In Umbria, A Study Of Artistic Personality

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Title:     In Umbria, A Study Of Artistic Personality
Author: Vernon Lee [More Titles by Lee]

... grande, austera, verde,
Da le montagne digradanti in cerchio,
L'Umbria guarda.--CARDUCCI.

The autumn sun is declining over the fields and oak-woods and vineyards of Umbria, where--in the wide undulating valley, inclosed by high rounded hills, bleak or dark with ilex, each with its strange terraced white city, Assisi, Spello, Spoleto, Todi--the Tiber winds lazily along, pale green, limpid, scarce rippled over its yellow pebbles, screened by long rows of reeds, and thinned, yellowing poplars, reflecting dimly the sky and trees, the pointed mediaeval bridges and the crenelated towers on its banks; so clear and placid that you can scarcely bring home to yourself that this can really be the Tiber of Rome, the turbid mass of yellow water which eddies sullen and mournful round the ship-shaped island, along by Vesta's temple, beneath the cypressed Aventine, and away into the desolate Campagna. Gradually, as the sun sinks, the valley of the Tiber fills with golden light moving along, little by little, travelling slowly up the wooded hillocks; covering the bluish mountains of Somma and Subasio with a purple flush, making the white towns rosy on their flanks, and then dying away into the pale amber horizon, rosy where it touches the hill, pearly, then bluish where it merges imperceptibly into the upper sky. Bluer and bluer become the hills, deeper and deeper the at first faint amber; the valley is filled with grey-blue mist; the hills stand out dark blue, cold, and massive; the sky above becomes a livid rose colour; there is scarcely a filament of cloud, and only a streak of golden orange where the sun has disappeared. There is a sudden stillness, as when the last chords of a great symphony have died out. All the way up the hill on which stands Perugia we meet the teams of huge oxen, not merely white, but milky, with great, deep, long-lashed eyes, swaying from side to side with their load of wine-vats; and the peasants returning home from ploughing up the last corn stubble. All is peaceful and very solemn, more so than after sunset in other places, in this sweet and austere Umbria, the fit home of the Christian revival of the early Middle Ages. And it makes us think, this beautiful and solemn evening, of the little book which epitomises all the emotions of this new birth, of this charming new childhood of humanity, when the feelings of men seem to have somewhat of the dewy freshness of dawn. The book is the "Fioretti di San Francesco," a collection of legends and examples relating to the cycle of St. Francis of Assisi by some monk or monks of the end of the thirteenth century. Flowerets they may well be called--flowers such as might grow, green and white-starred and delicately pearled with gold, in the thick grass across which dance Angelico's groups of the Blessed. Yet with a certain humanness, a certain reality and naturalness of sweetness, such as the great paradise painter, with his fleshless madonnas, his glory of radiant, unearthly draperies and golden skies, never could have conceived. A singular charm of simplicity and lucidness in this little book; no fever visions or unhealthy glories; an earnestness not without humour: there is nothing grim or absurd in the credulity and asceticism of these Umbrian saints. The asceticism is so gentle and tender, the credulity so childish and poetical, that the ridiculous itself ceases to be so. These monks, so far from being engrossed with the care of their own souls, or weighed down by the dread of hell, seemed to have awakened with perfect hope and faith in celestial goodness, with perfect desire to love all around them in the most literal sense: religion for them is love and reliance on love. The gentleness with which they admonish the sinning and back-sliding, the confidence in the inner goodness of man, from whose soiled surface all evil may be washed, extends in these men to the whole of creation, and makes them fraternise with beasts and birds, as is shown, with a delicate, slightly humorous grace, in the stories of St. Francis and the turtle doves, and of the ferocious wolf "Frate Lupo" of Gubbio, whom rather than kill, it pleased the saint to bring round to harmlessness by fair words, expostulations, and faithfully kept promises, expecting from the wolf fidelity to his word as much as from a human being. There is in this little book a vague, floating, permeating life of affection, of love unbounded by difference of species. Communion with all men, with Christ, with angels, with doves, and with wolves; the force of love bringing down God and raising up brutes to the level of these saints. And as we think over the little book we feel in a way as if we, to whom Francis and his companions are mere mortal men, and the tales of the "Fioretti" mere beautiful fancies, hollow and sad for their very sweetness, were looking down upon a sort of holy land, as we look down in the white twilight upon the misty undulations of this solemn and beautiful Umbria.

A serene country, neither rugged and barren, nor flat and fertile, not the grey, sharp Florentine valley, whose thin soil must be irrigated and ploughed, and on whose hillsides the carefully nurtured olives are stunted with winter wind and summer scorchings, where every outline is clear and bone-like in that same hard, light atmosphere which, as Vasari says, makes all appear hard and clear and logical to the minds of the Florentines. Not the endless flatness and fruitfulness of Lombardy, where the mists steam up in the evening golden round the great misty golden descending sun-ball, and the buildings flush like the cheeks of Correggio's joy-drunken seraphs, and the thin, clear outline of the rows of poplars looks against the sky like the outshaken golden hair combed into minute filaments of one of Lionardo's women. Nor the dreary wastes of sere oakwoods and livid sand-hills of Orvieto; nor the sea of lush vegetation gilded by the sun, merging into the vaporous damp blue sky of the plain of Lucca. None of these things is the Tiber valley, not harsh nor poor nor luxuriant; sober and restrained, without excess or scantness, an undulating country of pale and modest tints, and, save in the distant Apennine tops, of simple outline, with what glory of colours it may have, due mainly to sky and sunset of cloud, and even in that more chaste than other parts of Italy; neither poor nor rich; without the commerce of Lombardy or the industry of Tuscany, wholly without any intellectual movement, rural, believing, with but little of the imported influence of reviving Paganism, and still much of the clinging moral atmosphere of Christian contemplation and ecstacy of the days of St. Francis. Such is this isolated Tiber valley, whose skies and whose legends are so perfectly in harmony, and in it was born, of the country and of the traditions, a special, isolated school of art.

Is it a school or a man?--A school concentrated in one man, or a man radiating into a school. There are a great many men all about the one man Perugino, masters or pupils; the first seem so many bungled attempts to be what he is, the second so many disintegrations of him. Even the more powerful individualities are lost in his presence; at Perugia we know nothing of the real Pinturicchio, the bright, vain, thoughtless painters of the pageant scenes, brilliant like pages of Boiardo's fairy tales, on the walls of the Sienese Library. Raphael is no separate individual, has no personal qualities before he leaves Perugia. Everything is Perugino, in more or less degree. The whole town, nay, the surrounding country, is one vast studio in which his themes are being developed, his works being copied, his tricks being imitated. A score of artists of talent, one or two like Lo Spagna and the young Raphael, of first-rate powers, and a host of mere mechanical drudges, give us, in all Perugia, nothing new, nothing individual, no impression which we can disentangle from the general, all-pervading impression given by the one man Perugino. The country, physical and moral, has exhausted itself in this one artistic manifestation. One not merely, but unique and one-sided. What Perugino has done has been done by no other master; and what Perugino has done is only one thing, and that to all eternity. The sense of complete absence of variety, of difference; the impression of all being reduced to the minimum of everything, the vague consciousness that all here is one, isolated and indivisible, which haunts us all through the churches and galleries of Perugia, pursues us likewise through all the works of the school, that is to say, of Perugino himself. This unique school, consisting in reality of a single man, possesses only one theme, one type, one idea, one feeling; it does, it attempts but one thing, and that one thing means isolation, concentration, elimination of all but one single mood.

It is the painting of solitude; of the isolated soul, alone, unaffected by any other, unlinked in any work, or feeling, or suffering, with any other soul, nay even with any physical thing. The men and women of Perugino are the most completely alone that any artist ever painted, alone though in fours, or fives, or in crowds. Their relations to each other are purely architectural: it is a matter of mere symmetry, even as it is with the mouldings or carvings of the frame which surrounds them. Superficially, taken merely as so many columns, or half-arches of the pinnacled whole of the composition, they are, in his larger works, more rigorously related to each other than are the figures of any other painter of severely architectural groups; compared with Perugino, the figures in Bellini's or Mantegna's most solemn altarpieces are irrelevant to each other: one saint is turning too much aside, another looking too much on his neighbour. Not so with Perugino: his figures are all in relation to one another. The scarf floating in strange snakelike convolutions, from the shoulder of the one angel flying, cutting across the pale blue air as a skater cuts across the ice, floats and curls in distinct reference to the ribbons which twist, like lilac or yellow scrolls, about the head and neck of the other angel; the lute, with down-turned bulb, of the one seraph, his shimmering purple or ultramarine robe clinging in tight creases round his feet in the breeze of heaven, is rigorously balanced by the viol, upturned against the stooping head, of his fellow-seraph; the white-bearded anchorite stretches forth his right foot in harmony with the outstretched left foot of the scarlet-robed cardinal; the dainty arch-angelic warrior drolly designated as Scipio, or Cincinnatus on the wall of the Money Changer's Hall turns his delicate, quaintly-crested head, and raises his vague-looking eyes to match the upturned plumed head of the other celestial knight. All the figures are distinctly connected with each other; but they are connected as are the pillarets, various, but different, which balance each other in length and thickness and character, a twisted with a twisted one, a twin, strangely linked pair with another such, on the symmetrically sloping front of some Lombard cathedral; the connection is purely outer, purely architectural; and the solitude of each figure as a human being, as a body and a mind, is only the more complete. There is no grouping in these cunningly balanced altarpieces; there is no common employment or movement, no action or reaction. Angels and warriors and saints and sibyls stand separate, the one never touching the other, apart, each alone against the pale greenish background. They may look, the one towards the other, but they never see each other. They exist quite single and isolated, each unconscious that there is any other. Another--indeed, there is no other; in reality, every one is in complete solitude; it is only the canvas which makes them appear in the same place. They are not in the same place, or rather there is no place; the soft green field, the blue hills, darkening against the greenish evening sky, the spare, thinly leaved little trees, the white tower in the distance, this little piece of Umbrian country has nothing to do with any of them. They are nowhere; or rather each taken singly is nowhere. Place, like subject and action, has been eliminated; everything has, which possibly could. The very bodies seem reduced to the least possible: there is no interest in them: all is concentrated upon the delicate nervous hands, on the faces; in the faces, upon eyes and mouth, till the whole face seems scarcely more than tremulous lips, half parted, raised vividly to kiss, to suck in the impalpable; than dilating pupils, straining vaguely to seize, to absorb, to burn into themselves the invisible. It is the embodiment, with only as little body as is absolutely required, of a soul; and that soul simplified, rarefied into only one condition of being: beatitude of contemplation. As place and action have been eliminated, so also has time: they will for ever remain, alone, in the same attitude; they will never move, never change, never cease; there exists for them no other occupation or possibility. And as the bodies are separate, isolated from all physical objects, so is the soul: it touches no other human soul, touches no earthly interest: it is alone, motionless, space and time and change have ceased for it: contemplating, absorbing for all eternity that which the eye cannot see, nor the hand touch nor the will influence, the mysterious, the ineffable.

Are they really saints and angels, and prophets and sibyls? Surely not--for all such act or suffer; for each of these there is a local habitation, and a definite duty. These strange creatures of Perugino's are not supernatural beings in the same sense as are those robed in iridescent, impalpable glory of Angelico; or those others, clothed in more than human muscle and sinew, of the vault of the Sixtine. What are they? Not visions become concrete, but the act of vision personified. They are not the objects of religious feeling; they are its most abstract, intense reality. Yes, they are reality. They are no far-fetched fancies of the artist. They are souls and soul-saturated, soul-moulded bodies which he saw around him. For in that Umbria of the dying fifteenth century--where the old cities, their old freedom and industry and commerce well-nigh dwindled to nothing, had shrunk each on its mountain-side into mere huge barracks of mercenary troopers or strongholds of military bandit nobles, continually besieged and sacked and heaped with massacre by rival families and rival factions; where in the open country, the villagers, pent-up in fortified farms and barns, were burnt, women and children, with the stored-up fodder, or slaughtered and cast in heaps into the Tiber, and every year the tangled brushwood of ilex and oak and briars encroached further upon the devastated cornfields and oliveyards, and the wolves and foxes roamed nearer and nearer to the cities--in this terrible barbarous Umbria of the days of Caesar Borgia, the soul developed to strange unearthly perfection. It developed by the force of antagonism and isolation. This city of Perugia, which was governed by the most ferocious and treacherous little mercenary captains; whose dark precipitous streets were full of broil and bloodshed, and whose palaces full of evil, forbidden lust and family conspiracy, was one of the most pious in all Italy. Wondrous miraculous preachers, inspired and wild, were for ever preaching in the midst of the iniquity; holy monks and nuns were for ever seeing visions and curing the incurable; churches and hospitals were being erected throughout town and country; novices crowded the ever-increasing convents. Sensitive souls were sickened by the surrounding wickedness, and terrified lest it should triumph over them; resist it, bravely expose themselves to it, prevent or mitigate the evil of others they dared not: a moral plague was thick in the air, and those who would escape infection must needs fly, take refuge in strange spiritual solitude, in isolated heights where the moral air was rarefied and icy. Of the perfectly human, sociable devotion of the days of St. Francis, of the active benevolence and righteousness, there was now no question: the wolves had become too frightfully numerous and ravenous to be preached to like that Brother Wolf of the Flowerets of St. Francis. Active good there could now no longer be: the pure soul became inactive, passive, powerless over the evil around, contemplating for ever a distant, ineffable excellence; aspiring, sterile, and meagre, at being absorbed into that glory of perfect virtue at which it was for ever gazing. This solitary and inactive devotion, raised far above this world, is the feeling out of which are moulded those scarce embodied souls of Perugino's. Those emaciated hectic young faces, absorbed in one ineffable passion, which in their weakness and intensity are so infinitely feminine, are indeed mainly the faces of women--of those noble and holy ladies like Atalanta Baglioni, living in moral solitude among their turbulent clan of evil fathers and brothers and husbands: the victims, or worse, the passive spectators, the passive accomplices, of iniquity of all sorts, whom the grand old chronicler, Matarazzo, shows by glimpses, walking through the blood and lust-soiled houses of the brilliant and horrible Gianpavolos and Semonettos and Griffones of Perugia, pure and patient like nuns, and as secluded in mind as in any cloister. Theirs are these faces, and at the same time the faces which vaguely, confusedly looked down upon them, glorified reflections of their own, from above. These creatures of Perugino's are what every great artist's works must be--at once the portrait of those for whom he paints, and the portrait of their ideals, that is, of their intenser selves. He is the painter of the city where, in the Italian Renaissance, the unmixed devotional feeling, innate in the country of St. Francis, untroubled by Florentine scepticism or Lombard worldly sense, thrust back and concentrated upon itself by surrounding brutal wickedness, existed most intense; he is the painter of this kind of devotion. The very daintiness of accessory, the delicate embroidered robes, the long fringed scarves, the embossed armour, light and pliable like silk, which cannot wound the tender young archangels, the carefully waved and curled hair--all this is the religious luxuriousness of nuns and novices, the one vent for all love of beauty and ease and costliness of the poor delicate creatures, worn and galled by their shapeless hair cloth, living and sleeping in the dreary whitewashed cell. This is unmixed devotion, religious contemplation and aspiration absolutely separated from any other sort of moral feeling; there is the destructive wrath of righteousness in the prophets of Michael Angelo, and the gentleness of candour and charity in the Florentine virgins of Raphael; there is the serenity and solemnity of moral wisdom in Bellini, and the sweetness and cordiality of domestic love in Titian; there is even the half-animal motherly love in Correggio; there is, in almost all the schools of Italian painting, some character of human goodness; but in Perugino there is none of these things. Nothing but the one all-absorbing, abstract, devotional feeling--intense passive contemplation of the unattainable good; souls purged of every human desire or will, isolated from all human affection and action, raised above the limits of time and space; souls which have long ceased to be human beings and can never become angels, hovering, half pained, half joyful, in a limbo of endless spiritual desire.

Such is the work. Let us seek the master. Pietro Vannucci, of Citta della Pieve, surnamed Perugino, Petrus de Castro Plebis, as he signed himself, lived, as tradition has it, in a very good house in Via Deliziosa. Via Deliziosa is one of the many quiet little paved lanes of Perugia, steep and tortuous, looking up at whose rough scarred houses you forever see overgrown plants of white starred basil or grey marjoram bursting out of broken ewers and pipkins on the boards before the high windows, or trails of mottled red and green tomatos, or long crimson-tasselled sprays of carnation dangling along the broken, blackened masonry, crevassed and held together by iron clamps; where, at every sudden turn, you get, through some black and oozy archway, a glimpse of green sun-gilded vineyard and distant hills, hazy and blue through the yellow summer air. Here, in the best part of the town, Perugino had his house and his workshop. In the house, full of precious stuffs and fine linen and plate and everything which a wealthy burgher could desire, lived the handsome wife of the master, for whom he was for ever designing and ordering new clothes, and whose beautiful hair he loved himself to dress in strange fantastic diadems and helmets of minute plaits and waves and curls, that she might go through the town as magnificent and quaintly attired as any noble lady of the Baglionis or Antinoris or Della Staffas. In the workshop was the master and a host of pupils: Giannicola Manni, Doni, the Alfani, Tiberio d'Assisi; the exquisite anonymous stranger, of whom we know only as John the Spaniard, and perhaps that gentle fair feminine boy from Urbino, whom, in half-womanish gear and with wonderful delicate feathers and jewels in his hair, Perugino painted among the prophets in the Money Changer's Hall. A workshop indeed. Not merely the studio of a master and his pupils, but an enormous manufactory of works of devotional art; the themes of Perugino, the same saints, the same madonnas, the same angels, in the same groups, for ever repeated in large and small, some mere copies, others slightly varied or composed of various incoherent portions, by the pupil; some half by the master, half by the pupil, some possibly touched up by him, one or two wholly from his own exquisite hand. Things of all degrees of merit and execrableness, to suit the richest and the poorest; all could be had at that workshop, for Master Pietro had the monopoly of the art, good bad, or indifferent, of the country. You could order designs for wood carvings or silver ware; you could hire church banners, of which store was kept to be let out for processions at so much the hour. You could obtain men to set up triumphal arches of cardboard, and invent moulds for ornamental sweetmeats, like those of Astorre Baglioni's wedding; patterns, doubtless also for embroidery and armour embossing; you could have a young Raphael Santi set to repeating some Marriage of the Virgin for a Sforza or a Baglioni, or some tattered smearer to copy a copy of some madonna for a village church; or you could commission the master himself to go to Rome and paint a wall of Pope Sixtus's Chapel. For there never was a manufactory of art carried on more methodically or satisfactorily than this one. There never was a commercial speculator who knew so well how much good and bad he could afford and venture to give; who knew his public so thoroughly. He had, in his youth and poverty, invented, discovered (which shall we call it?) the perfection of devotional painting, that which perfectly satisfied his whole pious Umbria, and every pious man or woman of more distant parts: a certain number of types, a certain expression, a certain mode of grouping, a certain manner of colouring which constituted a perfect whole; a conception to embody which most completely he had in his youth worked like a slave, seeking, perfecting all that which belonged to the style: the clear, delicate colour, the exquisite, never excessive finish, the infinitely delicate modelling of finger and wrist, of eyelid and lip, the diaphanous sheen of light, soft, scarcely coloured hair on brow and temple and cheek; he had coolly turned away from everything else. The problems of anatomy, of perspective, of light and shade, and of grouping, at which in Florence he had seen men like Pollaiolo, Ghirlandaio, Filippino, Lionardo wasting their youth, he never even glanced at. No real bodies were required for his saints as long as he could give them the right, wistful faces; no tangible background, no well-defined composition. All this was unnecessary; and he wanted only the necessary. When he had got the amount and sort of skill required for this narrow style, he stopped; when he had invented the three or four types of faces, attitude, and composition, he ceased inventing. He had the means of making a fortune. All that remained was to organise his mechanism, to arrange that splendid system of repeating, arranging, altering, copying, on the part of himself and his scholars, by which he could, without further enlarging style or ideas, furnish Umbria and Italy with the pure devotional painting it required, in whatever amount and of whatever degree of excellence it might wish. He succeeded. True, other artists sneered at him, like that young Buonarroti, who had called him a blunderer; true, the Florentines complained that when he painted their fresco for them at S. Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi, he had cheated them, giving mere copies of works they had had from him twenty years before. About the judgment of other painters he cared not a fig; success was the only test; to the Florentines he calmly answered that as those figures had pleased them twenty years before, they ought to please them now; that he at least was not going to seek anything new as long as the old sufficed. For men who grew old in constant attempts after new styles, new muscles, new draperies, like Signorelli yonder labouring solitary on the rock of Orvieto, spending years in cramming new figures into spaces which he, Perugino, would have finished in a month with six isolated saints and a bit of blue sky; or frittered away time in endless sketches, endless cooking of new paints and trying of new washes, like Lionardo da Vinci: or who ruined themselves buying bits of old marble to copy, like crazy Mantegna at Mantua; for all such men as these Perugino must have had a supreme contempt. As long as money came in, all was right; new ideas, improvements, all such things were mere rubbish. Thus he probably preached to his pupils, and kept them carefully to their task of multiplying his own works, till his school became sterile and imbecile; and the young Raphael, in disgust, left him and begged the Lady Giovanna della Rovere for a letter to the Gonfaloniere Soderini, which should open to him the doors of the Florentine schools. With what contempt must not Master Perugino have looked after this departing young Raphael; with what cynical amusement he must have heard how the young fool, once successful, kept for ever altering his style, wearing his frail life out, meditating and working himself into the hectic broken creature whom Marc-Antonio has etched, seated, fagged and emaciated on the steps before his work. We can imagine how Perugino descanted on all this folly to the other young men in his workshop. For he was a cynical man as well as a grasping: he saw no wisdom beyond the desire for money and comfort. He had begun life almost a beggar, sleeping on a chest, going without food, in tatters, giving himself no respite from drudgery, sustained by one idea, one wish!--to be rich. And rich he had become; he had built houses on speculation at Florence, to let them out; and had farms at Citta della Pieve, and land near Perugia. He had obtained all he had ever desired or could conceive desirable: safety from poverty. In other things he did not believe: not in an after life, nor in God, nor in good; all these ideas, says Vasari, could never enter into his porphyry hard brain, "This Peter placed all his hopes in the good things of fortune, and for money would have made any evil bargain."

This is how Vasari has shown us Perugino. The unique painter of archangels and seraphs appears a base commercial speculator, a cynic, an atheist: the sort of man whom you could imagine transfigured into a shabby pettifogging Faustus, triumphing over the fiend by making over to him, in return for solid ducats, a bond mortgaging a soul which he knew himself never to have possessed. Some people may say, as learned folk are forever saying now-a-days, that all this is pure slander on the part of Vasari; and indeed, what satisfactory historical villain shall we soon possess, at the rate of present learned rehabilitations? Be this as it may, there remains for the present the typical contrast between this man and his works; and looking at it, other contrasts between noble art and grovelling artists vaguely occur to us, and we ask ourselves, Can it be? Can a pure and exquisite work be produced by a base nature? Can such anomaly exist--must the mental product not be stained by the vileness of the mind which has conceived it? Must we, together with a precious and noble gift taken from a hand we should shrink from touching, accept the disheartening, the debasing conclusion, that in art purity may spring from foulness, and the excellent be born of the base? It is a conclusion from which we instinctively shrink, feeling, rather than absolutely understanding, that it seems to strip the holiness from art, the worthiness, nay, almost the innocence, from our enjoyment. We feel towards any beautiful work of art something akin to love: a sort of desire to absorb it into our soul, to raise ourselves to it, to be with it in some manner united; and thus the mere thought that all this may be sprung from out of unworthiness, that this noble century-enduring work may be the sister of who knows how many long dead base thoughts and desires and resolves born together with it in the nature of its maker--this idea of contamination of origin, makes us shudder and suspect.... Alas, how many of us, of the better and nobler of us, have not often sickened for a moment as the thought quivered across their mind of the foulness out of which the noblest of our art has arisen. But instinctively we have struck down the half-formulated idea as we dash away any suspicion against that which we love, and which our love tells us must be good. And thus, as a rule, we have persuaded ourselves that, though by a horrible fatality our greatest art--in sculpture, and painting, and music, and poetry, has oftenest belonged not to a simple and austere state of society, to the strong manly days of Greece or Rome, to the first times of Christian abnegation and martyrdom, to the childlike angelic revival of mediaeval Christianity, to the solemn self-concentration of Huguenot France or Puritan England, that it has not sprung out of the straightforward purity of periods of moral regeneration, but rather from out of the ferment, nay, the putrescence, of many-sided, perplexed, anomalous times of social dissolution. That although our greatest art seems thus undeniably to have arisen in corrupt times, yet the individuals to whom we proximately owe have been the nobler and purer of their day. Nay, we almost persuade ourselves that in those dubious times of doubt and dissolution, the spotless, the unshaken were in a way divinely selected, like so many vestal virgins, to cherish in isolation the holy fire of art. And we call up to our minds men noble and pure, like Michael Angelo and Beethoven: we eagerly treasure up like relics anecdotes showing the gentleness and generosity of men like Lionardo and Mozart: trifling tales of caged-birds let loose, or of poor fellow-workers assisted, which, in our desire to trace art back to a noble origin, seem to shed so much light upon the production of a great picture or great symphony. And yet, even as the words leave our lips, words so sincerely consoling, we seem to catch in our voice an unintentional inflexion of deriding scepticism. So much light! these tales of mere ordinary goodness, such as we might hear (did we care) of so many a dull and blundering artisan, or vacant idler, these tales shed so much light upon the production of great works of art! A sort of reasoning devil seems to possess us, to twitch our little morsels of unreasoned consolation, of sanctifying, mystical half-reasoning away from our peace-hungry souls. And he says: "What of Perugino? What of so many undeniable realities which this Perugino of ours, even if the purest myth, so completely typifies? How did this cynic, this atheist, come to paint these saints? You say that he was no cynic, no atheist, that it is all vile slander." Well, I won't dispute that: perhaps he was a saint after all. I will even grant that he was. But in return for the concession, let us examine whether the saints could not have been equally well painted by the traditional, unrehabilitated Perugino, Vasari's Perugino--not the real one, oh no, I will admit not the real one--by the typical Perugino; the man "of exceeding little religion, who could never be got to believe in the soul's immortality; nay, with arguments suited to his porphyry intellect, obstinately refused all good paths; who placed all his hopes in the goods of fortune and for money would have consented to any evil compact." Nay, even by a Perugino a good deal worse.

An ugly, impertinent little reasoning fiend within us; but now-a-days we have lost the formula of exorcism for this kind of devil, and listen we must; indignantly, and with mind well made up to find all his arguments completely false. Think over the matter, now that idea is once started, we can no longer help. So let us discuss it with ourselves, within ourselves, the place where most discussion must ever go on. Let us sit here on the low-broken brick parapet, which seems to prevent all this rough, black Perugia from precipitating itself, a mass of huddled, strangled lanes, into the ravine below; sit with the grey, berry-laden olives, and twisted sere-leaved fig-trees with their little brown bursting fruit, pushing their branches up from the orchard on the steep below, where the women dawdle under the low evening sun, sickle in hand, mowing up the long juicy grass, tearing out wreath after wreath, of vine and clematis, spray after spray of feathery bluish fennel, till their wheel-shaped crammed baskets look as if destined for some sylvan god's altar, rather than to be emptied out into the sweltering darkness before the cows mewed up in the thatched hut yonder by the straw-stack and the lavender and rose-hedged tank.

The question which, we scarcely know how, has thus been started within us, and which, (like all similar questions) develops itself almost automatically in our mind, without much volition and merely a vague feeling of discomfort, until it have finally taken shape and left our consciousness for the limbo of decided points, this question is simply: What are the relations between the character of the work of art and the character of the artist who creates it? To what extent may we infer from the peculiar nature of the one the peculiar nature of the other? Such, if we formulate it, is the question, and the answer thereunto seems obvious: that as the peculiarity of the fruit depends, caeteris paribus, upon the peculiarity of the tree (itself due in part to soil and temperature and similar external circumstances), so also must the peculiarity of the spiritual product be due to the peculiarities of the spiritual whole of which it is born. And thus, in inverted order of ideas, the definite character of the fruit proves the character of the tree, the result argues the origin: there must exist a necessary relation between the product and that which has produced. If then we find a definite quality in the works of an artist, we have a right to suppose that corresponding qualities existed in the artist himself: if the picture, or symphony, or poem be noble, and noble moreover with a special sort of nobility, then noble also, and noble with that special sort of nobility must be the artistic organism, the artist, by whom it was painted, or composed or written. And this once granted (which we cannot help granting), we must inevitably conclude that the man Perugino, who painted those wonderful intense types of complete renunciation of the world, could not in reality have been the worldly, unconscientious atheist described by Vasari. So, at least, it would seem. But tarry awhile. We have decided on analogy, and by a sort of instinct of cause and effect, that the work must correspond in its main qualities with the main qualities of the artist, of the artistic organism by which it is produced. Mark what we have said: of the artist, or artistic organism. Now what is this artistic organism, this artist? An individual, a man, surely? Yes, and no. The artist and the man are not the same: the artist is only part of the man; how much of him, depends upon the art in which he is a worker. The work is produced by the man, but not by the whole of him; only by that portion which we call the artist; and how much that portion is, what relation it bears to the whole man, we can ascertain by asking ourselves what faculties are required for the production of a work of art. And thus we soon get to a new question. The faculties required for the production of a work of art may be divided into two classes; those which directly and absolutely produce it, and those which are required to enable the production to take place without interference from contrary parts of the individual nature. These secondary qualities, merely protective as it were, are the moral qualities common, in greater or less degree, to all workers: concentration, patience, determination, desire of improvement; they are not artistic in themselves, and are not more requisite to the artist than to the thinker, or statesman, or merchant, or soldier, to preserve his very different mental powers from the disturbing influence of laziness, or fickleness, or any more positive tendencies, vices or virtues, which might interfere with the development of his talents. And of these purely protective qualities only so much need exist as the relative strength of the artistic faculty and of the unartistic tendencies of the individual require in order that the former be protected from the latter; and thus it comes that where the artistic endowment has been out of all proportion large, as in the case of such a man as Rossini, it has been able to produce the most excellent work without much of what we should call moral fibre: the man was lazy and voluptuous, but he was, above all, musical; it was easier for him to be musically active than to be merely dissipated and inactive: the artistic instincts were the strongest, and were passively followed. When these moral qualities, merely protective and secondary in art, are developed beyond the degree requisite for mere protection of the artistic faculties (a degree small in proportion to the magnitude of the artistic instinct), they become ruling characteristics of the whole individual nature, and influence all the actions of the man as distinguished from the artist: they make him as inflexible in the pursuit of the non-artistic aims of life as in that of mere excellence in his own art. The timorous and slothful Andrea del Sarto is quite as complete an artist as the eager and inquisitive Lionardo da Vinci; but, whereas Andrea's activity stops short at the limits of his powers of painting, the increasing laboriousness and never satisfied curiosity of Lionardo extend, on the contrary, to all manner of subjects quite disconnected with his real art. When once the glorious fresco of the Virgin, seated like a happier Niobe, by the mealsack, has been properly finished in the cloister of the Servites, Andrea goes home and crouches beneath the violence of his wife, or to the tavern to seek feeble consolation. But when, after never-ending alterations and additional touches, Lionardo at length permits Paolo Giocondo to carry home the portrait of his dubious, fascinating wife, he sets about mathematical problems or chemical experiments, offers to build fortresses for Caesar Borgia, manufactures a wondrous musical instrument like the fleshless skull of a horse and learns to play thereon, or writes treatises on anatomy: there is in him a desire, a capacity for work greater than even his subtle and fantasticating style of art can ever fully employ. Such are the non-artistic qualities required, merely as protectors from interference, for the production of a work of art: the same these, whatever the art, as they are the same if, instead of art, we consider science, or commerce, or any other employment. The artistic, the really directly productive qualities, differ of course according to the art to which the work belongs, differ not only in nature but also in number. For there are some arts in which the work is produced by a very small number of faculties; others where it requires a very complex machine, which we call a whole individuality: and here we find ourselves back again before our original question, to what extent the personality of an artist influences the character of his work. We have got back to the anomaly typified by Perugino; back to it, and as completely without an answer to the problem as we were on starting. We have been losing our time, going round and round a question merely to find ourselves at our original starting-point. Not so: going round the question indeed, but in constantly narrowing circles, which will dwindle, let us hope, till we find ourselves on the only indivisible centre, which is the solution of the problem. For there are many questions which are like the towns of this same Umbria of Perugino: built upon the brink of a precipice, walled round with a wall of unhewn rock, seeming so near if we look up at them from the ravine below, and see every roof, and cypress-tree, and pillared balcony; but which we cannot approach by scaling the unscalable, sheer precipice, but must slowly wind round from below, circling up and down endless undulations of vineyard and oakwood, coming for ever upon a tantalising glimpse of towers and walls, for ever seemingly close above us, and yet forever equally distant; till at last, by a sharp turn of the gradually ascending road, we find ourselves before the unexpected gates of the city. And thus we have approached a little nearer to the solution of the question. We have, in our wanderings, left behind one part of the ground. We have admitted that the work of art is produced not by the man, but merely by that portion of him which we call the artist; we have even dimly foreseen that the case may be that in one art the artist, that is to say, the art-producing organism, comprises nearly the whole of the mere individual: that the artistic part is very nearly the complete human whole. Now, in order to approach nearer our final conclusion, namely, whether the man Perugino could have painted those saints and those angels had he really been the mercenary atheist of Vasari, we must set afresh to examine what, in the various arts, are the portions of an individual necessary to constitute the mere artist, that is to say, the producer of a work of art.

But stop again. Are we quite sure that we know what we mean when we say "a work of art?" Are we quite sure that we may not, without knowing it, be talking of two things under one name? Surely not: when we apply the word to one of Perugino's archangels, we certainly refer to one whole object. So far, certainly, we mean (let us put it in the crudest way) a certain amount of colour laid on to a canvas in such a manner, and with such arrangements of tints and shadows, that it presents to our eyes and mind a certain form, a form which we define, from its resemblance to other forms made out of flesh and bone, the face and body of a young man; a form which, owing to certain constitutional peculiarities and engrained habits of our mind, we also declare to a given extent beautiful. This form, moreover, distinctly recalls to our mind real forms which experience has taught us to associate with the idea of moral purity, self-forgetfulness, piety; simply because we have noticed or been told since our infancy that persons with such bodily aspects are usually pure, self-forgetful and pious; because, without our knowing it, thousands of painters have accustomed us by giving us such forms as the portraits of saints to consider this physical type as distinctly saintly. This perception, that the form into which the colours on Perugino's canvas have been combined is such as we are accustomed to think of in connection with saintliness, immediately awakens in our mind a whole train of associations: we not merely see with our physical eyes the combination of colours and lines constituting the form, but with our mental eyes we rapidly and half unconsciously glance over all the occupations, aspirations, habits of such a creature as we conceive this form to belong to. We not merely see the delicate, thin, pale lips, thrown back head and neck, and the wide-opened, dilated, greyish eyes; we imagine in our mind the vague delights after which those lips are thirsting as the half-closed pale flowers thirst for the rain-drops, the ecstasy of fulfilled hope which makes the veins of the neck pulse and the head fall back in weariness of inner quivering; the confused glory of heaven after which those wide-opened eyes are straining; while our bodily sight is resting on the mere coloured surface of Perugino's picture, our mental sight is wandering across all the past and future of this strange being whose bodily semblance the artist has suddenly thrust upon us. All this is what we vaguely think of when we speak of a work of art. Perhaps we can so little disentangle our impressions and our fancies that their combination may thus be treated as a unity. But this unity is a dualism: the mere colour arrangement constituting the form which we see with our bodily eyes, and with our bodily eyes find beautiful, is one half; and the whole moral apparition, conjured up by association and imagination, is the other. And, as far as so infinitely interwoven a dualism can be divided, coarsely, and leaving or taking too much on one side or the other, we can divide this dual existence into that which has been given to us by the artist, the visible, material form; and that which association, recollection, fancy, has been added by ourselves to the artist's work. Of this dualism, therefore, of impression and fancy, only that portion of the work of art which is absolutely visible and concrete; the form, whether it exist in combined colour and shadow, or marble mass, as in the plastic arts, or in partially combined and partially successive sounds, as in music, only this form is really given by the artist, is that which, with reference to his productive power, we can call the work of art. He may, it is true, have deliberately chosen that form which should lead us to such associations of ideas, but in so far he has been acting not as the artist, but as a sort of foreshadowed spectator or listener; he has, before taking up his own work with the mere material, visible, tangible, audible realities of the art, stepped into the place to be occupied by ourselves, and foreseen, by his knowledge of the effects which he can produce, by his experience of what associations are awakened by each of his various forms, the imaginative activities which his yet unfinished work will call for in those who see or hear it. But he will, in so doing, be deliberately or unconsciously leaving his own work, forestalling ours: nay, the artist who says to himself, "Now I will paint a soul in a condition of ecstasy," is in reality transforming himself into the customer who would enter his workshop and say, "Paint me a figure such as your experience tells you suggests to beholders the idea of religious enthusiasm; copy the features of any religious enthusiast of your acquaintance, or put together such dispersed features as seem to you indicative of that temper of mind." All this, while the real artistic work has not begun; for that begins when the artist first places before his easel the model for his archangel: either the delicate, hectic, little girlish novice-boy, or the distinct outline of the armed young angel existing in his mind and requiring only to be printed off into concrete existence. Thus, in our examination of the amount of an artist's personality which can go into his work, we must remember that this work is merely the externally existing, definite, finite form, and not the ideas of emotions which, by the power of association, that form may awaken in ourselves. What the artist gives is merely the arrangement of lines and colours in a given manner, which may, as in painting, resemble an already existing natural object; or, as in architecture and pattern decoration, resemble no already existing natural object; the arrangement of sounds which may, as in a dramatic air, recall the inflexions proper to a given emotion, or, as in a formal fugue, recall no emotional inflexions whatever. This, and not any train of thoughts awakened by this possibly but not necessarily existing resemblance to an already known natural object, or to an already known sort of emotional voice inflexion, is what is given by the artist, and this is artistic form, the absolutely, objectively existing work of art. And now we may examine what mental faculties, in the various arts, are required for the production of this work: what portions of the whole individual man are included or excluded in that smaller, more limited individual whom we call the artist. Let us investigate the point by a sort of experiment: by stripping away, one by one, those qualities of an ideal individual which are not necessary for the production of the various kinds of artistic work; let us separate and afterwards, if need be, select and reunite the qualities which are required and those which are not required to make up a poet, a painter, a sculptor, or a musician.

And first we must create our ideal man, who contains within him the stuff of every kind of artist, the faculties of producing every kind of artistic work. First, a word about this ideal man, and about the manner in which he differs from other men. He differs in completeness, in balance, in intensity. For almost every one of us has some mental faculty so imperfectly developed that we may say that it does not exist: it exists indeed, and perhaps not without a certain necessary effect, but as with a single solitary instrument in a powerful orchestra of dozens of every other kind of instruments, this effect is not consciously perceived. And the faculties which we do possess are rarely of very remarkable strength and intensity: we have enough of them for our ordinary wants of life, but not necessarily more. Our sense of hearing is sufficient to distinguish the voice of one friend from another, but not always sufficient to be able to enjoy music, still less often to perform, least often of all to compose. And similarly with every other mental faculty: most men can follow a simple argument, some a more complex one, but few can reason out unaided a complicated proposition. Now the creative degree in any faculty is the most intense in its development. The painter is the man who receives the largest number of most delicately complete visional impressions; the musician the man who receives the largest number of most delicately complete audible impressions: to the painter everything is a shape, a colour; to the musician everything is a sound; the whole universe, to the thinker, is but a concatenation of logical propositions. Thus, our ideal man must, at starting, possess every higher faculty, developed to the most intense degree, and every one of them developed equally: for out of him is to be made every kind of artist. Here, then, we have our ideal man: he possesses in the highest degree, and in the most perfect balance, all the emotional, logical, and perceptive powers of the mind; he is, if you choose, the abstract creature (never existing, and never, alas! to exist), the all beautiful, all powerful, perfect fiction, which we call humanity; and with him is our work. He is perfectly balanced, he is a mere abstraction: for these two reasons he is, so far, inactive; we cannot, with the best will in the world, imagine his doing anything as long as he can do everything: he will, in all probability, merely passively enjoy. Before he can create, we must alter him. And he is to create, remember, not as a statesman or a handicraftsman, but as an artist: he is to deal not with realities, but with fictions; he is not to touch our material interests, he is merely to evoke for us a series of phantom sights or sounds, of phantom men and women. Therefore, our first act must be to diminish, by at least a half, all the practical sides of his nature, so that no practical activities divert him from his purely ideal field. So that it be for him infinitely more natural to think, to feel, to imitate, to combine impressions, than to be of any immediate use in the world; so that the mere employment of his powers be his furthest aim, without thinking what effect that employment will have upon the real condition of himself or of others. This much we have done: we have obtained a creature whose interest is never purely practical. But this will not suffice. We must diminish by at least a quarter his mere logical powers, thus rendering him far more inclined to view things as concrete, living manifestations, than as logical abstractions. This has served to prevent his being diverted into metaphysic or scientific speculations: there is now no longer any fear of his becoming a psychologist instead of a poet, a mathematician or physicist instead of a painter or a composer: things now interest him no longer for their practical bearing, nor for their abstract meaning: he cares for them not as forces, nor as ideas, but as forms, as visions. And this time we have, as it were, rough-hewn our artist. But what artist? He is, it is true, mainly attracted by the mere contemplation of things apart from practical or scientific interests, but he is equally attracted by all sorts of visions: he receives every kind of impression. This time, again, he will, from perfect balance, remain inactive. We must throw his faculties a little into disorder, we must, at random, diminish here in order (relatively) to increase there: let us, for instance, diminish by a trifle his faculty for manipulating colours or masses of stone, his faculty for conceiving sounds in succession and in combination; let us, in short, make it a little difficult for him to be a painter or sculptor or musician.

What will he be, this first made artist of ours? this creature, clipped in all the mere practically scientific instincts, only that his whole intense personality may be given more completely, more absolutely to the world of artistic phantoms? Before breaking up this huge psychological snow-man, this ungainly monster roughly moulded into caricature shape by awkward removing of material here and adding on there, before dashing it back into the limbo of used up and unformed similes, let us ask ourselves what artist he vaguely resembles: what is the artist thus formed, it would seem, of a mere intense human being; of all the faculties of our nature, only more subtle and powerful, and working not in the world of practical realities, nor of abstract truths, but in that of imaginary forms? The answer comes instinctively, unhesitatingly to all of us: this universal artist, this artistic organism which contains the whole intensified individual, is the poet. Nay: why call him poet? why reserve this supreme place of artist not of colours or sounds, but of spoken emotion, and perception, and action, for the man whose words are grouped into metrical shape? Is it this metrical shape, this mere enveloping form perceived merely by the ear, this monotonous, rudimentary music, so paltry by the side of the musician's real music, is it this which requires for its production that wondrous combination of faculties, that whole intensified human individuality? For those same faculties, that same intensified individuality, will act and bear fruit in the man who lets his words drift on, unmetrical, in mere spoken manner. And yet he shall be accounted less, and shall cede to the other, who can measure his words into verses, and couple them into rhyme. Surely there is injustice in this. Wherefore, I pray you, should you, my friend, my beloved little child poet, with the keen eyes and eager lips of Keats, who sit (in fancy at least) here by my side on the rough wall overlooking the orchard ravine at Perugia, drowsily listening (as poets listen to prose) to our discussion, wherefore should you, the poet, be worth more than I, the prose writer, merely inasmuch as you are the one and I am the other? Why be surrounded, even in my eyes, by a sort of ideal halo; why pointed out by my own secret instinct as the artist? All this must be mere folly, prejudice, dried old forms of thought handed down from the days when poets were priests and lawgivers and prophets, when their very credit depended upon their not being solely what you modern poets are; all this is a mere historic myth, in which the world continues foolishly to believe, letting itself be told from generation to generation, till the idea has become engrained in its mode of thinking, that the poet is a special creature, a thing of finer mould, in whose life, and movements, and feelings it expects something different from the rest of humanity; in whose eyes it seeks a dim reflection, in whose voice a distant echo of the colours and sounds of that fairyland out of which he has come as a changeling into the world of realities. Infatuation and injustice. But no! mankind at large is right in its ideas, but as it usually is, without knowing why it has them: right in giving instinctively this place of artist of the merely suggested, as distinguished from the absolutely seen or heard forms of other arts, to the poet alone. For the poet is, in the kingdom of words, the real, complete artist. The artistic external form which he gives to his creations removes them out of the domain of the practically useful, or the scientifically interesting. This metrical setting enables the poet to show a part, to make perfect the tiniest thing; to give complete significance, complete beauty, and eternal life to a perception, an emotion, an image which cannot be expanded beyond the fourteen lines of a sonnet; while the poor prose writer, reduced to being a mere smith or mechanist, can do nothing with any stray gem he may cut, knows not how to set it, and is forced in despair to stick it clumsily into some unwieldy utensil or implement, some pot out of which to drink knowledge, or some shield to ward off disaster. The prose writer is for ever being driven to seek employment outside the land of pure art. Therefore, the poet is truly the exclusive artist in words; or rather the exclusive artist in words must needs become the poet; if the man feel that he cannot hammer wearily at some clumsy ornamented piece of furniture, some bastard of artistic uselessness and practical utility, that he cannot write histories, or ethical disquisitions or psychological studies (waxworks of spiritual pathology, technically called novels), in order to bury in them the delicate artistic fragments which he spontaneously produces; then that man will assuredly learn the manner of making metrical settings; that man, that word artist will infallibly become a poet: nay, he is one. Thus, the poet is in reality the artist who suggests emotions, and actions, and sights, and sounds, as the painter is the artist who shows coloured shapes, and the musician the artist who creates forms made of sounds. The poet, therefore, is the artist into whose work there enters, or can enter, the greatest number of fragments of his whole personality: for his works are made up of all that which his nature perceives and evolves and desires: of the forests and fields, and sea and skies which have printed their likenesses on his mind; of the faces and movements of the men and women whom he has known, nay, of whom once perhaps, only once in his life, he has caught a never forgotten glimpse; of the events which have taken place before his eyes, or of which he has been told; of the emotions and passions which he has felt hidden in himself or seen burst out in others; of all that he can see, feel, hear, conceive, imagine. He is the man who assimilates most, initiates most, perceives most of all that passes within and without him, and unites it all in a homogeneous outer shape: nothing for him is waste: not the hard, scaly first shoot of the reed, pale green, which catches his feet as he walks on the riverside, across the grass, half sere, half renovated by spring; not the scent of first raindrops on the upturned mould of the fields; not the sentence read at random in a book opened by accident; not the sudden, never-recurring look in the eyes of one beloved; not the base appetite which he has hidden away, trampled back out of sight of his own consciousness; not the preposterous ideal which his vanity may have shown him for one second; not anything, however small or however large, however common or however rare, not anything inanimate or feeling, not anything in life or in death, not anything which can be seen, or heard, or felt, or understood, which may not be moulded by the poet into some form which will have meaning and charm, and eternal value for all men. The poet is the man who receives a greater number of more intense impressions than any other man; he is, of all creatures, the most sensitive in the whole of his being; for the whole of his being is at once the raw material, and the forming mechanism of the work of art. This is the ideal, the universal poet, the type: of him every individual poet represents a limited portion, and is a fresh repartition of faculties, a fresh combination and proportion of material and mechanism, due to the accident of race, of time, of birth, of education. The typical poet assimilates and reproduces everything; and each fragment of this type, each individual, differs from every other individual in that which is assimilated and reproduced by him: the one feels more, the other sees more, the third imagines more; and each feels, sees, and imagines, according to what external things have been put within reach of his feelings, his sight, his fancy. As, therefore, the typical poet is the whole type of humanity affording material and acting as manipulative apparatus to produce the work of art, so also the individual poet is the individual man, moulding into shape all the qualities which are strongest in his nature. All the qualities, let us however mark, which are indisputedly dominant; often, therefore, only the better, and in only the lowest tempers the worst. For, remembering what we noticed about moral faculties of will which protect the artistic workings from the interference of other parts of our nature, we may see that it must often happen that a noble spirit may be able to keep out of his mere abstract creations those baser instincts (which though recognized with shame) he is unable to subdue in practice; his works show him as he would desire himself to be, as he, alas! has not the strength to be in reality; let us not, therefore, complain of those who are unable to live up to their conceptions, for they have given to us their better part, and kept for themselves, with bitterness and shame, their worse.

The poet, therefore, is the artist into whose work there enters the greatest proportion of his individual nature; if he be flippant in temper his works cannot be earnest; if he be impure his writings cannot be actively pure; the distinctive features of his nature must be reflected in his work, since his work is made out of and by his nature. Now let us proceed. We had constructed a sort of typical giant, promising all the powers and qualities of all humanity; and this, by the gradually stripping away of some of these human powers, we had reduced to the condition of typical poet. Now let us continue our work. Of course there are kinds of poetry which form links with other intellectual work; and to obtain these we must remove such faculties as do not enter into them: separate from the artist those qualities which belong only to the man. There is first of all that great poetical anomaly the drama, for which, it would seem, that less of the writer's own personality is required than for any other form; for the dramatist stands half way between the artist and the psychologist; he can obtain innumerable varieties of character and feeling merely by his reasoning powers, not by any personal experience. He is a sort of synthetic metaphysician, who can construct the saint, the villain, the simpleton, the knave, not out of anything within himself, but out of the very elements of these characters which he has obtained by analysis; hence it is that, while we can from their works reconstruct the character of poets like Milton, or Wordsworth, or Leopardi, or Musset, we remain wholly ignorant of the personality of Shakespeare; he cannot be all that he shows us, and in the doubt he remains none of it at all. Let us put aside therefore this anomalous artist, and continue stripping away some of the purely emotional characters of our typical colossus. We shall soon meet the last and simplest form of poet--the mere describer; of his aspirations and emotions we know but little; we know only of his tastes, his preferences for certain sights and sounds. He cares for the sea, or the woods, or the fields, or the skies; he is very near being a mere thing of eyes and ears. Yet not wholly; for he perceives not only the colour and movement of the waves, but their sound, their briny scent; he perceives not only the green and tawny tints of leaves and moss, he hears the crackling of the brushwood, the rustling of the boughs, the confused hum of bees, the faint murmur of waters; nay, in the waves and in the woods he perceives something more, vague resemblances to other things; vague expressions of mood and feeling which, when the waters rush in, make his heart leap; when the grey light steals in among the branches, sends a sadness throughout him. Nay, in this artist, in this simplest, least human sort of poet, there remains yet an infinite amount of the human individuality, of its passions and desires. Let us tear away, throw aside this last amount of human feeling, reduce our typical artist to mere intense powers of seeing. Shall we still have wherewith to obtain any work at all? will this rarified, simplified mentality be much above a mere feelingless optic machine? Let us see. Here we have a creature out of which we have removed as much as possible of all human qualities: a creature which can perceive with infinite keenness and reproduce with the most perfect exactitude, every little subtle line and tint and shadow which escapes other men; a creature whose delicate perception vibrates with delight at every harmonious combination, and writhes, as if it would shatter to atoms, at every displeasing mixture of lines or colours. A living and most sensitive organism which feels, thinks everything as form and colour, fostered with the utmost care by other such organisms, themselves nurtured into intensity more intense than that with which they were born; for ever put in contact with the visual objects which are, let us remember, the air it breathes, the food it assimilates until this visual organism becomes beyond compare perfect in its power of perceiving and reproducing. Then, imagine this abstract being, this quivering thing of sight, placed in the midst of a country of austere, delicate lines, and solemn yet diaphanous tints; among the undulating fields and oakwoods, beneath the pearly sky of Umbria; imagine that before it are placed, as the creatures most precious and lovely, the creatures whose likeness must for ever be copied in all its intensity, youths, young women, old men, delicate and emaciate with solitude and maceration, with eyes grown dilated and bright from straining to see the glorious visions, the celestial day-dreams which flit across their mind; with lips grown tremulous and eager with passionate longing for constantly expected, never-coming bliss; always alone, inactive, with listless limbs and workless hands, in the bare, unadorned cell or oratory; or if, coming forth, walking through the streets, passing through the crowd (giving way with awe), erect, self-engrossed, seeing and hearing nothing around, like one entranced. Let us imagine this organism, thus perfect for perceiving and reproducing all that it sees, for ever in the presence of such lines and colours, such faces and figures as these; and then let us ask ourselves what this quite abstract, unhuman power will produce, what this artist, who is completely divested of all that which belongs merely to the man, would paint. What would that be, that work thus produced? What save those delicate, wan angels and saints and apostles, standing in solitary contemplation and ecstasy, those scarcely embodied souls, raised beyond the bounds of time and space, concentrated, absorbed in longing for heavenly perfection? And if this subtle visual organism, nurtured among these sights, should happen to be lodged in the same body with a sordid, base, cynical temper, can it be altered thereby? Surely not. The eye has seen, the hand has reproduced--seen and reproduced that which surrounds them--and inevitably, fatally, although eye and hand belonged to the man "who placed all his hopes in the good things of fortune, into whose porphyry brain no idea of good could enter, who for money would have concluded any evil bargain," the work thus produced by this commonplace, grasping atheist, Peter Perugino, must be the ideal of all purely devotional art. He was an atheist and a cynic, but he was a great painter, and lived in Umbria, in the country of sweet and austere hills and valleys, in the country whose moral air was still scented by the "flowerets of St. Francis."

This is the end of our long wandering up and down, round and round, the question of artistic personality, even as we must wander up and down, round and round, before we can reach any of these strange Umbrian towns. And, as after long journeying, when we enter the city, and find that that which seemed a castle, a grand, princely town, all walled and towered and battlemented, is in reality only a large, rough village, with blackened houses and fissured church steeples, a place containing nothing of any interest: so also in this case, when we have finally reached our paltry conclusion that this painter of saints was no saint himself, we must admit to ourselves that to arrive at this conclusion was scarcely our real object; even as while travelling through this country of Perugino we make our guide confess that what, in all this expedition, we were meant to see and enjoy, was not the paltry, deceptive hill-top village, but the sere-brown oakwoods, tinged russet by the sun, the grey olive hills through which we have slowly ascended, and the glimpses of undulating grey-green country and distant wave-blue mountains which we have had at every new turn of our long and up-hill road.

[The end]
Vernon Lee's essay: In Umbria, A Study Of Artistic Personality

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