adolescence are his: audacity
and endurance, swift passions and exquisite sensibilities, the alter-
nations of sublime repose and boyish noise, grace, pliancy, and
stubbornness and power, love of all fair things and radiant in
the world, the frank enjoyment of the open air, free merriment,
and melancholy well beloved. Of these adolescent qualities, of
this clear and stainless personality, this conscience whole and
pure and reconciled to nature, what survives among us now?
The imagination must be strained to the uttermost before we
can begin to sympathize with such a being. The blear-eyed
mechanic, stified in a hovel of our sombre Northern towns, can-
opied through all the year with smoke, deafened with wheels
that never cease to creak, stiffened by toil in one cramped post-
ure, oblivious of the sunlight and green fields, could scarcely
be taught even to envy the pure, clear life of art made perfect
in humanity, which was the pride of Hellas. His soul is glad-
dened, if at all, by a glimpse of celestial happiness far off. The
hope that went abroad across the earth so many centuries ago
has raised his eyes to heaven. How can he comprehend a mode
of existence in which the world itself was adequate to all the
wants of the soul, and when to yearn for more than life affords
was reckoned a disease ?
We may tell of blue Ægean waves, islanded with cliffs that
seem less real than clouds, whereon the temples stand, burning
like gold in sunset or turning snowy fronts against the dawn.
We may paint high porches of the gods, resonant with music and
gladdened with choric dances; or describe perpetual sunshine and
perpetual ease, - no work from year to year that might degrade
the body or impair the mind, no dread of hell, no yearning after
heaven, but summer-time of youth and autumn of old age and
loveless death bewept and bravely borne. The life of the schools,
the theatre, the wrestling-ground, the law courts; generous con-
tests on the Pythian or Olympian plains; victorious crowns of
athletes or of patriots; Simonidean epitaphs and funeral orations
of Pericles for fallen heroes; the prize of martial prowess or
poetic skill; the honor paid to the pre-eminence of beauty,— all


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14358
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
these things admit of scholar-like enumeration.
Or we may
recall by fancy the olive groves of the Academy; discern Hymet-
tus pale against the burnished sky, and Athens guarded by her
glistening goddess of the mighty brow,- Pallas, who spreads her
shield and shakes her spear above the labyrinth of peristyles
and pediments in which her children dwell. Imagination can
lead us to the plane-trees on Cephisus's shore, the labors of the
husbandmen who garner dues of corn and oil, the galleys in Pei-
ræan harborage. Or with the Lysis and the Charmides beneath
our eyes, we may revisit the haunts of the wrestlers and the
runners; true-born Athenians, fresh from the bath and crowned
with violets,-chaste, vigorous, inured to rhythmic movements of
the passions and the soul.
Yet after all, when the process of an elaborate culture has
thus been toilsomely accomplished, when we have trained our
soul to sympathize with that which is so novel and so strange
and yet so natural, few of us can fairly say that we have touched
the Greeks at more than one or two points. Novies Styx inter-
fusa coercet: between us and them crawls the nine times twisted
stream of death. The history of the human race is one; and
without the Greeks we should be nothing. But just as an old
man of ninety is not the same being as the boy of nineteen, -
nay, cannot even recall to memory how and what he felt when
the pulse of manhood was yet gathering strength within his
veins,- even so now, civilized humanity looks back upon the
youth of Hellas, and wonders what she was in that blest time.
A few fragments yet remain from which we strive to recon-
struct the past. Criticism is the product of the weakness as well
as of the strength of our age.
In the midst of our activity,
we have so little that is artistically salient or characteristic in
our life that we are not led astray by our own individuality,
or tempted to interpret the past wrongly by making it square
with the present. Impartial clearness of judgment in scientific
research, laborious antiquarian zeal, methodic scrupulousness in
preserving the minutest details of local coloring, and an earnest
craving to escape from the dreary present of commonplace rou-
tine and drudgery into the spirit-stirring freedom of the past,-
these are qualities of the highest value which our century has
brought to bear upon history. They make up in some measure
for our want of the creative faculties which more productive but
less scientific ages have possessed, and enable those who have


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JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
14359
our
but little original imagination to enjoy imaginative pleasures at
second hand, by living as far as may be in the clear light of
antique beauty.
The sea, the hills, the plains, the sunlight of the South, to-
gether with some ruins which have peopled Europe with phan-
toms of dead art and the relics of Greek literature, are
guides in the endeavor to restore the past of Hellas. Among
rocks golden with broom-flowers, murmurous with bees, burning
with anemones in spring and oleanders in summer, and odorous
through all the year with thyme, we first assimilate the spirit of
the Greeks. It is here that we divine the meaning of the myths,
and feel those poems that expressed themselves in marble 'mid
the temples of the gods to have been the one right outgrowth
from the sympathy of man, as he was then, with nature. In the
silence of mountain valleys thinly grown with arbutus and pine
and oak, open at all seasons to pure air, and breaking downwards
to the sea, we understand the apparition of Pan to Pheidippi-
des, we read the secret of a nation's art that aimed at definition
before all things. The bay of Naples, the coast of Sicily, are
instinct with the sense of those first settlers, who, coasting round
the silent promontories, ran their keels upon the shelving shore,
and drew them up along the strand, and named the spot Neap-
olis or Gela. The boys of Rome were yet in the wolf's cavern.
Vesuvius was a peaceful hill on which the olive and the vine
might slumber. The slopes of Pozzuoli were green with herbs,
over which no lava had been poured. Wandering about Sor-
rento, the spirit of the Odyssey is ours. Those fishing-boats with
lateen sail are such as bore the heroes from their ten-years' toil
at Troy. Those shadowy islands caught the gaze of Æneas
straining for the promised land. Into such clefts and rents of
rock strode Herakles and Jason when they sought the golden
apples and the golden fleece. Look down. There gleam the
green and yellow dragon scales, coiled on the basement of the
hills, and writhing to each curve and cleavage of the chasm.
it a dream ? Do we in fact behold the mystic snake, or in the
twilight do those lustrous orange-trees deceive our eyes ? Nay,
there are no dragons in the ravine — only thick boughs and bur-
nished leaves and snowy bloom and globes of glittering gold.
Above them on the cliff sprout myrtle rods, sacred to love; myr-
tle branches, with which the Athenians wreathed their swords
in honor of Harmodius. Lilies and jonquils and hyacinths stand,


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14360
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
each straight upon his stem, - a youth, as Greeks imagined, slain
by his lover's hand, or dead for love of his own loveliness, or
cropped in love's despite by death that is the foe of love. Scar-
let and white anemones are there: some born of Adonis's blood,
and some of Aphrodite's tears. All beauty fades; the flowers
of earth, the bloom of youth, man's strength, and woman's grace,
all wither and relapse into the loveless and inexorable grave.
This the Greeks knew, mingling mirth with melancholy, and love
with sadness, their sweetest songs with elegiac melodies.
Beneath the olive-trees, among the flowers and ferns, move
stately maidens and bare-chested youths. Their eyes are starry-
softened or flash fire, and their lips are parted to drink in the
breath of life. Some are singing in the fields an antique, world-
old monotone of song. Was not the lay of Linus, the burden
of yarpai tai òpies ŭ Mevaiza (High are the oak-trees, O Menalcas),
some such canzonet as this? These late descendants of Greek
colonists are still beautiful - like moving statues in the sunlight
and the shadow of the boughs. Yonder tall, straight girl, whose
pitcher, poised upon her head, might have been filled by Electra
or Chrysothemis with lustral waters for a father's tomb, carries
her neck nobly as a Fate of Pheidias. Her body sways upon the
hips, where rests her modeled arm; the ankle and the foot are
sights to sit and gaze at through a summer's day. And where,
if not here, shall we meet with Hylas and Hyacinth, with Gany-
mede and Hymenæus, in the flesh ? As we pass, the laughter
and the singing die away. Bright dresses and pliant forms are
lost. We stray onward through the sheen and shade of olive
branches.
The olive was Athene's gift to Hellas, and Athens carved its
leaves and berries on her drachma with the head of Pallas and
her owl. The light which never leaves its foliage, silvery beneath
and sparkling from the upper surface of burnished green; the
delicacy of its stem, which in youth and middle and old
age
retains the distinction of finely accentuated form; the absence of
sombre shadow on the ground beneath its branches, — might well
fit the olive to be the symbol of the purity of classic art. Each
leaf is cut into a lance-head of brilliancy, not jagged or fanciful
or woolly like the foliage of Northern trees. There is here no
mystery of darkness, no labyrinth of tortuous shade, no conflict
of contrasted forms. Excess of light sometimes fatigues the eye
amid those airy branches, and we long for the repose of gloom


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JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
14361
to which we are accustomed in our climate. But gracefulness,
fertility, power, radiance, pliability, are seen in every line. The
spirit of the Greeks itself is not more luminous and strong and
subtle. The color of the olive-tree, again, is delicate. Its pearly
grays and softened greens in no wise interfere with the lustre
which is the true distinction of the tree, Clear and faint like
Guido's colors in the Ariadne of St. Luke's at Rome, distinct as
the thought in a Greek epigram, the olive branches are relieved
against the bright blue of the sea. The mountain slopes above
are clothed by them with light as with a raiment; clinging to
knoll and vale and winding creek, rippling in hoary undulations
to the wind, they wrap the hills from feet to flank in lucid haze.
Above the olives shine bare rocks in steady noon, or blush with
dawn and evening. Nature is naked and beautiful beneath the
sun,-- like Aphrodite, whose raiment falls waist downward to
her sandals on the sea, but whose pure breasts and forehead are
unveiled.
Nature is thus the first, chief element by which we are en-
abled to conceive the spirit of the Greeks. The key to their
mythology is here. Here is the secret of their sympathies, the
well-spring of their deepest thoughts, the primitive potentiality
of all they have achieved in art. What is Apollo but the magic
of the sun whose soul is light ? What is Aphrodite but the
love charm of the sea ? What is Pan but the mystery of nature,
the felt and hidden want pervading all? What, again, are those
elder, dimly discovered deities, the Titans and the brood of
Time, but forces of the world as yet beyond the touch and ken
of human sensibilities? But nature alone cannot inform us what
that spirit was. For though the Greeks grew up in scenes which
we may visit, they gazed on them with Greek eyes, eyes differ-
ent from ours; and dwelt upon them with Greek minds, minds
how unlike our own! Unconsciously, in their long and unsophisti-
cated infancy, the Greeks absorbed and assimilated to their own
substance that loveliness which it is left for us only to admire.
Between them and ourselves — even face to face with mountain,
sky, and sea, unaltered by the lapse of years — flow the rivers of
Death and Lethe and New Birth, and the mists of thirty centu-
ries of human life are woven like a veil. To pierce that veil,
to learn even after the most partial fashion how they transmuted
the splendors of the world into æsthetic forms, is a work which
involves the further interrogation of their sculpture and their
literature.


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14362
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
RAVENNA
From (Sketches in Italy)
The
HE Emperor Augustus chose Ravenna for one of his two naval
stations, and in course of time a new city arose by the sea-
shore, which received the name of Portus Classis. Between
this harbor and the mother city a third town sprang up, and was
called Cæsarea. Time and neglect, the ravages of war, and the
encroaching powers of nature, have destroyed these settlements,
and nothing now remains of the three cities but Ravenna. It
would seem that in classical times Ravenna stood, like modern
Venice, in the centre of a huge lagoon, the fresh waters of the
Ronco and the Po mixing with the salt waves of the Adriatic
round its very walls. The houses of the city were built on piles;
canals instead of streets formed the means of communication,
and these were always filled with water artificially conducted from
the southern estuary of the Po. Round Ravenna extended a vast
morass, for the most part under shallow water, but rising at
intervals into low islands like the Lido or Murano or Torcello
which surround Venice. These islands were celebrated for their
fertility: the vines and fig-trees and pomegranates, springing from
a fat and fruitful soil, watered with constant moisture, and fos-
tered by a mild sea wind and liberal sunshine, yielded crops that
for luxuriance and quality surpassed the harvests of any orchards
on the mainland. All the conditions of life in old Ravenna seem
to have resembled those of modern Venice: the people went
about in gondolas; and in the early morning, barges laden with
fresh fruit or meat and vegetables flocked from all quarters to
the city of the sea. Water also had to be procured from the
neighboring shore; for as Martial says, a well at Ravenna was
more valuable than a vineyard. Again, between the city and the
mainland ran a long low causeway all across the lagoon, like that
on which the trains now glide into Venice. Strange to say, the
air of Ravenna was remarkably salubrious: this fact, and the ease
of life that prevailed there, and the security afforded by the sit-
uation of the town, rendered it a most desirable retreat for the
monarchs of Italy during those troublous times in which the em-
pire nodded to its fall. Honorius retired to its lagoons for safety;
Odoacer, who dethroned the last Cæsar of the West, succeeded
him; and was in turn supplanted by Theodoric the Ostrogoth.
Ravenna, as we see it now, recalls the peaceful and half Roman


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JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
14363
rule of the great Gothic king. His palace, his churches, and the
mausoleum in which his daughter Amalasuntha laid the hero's
bones, have survived the sieges of Belisarius and Astolphus, the
conquest of Pepin, the bloody quarrels of iconoclasts with the
children of the Roman Church, the mediæval wars of Italy,
the victory of Gaston de Foix; and still stand gorgeous with
marbles and mosaics in spite of time and the decay of all around
them.
As early as the sixth century, the sea had already retreated
to such a distance from Ravenna that orchards and gardens
were cultivated on the spot where once the galleys of the Cæsars
rode at anchor. Groves of pines sprang up along the shore, and
in their lofty tops the music of the wind moved like the ghost of
waves and breakers plunging upon distant sands. This Pinetum
stretches along the shore of the Adriatic for about forty miles,
forming a belt of variable width between the great marsh and
the tumbling sea. From a distance the bare stems and velvet
crowns of the pine-trees stand up like palms that cover an oasis
on Arabian sands; but at a nearer view the trunks detach them-
selves from an inferior forest growth of juniper and thorn and
ash and oak, the tall roofs of the stately firs shooting their
breadth of sheltering greenery above the lower and less sturdy
brushwood. It is hardly possible to imagine a more beautiful
and impressive scene than that presented by these long alleys of
imperial pines. They grow so thickly one behind another that
we might compare them to the pipes of a great organ, or the
pillars of a Gothic church, or the basaltic columns of the Giant's
Causeway. Their tops are ever green, and laden with the heavy
cones from which Ravenna draws considerable wealth. Scores
of peasants are quartered on the outskirts of the forest, whose
business it is to scale the pines and rob them of their fruit at
certain seasons of the year. Afterwards they dry the fir-cones
in the sun, until the nuts which they contain fall out.