Stones of Venice, Volume 3 — Chapter 02, Roman Renaissance, part 6

§ LXXXV.

Thus far, then, of the second element of the Renaissance spirit, the Pride of State; nor need we go farther to learn the reason of the fall of Venice.

She was already likened in her thoughts, and was therefore to be likened in her ruin, to the Virgin of Babylon.

The Pride of State and the Pride of Knowledge were no new passions: the sentence against them had gone forth from everlasting.

"Thou saidst, I shall be a lady for ever; so that thou didst not lay these things to thine heart ...

_Thy wisdom and thy knowledge, it hath perverted thee_; and thou hast said in thine heart, I am, and none else beside me.

Therefore shall evil come upon thee ...

; thy merchants from thy youth, they shall wander every one to his quarter; none shall save thee."

[21] § LXXXVI.

III. PRIDE OF SYSTEM.

I might have illustrated these evil principles from a thousand other sources, but I have not time to pursue the subject farther, and must pass to the third element above named, the Pride of System.

It need not detain us so long as either of the others, for it is at once more palpable and less dangerous.

The manner in which the pride of the fifteenth century corrupted the sources of knowledge, and diminished the majesty, while it multiplied the trappings, of state, is in general little observed; but the reader is probably already well and sufficiently aware of the curious tendency to formulization and system which, under the name of philosophy, encumbered the minds of the Renaissance schoolmen.

As it was above stated, grammar became the first of sciences; and whatever subject had to be treated, the first aim of the philosopher was to subject its principles to a code of laws, in the observation of which the merit of the speaker, thinker, or worker, in or on that subject, was thereafter to consist; so that the whole mind of the world was occupied by the exclusive study of Restraints.

The sound of the forging of fetters was heard from sea to sea.

The doctors of all the arts and sciences set themselves daily to the invention of new varieties of cages and manacles; they themselves wore, instead of gowns, a chain mail, whose purpose was not so much to avert the weapon of the adversary as to restrain the motions of the wearer; and all the acts, thoughts, and workings of mankind,--poetry, painting, architecture, and philosophy,--were reduced by them merely to so many different forms of fetter-dance.

§ LXXXVII.

Now, I am very sure that no reader who has given any attention to the former portions of this work, or the tendency of what else I have written, more especially the last chapter of the "Seven Lamps," will suppose me to underrate the importance, or dispute the authority, of law.

It has been necessary for me to allege these again and again, nor can they ever be too often or too energetically alleged, against the vast masses of men who now disturb or retard the advance of civilization; heady and high-minded, despisers of discipline, and refusers of correction.

But law, so far as it can be reduced to form and system, and is not written upon the heart,--as it is, in a Divine loyalty, upon the hearts of the great hierarchies who serve and wait about the throne of the Eternal Lawgiver,--this lower and formally expressible law has, I say, two objects.

It is either for the definition and restraint of sin, or the guidance of simplicity; it either explains, forbids, and punishes wickedness, or it guides the movements and actions both of lifeless things and of the more simple and untaught among responsible agents.

And so long, therefore, as sin and foolishness are in the world, so long it will be necessary for men to submit themselves painfully to this lower law, in proportion to their need of being corrected, and to the degree of childishness or simplicity by which they approach more nearly to the condition of the unthinking and inanimate things which are governed by law altogether; yet yielding, in the manner of their submission to it, a singular lesson to the pride of man,--being obedient more perfectly in proportion to their greatness.

[22] But, so far as men become good and wise, and rise above the state of children, so far they become emancipated from this written law, and invested with the perfect freedom which consists in the fulness and joyfulness of compliance with a higher and unwritten law; a law so universal, so subtle, so glorious, that nothing but the heart can keep it.

§ LXXXVIII.

Now pride opposes itself to the observance of this Divine law in two opposite ways: either by brute resistance, which is the way of the rabble and its leaders, denying or defying law altogether; or by formal compliance, which is the way of the Pharisee, exalting himself while he pretends to obedience, and making void the infinite and spiritual commandment by the finite and lettered commandment.

And it is easy to know which law we are obeying: for any law which we magnify and keep through pride, is always the law of the letter; but that which we love and keep through humility, is the law of the Spirit: And the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life.

§ LXXXIX.

In the appliance of this universal principle to what we have at present in hand, it is to be noted, that all written or writable law respecting the arts is for the childish and ignorant: that in the beginning of teaching, it is possible to say that this or that must or must not be done; and laws of color and shade may be taught, as laws of harmony are to the young scholar in music.

But the moment a man begins to be anything deserving the name of an artist, all this teachable law has become a matter of course with him; and if, thenceforth, he boast himself anywise in the law, or pretend that he lives and works by it, it is a sure sign that he is merely tithing cummin, and that there is no true art nor religion in him.

For the true artist has that inspiration in him which is above all law, or rather, which is continually working out such magnificent and perfect obedience to supreme law, as can in no wise be rendered by line and rule.

There are more laws perceived and fulfilled in the single stroke of a great workman, than could be written in a volume.

His science is inexpressibly subtle, directly taught him by his Maker, not in any wise communicable or imitable.

[23] Neither can any written or definitely observable laws enable us to do any great thing.

It is possible, by measuring and administering quantities of color, to paint a room wall so that it shall not hurt the eye; but there are no laws by observing which we can become Titians.

It is possible so to measure and administer syllables, as to construct harmonious verse; but there are no laws by which we can write Iliads.

Out of the poem or the picture, once produced, men may elicit laws by the volume, and study them with advantage, to the better understanding of the existing poem or picture; but no more write or paint another, than by discovering laws of vegetation they can make a tree to grow.

And therefore, wheresoever we find the system and formality of rules much dwelt upon, and spoken of as anything else than a help for children, there we may be sure that noble art is not even understood, far less reached.

And thus it was with all the common and public mind in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The greater men, indeed, broke through the thorn hedges; and, though much time was lost by the learned among them in writing Latin verses and anagrams, and arranging the framework of quaint sonnets and dexterous syllogisms, still they tore their way through the sapless thicket by force of intellect or of piety; for it was not possible that, either in literature or in painting, rules could be received by any strong mind, so as materially to interfere with its originality: and the crabbed discipline and exact scholarship became an advantage to the men who could pass through and despise them; so that in spite of the rules of the drama we had Shakspeare, and in spite of the rules of art we had Tintoret,--both of them, to this day, doing perpetual violence to the vulgar scholarship and dim-eyed proprieties of the multitude.

§ XC.

But in architecture it was not so; for that was the art of the multitude, and was affected by all their errors; and the great men who entered its field, like Michael Angelo, found expression for all the best part of their minds in sculpture, and made the architecture merely its shell.

So the simpletons and sophists had their way with it: and the reader can have no conception of the inanities and puerilities of the writers, who, with the help of Vitruvius, re-established its "five orders," determined the proportions of each, and gave the various recipes for sublimity and beauty, which have been thenceforward followed to this day, but which may, I believe, in this age of perfect machinery, be followed out still farther.

If, indeed, there are only five perfect forms of columns and architraves, and there be a fixed proportion to each, it is certainly possible, with a little ingenuity, so to regulate a stonecutting machine, as that it shall furnish pillars and friezes to the size ordered, of any of the five orders, on the most perfect Greek models, in any quantity; an epitome, also, of Vitruvius, may be made so simple, as to enable any bricklayer to set them up at their proper distances, and we may dispense with our architects altogether.

§ XCI.

But if this be not so, and there be any truth in the faint persuasion which still lurks in men's minds that architecture _is_ an art, and that it requires some gleam of intellect to practise it, then let the whole system of the orders and their proportions be cast out and trampled down as the most vain, barbarous, and paltry deception that was ever stamped on human prejudice; and let us understand this plain truth, common to all work of man, that, if it be good work, it is not a copy, nor anything done by rule, but a freshly and divinely imagined thing.

Five orders!

There is not a side chapel in any Gothic cathedral but it has fifty orders, the worst of them better than the best of the Greek ones, and all new; and a single inventive human soul could create a thousand orders in an hour.

[24] And this would have been discovered even in the worst times, but that, as I said, the greatest men of the age found expression for their invention in the other arts, and the best of those who devoted themselves to architecture were in great part occupied in adapting the construction of buildings to new necessities, such as those developed by the invention of gunpowder (introducing a totally new and most interesting science of fortification, which directed the ingenuity of Sanmicheli and many others from its proper channel), and found interest of a meaner kind in the difficulties of reconciling the obsolete architectural laws they had consented to revive, and the forms of Roman architecture which they agreed to copy, with the requirements of the daily life of the sixteenth century.

§ XCII.

These, then, were the three principal directions in which the Renaissance pride manifested itself, and its impulses were rendered still more fatal by the entrance of another element, inevitably associated with pride.

For, as it is written, "He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool," so also it is written, "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God;" and the self-adulation which influenced not less the learning of the age than its luxury, led gradually to the forgetfulness of all things but self, and to an infidelity only the more fatal because it still retained the form and language of faith.

§ XCIII.

IV. INFIDELITY.

In noticing the more prominent forms in which this faithlessness manifested itself, it is necessary to distinguish justly between that which was the consequence of respect for Paganism, and that which followed from the corruption of Catholicism.

For as the Roman architecture is not to be made answerable for the primal corruption of the Gothic, so neither is the Roman philosophy to be made answerable for the primal corruption of Christianity.

Year after year, as the history of the life of Christ sank back into the depths of time, and became obscured by the misty atmosphere of the history of the world,--as intermediate actions and incidents multiplied in number, and countless changes in men's modes of life, and tones of thought, rendered it more difficult for them to imagine the facts of distant time,--it became daily, almost hourly, a greater effort for the faithful heart to apprehend the entire veracity and vitality of the story of its Redeemer;

and more easy for the thoughtless and remiss to deceive themselves as to the true character of the belief they had been taught to profess.

And this must have been the case, had the pastors of the Church never failed in their watchfulness, and the Church itself never erred in its practice or doctrine.

But when every year that removed the truths of the Gospel into deeper distance, added to them also some false or foolish tradition; when wilful distortion was added to natural obscurity, and the dimness of memory was disguised by the fruitfulness of fiction;

when, moreover, the enormous temporal power granted to the clergy attracted into their ranks multitudes of men who, but for such temptation, would not have pretended to the Christian name, so that grievous wolves entered in among them, not sparing the flock; and when, by the machinations of such men, and the remissness of others, the form and administrations of Church doctrine and discipline had become little more than a means of aggrandizing the power of the priesthood, it was impossible any longer for men of thoughtfulness or piety to remain in an unquestioning serenity of faith.

The Church had become so mingled with the world that its witness could no longer be received; and the professing members of it, who were placed in circumstances such as to enable them to become aware of its corruptions, and whom their interest or their simplicity did not bribe or beguile into silence, gradually separated themselves into two vast multitudes of adverse energy, one tending to Reformation, and the other to Infidelity.

§ XCIV.

Of these, the last stood, as it were, apart, to watch the course of the struggle between Romanism and Protestantism; a struggle which, however necessary, was attended with infinite calamity to the Church.

For, in the first place, the Protestant movement was, in reality, not _reformation_ but _reanimation_.

It poured new life into the Church, but it did not form or define her anew.

In some sort it rather broke down her hedges, so that all they who passed by might pluck off her grapes.

The reformers speedily found that the enemy was never far behind the sower of good seed; that an evil spirit might enter the ranks of reformation as well as those of resistance; and that though the deadly blight might be checked amidst the wheat, there was no hope of ever ridding the wheat itself from the tares.

New temptations were invented by Satan wherewith to oppose the revived strength of Christianity: as the Romanist, confiding in his human teachers, had ceased to try whether they were teachers sent from God, so the Protestant, confiding in the teaching of the Spirit, believed every spirit, and did not try the spirits whether they were of God.

And a thousand enthusiasms and heresies speedily obscured the faith and divided the force of the Reformation.

§ XCV.

But the main evils rose out of the antagonism of the two great parties; primarily, in the mere fact of the existence of an antagonism.

To the eyes of the unbeliever the Church of Christ, for the first time since its foundation, bore the aspect of a house divided against itself.

Not that many forms of schism had not before arisen in it; but either they had been obscure and silent, hidden among the shadows of the Alps and the marshes of the Rhine; or they had been outbreaks of visible and unmistakable error, cast off by the Church, rootless, and speedily withering away, while, with much that was erring and criminal, she still retained within her the pillar and ground of the truth.

But here was at last a schism in which truth and authority were at issue.

The body that was cast off withered away no longer.

It stretched out its boughs to the sea and its branches to the river, and it was the ancient trunk that gave signs of decrepitude.

On one side stood the reanimated faith, in its right hand the book open, and its left hand lifted up to heaven, appealing for its proof to the Word of the Testimony and the power of the Holy Ghost.

On the other stood, or seemed to stand, all beloved custom and believed tradition; all that for fifteen hundred years had been closest to the hearts of men, or most precious for their help.

Long-trusted legend; long-reverenced power; long-practised discipline;

faiths that had ruled the destiny, and sealed the departure, of souls that could not be told or numbered for multitude; prayers, that from the lips of the fathers to those of the children had distilled like sweet waterfalls, sounding through the silence of ages, breaking themselves into heavenly dew to return upon the pastures of the wilderness; hopes, that had set the face as a flint in the torture, and the sword as a flame in the battle, that had pointed the purposes and ministered the strength of life, brightened the last glances and shaped the last syllables of death; charities, that had bound together the brotherhoods of the mountain and the desert, and had woven chains of pitying or aspiring communion between this world and the unfathomable beneath and above; and, more than these, the spirits of all the innumerable, undoubting, dead, beckoning to the one way by which they had been content to follow the things that belonged unto their peace;--these all stood on the other side: and the choice must have been a bitter one, even at the best; but it was rendered tenfold more bitter by the natural, but most sinful animosity of the two divisions of the Church against each other.

§ XCVI.

On one side this animosity was, of course, inevitable.

The Romanist party, though still including many Christian men, necessarily included, also, all the worst of those who called themselves Christians.

In the fact of its refusing correction, it stood confessed as the Church of the unholy; and, while it still counted among its adherents many of the simple and believing,--men unacquainted with the corruption of the body to which they belonged, or incapable of accepting any form of doctrine but that which they had been taught from their youth,--it gathered together with them whatever was carnal and sensual in priesthood or in people, all the lovers of power in the one, and of ease in the other.

And the rage of these men was, of course, unlimited against those who either disputed their authority, reprehended their manner of life, or cast suspicion upon the popular methods of lulling the conscience in the lifetime, or purchasing salvation on the death-bed.

§ XCVII.

Besides this, the reassertion and defence of various tenets which before had been little more than floating errors in the popular mind, but which, definitely attacked by Protestantism, it became necessary to fasten down with a band of iron and brass, gave a form at once more rigid, and less rational, to the whole body of Romanist Divinity.

Multitudes of minds which in other ages might have brought honor and strength to the Church, preaching the more vital truths which it still retained, were now occupied in pleading for arraigned falsehoods, or magnifying disused frivolities; and it can hardly be doubted by any candid observer, that the nascent or latent errors which God pardoned in times of ignorance, became unpardonable when they were formally defined and defended; that fallacies which were forgiven to the enthusiasm of a multitude, were avenged upon the stubbornness of a Council; that, above all, the great invention of the age, which rendered God's word accessible to every man, left all sins against its light incapable of excuse or expiation; and that from the moment when Rome set herself in direct opposition to the Bible, the judgment was pronounced upon her, which made her the scorn and the prey of her own children, and cast her down from the throne where she had magnified herself against heaven, so low, that at last the unimaginable scene of the Bethlehem humiliation was mocked in the temples of Christianity.

Judea had seen her God laid in the manger of the beasts of burden; it was for Christendom to stable the beasts of burden by the altar of her God.

§ XCVIII.

Nor, on the other hand, was the opposition of Protestantism to the Papacy less injurious to itself.

That opposition was, for the most part, intemperate, undistinguishing, and incautious.

It could indeed hardly be otherwise.

Fresh bleeding from the sword of Rome, and still trembling at her anathema, the reformed churches were little likely to remember any of her benefits, or to regard any of her teaching.

Forced by the Romanist contumely into habits of irreverence, by the Romanist fallacies into habits of disbelief, the self-trusting, rashly-reasoning spirit gained ground among them daily.

Sect branched out of sect, presumption rose over presumption; the miracles of the early Church were denied and its martyrs forgotten, though their power and palm were claimed by the members of every persecuted sect; pride, malice, wrath, love of change, masked themselves under the thirst for truth, and mingled with the just resentment of deception, so that it became impossible even for the best and truest men to know the plague of their own hearts; while avarice and impiety openly transformed reformation into robbery, and reproof into sacrilege.

Ignorance could as easily lead the foes of the Church, as lull her slumber; men who would once have been the unquestioning recipients, were now the shameless inventors of absurd or perilous superstitions; they who were of the temper that walketh in darkness, gained little by having discovered their guides to be blind; and the simplicity of the faith, ill understood and contumaciously alleged, became an excuse for the rejection of the highest arts and most tried wisdom of mankind: while the learned infidel, standing aloof, drew his own conclusions, both from the rancor of the antagonists, and from their errors; believed each in all that he alleged against the other; and smiled with superior humanity, as he watched the winds of the Alps drift the ashes of Jerome, and the dust of England drink the blood of King Charles.

§ XCIX.

Now all this evil was, of course, entirely independent of the renewal of the study of Pagan writers.

But that renewal found the faith of Christendom already weakened and divided; and therefore it was itself productive of an effect tenfold greater than could have been apprehended from it at another time.

It acted first, as before noticed, in leading the attention of all men to words instead of things; for it was discovered that the language of the middle ages had been corrupt, and the primal object of every scholar became now to purify his style.

To this study of words, that of forms being added, both as of matters of the first importance, half the intellect of the age was at once absorbed in the base sciences of grammar, logic, and rhetoric; studies utterly unworthy of the serious labor of men, and necessarily rendering those employed upon them incapable of high thoughts or noble emotion.

Of the debasing tendency of philology, no proof is needed beyond once reading a grammarian's notes on a great poet: logic is unnecessary for men who can reason; and about as useful to those who cannot, as a machine for forcing one foot in due succession before the other would be to a man who could not walk: while the study of rhetoric is exclusively one for men who desire to deceive or be deceived; he who has the truth at his heart need never fear the want of persuasion on his tongue, or, if he fear it, it is because the base rhetoric of dishonesty keeps the truth from being heard.

§ C.

The study of these sciences, therefore, naturally made men shallow and dishonest in general; but it had a peculiarly fatal effect with respect to religion, in the view which men took of the Bible.

Christ's teaching was discovered not to be rhetorical, St. Paul's preaching not to be logical, and the Greek of the New Testament not to be grammatical.

The stern truth, the profound pathos, the impatient period, leaping from point to point and leaving the intervals for the hearer to fill, the comparatively Hebraized and unelaborate idiom, had little in them of attraction for the students of phrase and syllogism; and the chief knowledge of the age became one of the chief stumbling-blocks to its religion.

§ CI.

But it was not the grammarian and logician alone who was thus retarded or perverted; in them there had been small loss.

The men who could truly appreciate the higher excellences of the classics were carried away by a current of enthusiasm which withdrew them from every other study.

Christianity was still professed as a matter of form, but neither the Bible nor the writings of the Fathers had time left for their perusal, still less heart left for their acceptance.

The human mind is not capable of more than a certain amount of admiration or reverence, and that which was given to Horace was withdrawn from David.

Religion is, of all subjects, that which will least endure a second place in the heart or thoughts, and a languid and occasional study of it was sure to lead to error or infidelity.

On the other hand, what was heartily admired and unceasingly contemplated was soon brought nigh to being believed; and the systems of Pagan mythology began gradually to assume the places in the human mind from which the unwatched Christianity was wasting.

Men did not indeed openly sacrifice to Jupiter, or build silver shrines for Diana, but the ideas of Paganism nevertheless became thoroughly vital and present with them at all times;

and it did not matter in the least, as far as respected the power of true religion, whether the Pagan image was believed in or not, so long as it entirely occupied the thoughts.

The scholar of the sixteenth century, if he saw the lightning shining from the east unto the west, thought forthwith of Jupiter, not of the coming of the Son of Man; if he saw the moon walking in brightness, he thought of Diana, not of the throne which was to be established for ever as a faithful witness in heaven; and though his heart was but secretly enticed, yet thus he denied the God that is above.

[25] And, indeed, this double creed, of Christianity confessed and Paganism beloved, was worse than Paganism itself, inasmuch as it refused effective and practical belief altogether.

It would have been better to have worshipped Diana and Jupiter at once, than to have gone on through the whole of life naming one God, imagining another, and dreading none.

Better, a thousandfold, to have been "a Pagan suckled in some creed outworn," than to have stood by the great sea of Eternity and seen no God walking on its waves, no heavenly world on its horizon.

§ CII.

This fatal result of an enthusiasm for classical literature was hastened and heightened by the misdirection of the powers of art.

The imagination of the age was actively set to realize these objects of Pagan belief; and all the most exalted faculties of man, which, up to that period, had been employed in the service of Faith, were now transferred to the service of Fiction.

The invention which had formerly been both sanctified and strengthened by laboring under the command of settled intention, and on the ground of assured belief, had now the reins laid upon its neck by passion, and all ground of fact cut from beneath its feet; and the imagination which formerly had helped men to apprehend the truth, now tempted them to believe a falsehood.

The faculties themselves wasted away in their own treason; one by one they fell in the potter's field; and the Raphael who seemed sent and inspired from heaven that he might paint Apostles and Prophets, sank at once into powerlessness at the feet of Apollo and the Muses.

§ CIII.

But this was not all.

The habit of using the greatest gifts of imagination upon fictitious subjects, of course destroyed the honor and value of the same imagination used in the cause of truth.

Exactly in the proportion in which Jupiters and Mercuries were embodied and believed, in that proportion Virgins and Angels were disembodied and disbelieved.

The images summoned by art began gradually to assume one average value in the spectator's mind; and incidents from the Iliad and from the Exodus to come within the same degrees of credibility.

And, farther, while the powers of the imagination were becoming daily more and more languid, because unsupported by faith, the manual skill and science of the artist were continually on the increase.

When these had reached a certain point, they began to be the principal things considered in the picture, and its story or scene to be thought of only as a theme for their manifestation.

Observe the difference.

In old times, men used their powers of painting to show the objects of faith; in later times, they used the objects of faith that they might show their powers of painting.

The distinction is enormous, the difference incalculable as irreconcilable.

And thus, the more skilful the artist, the less his subject was regarded; and the hearts of men hardened as their handling softened, until they reached a point when sacred, profane, or sensual subjects were employed, with absolute indifference, for the display of color and execution; and gradually the mind of Europe congealed into that state of utter apathy,--inconceivable, unless it had been witnessed, and unpardonable, unless by us, who have been infected by it,--which permits us to place the Madonna and the Aphrodite side by side in our galleries, and to pass, with the same unmoved inquiry into the manner of their handling, from a Bacchanal to a Nativity.

Now all this evil, observe, would have been merely the necessary and natural operation of an enthusiasm for the classics, and of a delight in the mere science of the artist, on the most virtuous mind.

But this operation took place upon minds enervated by luxury, and which were tempted, at the very same period, to forgetfulness or denial of all religious principle by their own basest instincts.

The faith which had been undermined by the genius of Pagans, was overthrown by the crimes of Christians; and the ruin which was begun by scholarship, was completed by sensuality.

The characters of the heathen divinities were as suitable to the manners of the time as their forms were agreeable to its taste;

and Paganism again became, in effect, the religion of Europe.

That is to say, the civilized world is at this moment, collectively, just as Pagan as it was in the second century; a small body of believers being now, as they were then, representative of the Church of Christ in the midst of the faithless: but there is just this difference, and this very fatal one, between the second and nineteenth centuries, that the Pagans are nominally and fashionably Christians, and that there is every conceivable variety and shade of belief between the two; so that not only is it most difficult theoretically to mark the point where hesitating trust and failing practice change into definite infidelity, but it has become a point of politeness not to inquire too deeply into our neighbor's religious opinions; and, so that no one be offended by violent breach of external forms, to waive any close examination into the tenets of faith.

The fact is, we distrust each other and ourselves so much, that we dare not press this matter; we know that if, on any occasion of general intercourse, we turn to our next neighbor, and put to him some searching or testing question, we shall, in nine cases out of ten, discover him to be only a Christian in his own way, and as far as he thinks proper, and that he doubts of many things which we ourselves do not believe strongly enough to hear doubted without danger.

What is in reality cowardice and faithlessness, we call charity; and consider it the part of benevolence sometimes to forgive men's evil practice for the sake of their accurate faith, and sometimes to forgive their confessed heresy for the sake of their admirable practice.

And under this shelter of charity, humility, and faintheartedness, the world, unquestioned by others or by itself, mingles with and overwhelms the small body of Christians, legislates for them, moralizes for them, reasons for them; and, though itself of course greatly and beneficently influenced by the association, and held much in check by its pretence to Christianity, yet undermines, in nearly the same degree, the sincerity and practical power of Christianity itself, until at last, in the very institutions of which the administration may be considered as the principal test of the genuineness of national religion, those devoted to education, the Pagan system is completely triumphant; and the entire body of the so-called Christian world has established a system of instruction for its youth, wherein neither the history of Christ's Church, nor the language of God's law, is considered a study of the smallest importance; wherein, of all subjects of human inquiry, his own religion is the one in which a youth's ignorance is most easily forgiven;[26] and in which it is held a light matter that he should be daily guilty of lying, or debauchery, or of blasphemy, so only that he write Latin verses accurately, and with speed.

I believe that in few years more we shall wake from all these errors in astonishment, as from evil dreams; having been preserved, in the midst of their madness, by those hidden roots of active and earnest Christianity which God's grace has bound in the English nation with iron and brass.

But in the Venetian, those roots themselves had withered;

and, from the palace of their ancient religion, their pride cast them forth hopelessly to the pasture of the brute.

From pride to infidelity, from infidelity to the unscrupulous and insatiable pursuit of pleasure, and from this to irremediable degradation, the transitions were swift, like the falling of a star.

The great palaces of the haughtiest nobles of Venice were stayed, before they had risen far above their foundations, by the blast of a penal poverty; and the wild grass, on the unfinished fragments of their mighty shafts, waves at the tide-mark where the power of the godless people first heard the "Hitherto shalt thou come."

And the regeneration in which they had so vainly trusted,--the new birth and clear dawning, as they thought it, of all art, all knowledge, and all hope,--became to them as that dawn which Ezekiel saw on the hills of Israel: "Behold the day; behold, it is come.

The rod hath blossomed, pride hath budded, violence is risen up into a rod of wickedness.

None of them shall remain, nor of their multitude;

let not the buyer rejoice, nor the seller mourn, for wrath is upon all the multitude thereof."

FOOTNOTES:

[8] Or, more briefly, science has to do with facts, art with phenomena.

To science, phenomena are of use only as they lead to facts; and to art facts are of use only as they lead to phenomena.

I

use the word "art" here with reference to the fine arts only, for the lower arts of mechanical production I should reserve the word "manufacture."

[9] Tintoret.

[10] St. Bernard.

[11] Society always has a destructive influence upon an artist: first by its sympathy with his meanest powers; secondly, by its chilling want of understanding of his greatest; and, thirdly, by its vain occupation of his time and thoughts.

Of course a painter of men must be _among_ men; but it ought to be as a watcher, not as a companion.

[12] I intended in this place to have introduced some special consideration of the science of anatomy, which I believe to have been in great part the cause of the decline of modern art; but I have been anticipated by a writer better able to treat the subject.

I have only glanced at his book; and there is something in the spirit of it which I do not like, and some parts of it are assuredly wrong; but, respecting anatomy, it seems to me to settle the question indisputably, more especially as being written by a master of the science.

I quote two passages, and must refer the reader to the sequel.

"_The scientific men of forty centuries_ have failed to describe so accurately, so beautifully, so artistically, as Homer did, the organic elements constituting the emblems of youth and beauty, and the waste and decay which these sustain by time and age.

All these Homer understood better, and has described more truthfully than the scientific men of forty centuries....

"Before I approach this question, permit me to make a few remarks on the pre-historic period of Greece; that era which seems to have produced nearly all the great men.

"On looking attentively at the statues within my observation, I cannot find the slightest foundation for the assertion that their sculptors must have dissected the human frame and been well acquainted with the human anatomy.

They, like Homer, had discovered Nature's secret, and bestowed their whole attention on the exterior.

The exterior they read profoundly, and studied deeply--the _living exterior_ and the _dead_.

Above all, they avoided displaying the dead and dissected interior, through the exterior.

They had discovered that the interior presents hideous shapes, but not forms.

Men during the philosophic era of Greece saw all this, each reading the antique to the best of his abilities.

The man of genius rediscovered the canon of the ancient masters, and wrought on its principles.

The greater number, as now, unequal to this step, merely imitated and copied those who preceded them."

--_Great Artists and Great Anatomists_.

By R. Knox, M. D.

London, Van Voorst, 1852. Respecting the value of literary knowledge in general as regards art, the reader will also do well to meditate on the following sentences from Hallam's "Literature of Europe;" remembering at the same time what I have above said, that "the root of all great art in Europe is struck in the thirteenth century," and that the great time is from 1250 to 1350: "In Germany the tenth century, Leibnitz declares, was a golden age of learning compared with the thirteenth."

"The writers of the thirteenth century display an incredible ignorance, not only of pure idiom, but of common grammatical rules."

The fourteenth century was "not superior to the thirteenth in learning....

We may justly praise Richard of Bury for his zeal in collecting books.

But his erudition appears crude, his style indifferent, and his thoughts superficial."

I doubt the superficialness of the _thoughts_: at all events, this is not a character of the time, though it may be of the writer; for this would affect art more even than literature.

[13] Churton's "Early English Church."

London, 1840. [14] "Quibus nulla macula inest quæ non cernatur.

Ita viri nobilitate præditi eam vitam peragant cui nulla nota possit inviri."

The first sentence is literally, "in which there is no spot that may not be seen."

But I imagine the writer meant it as I have put it in the text, else his comparison does not hold.

[15] Observe, however, that the magnitude spoken of here and in the following passages, is the finished and polished magnitude sought for the sake of pomp: not the rough magnitude sought for the sake of sublimity: respecting which see the "Seven Lamps," chap.

iii.

§ 5, 6, and 8. [16] Can Grande died in 1329: we can hardly allow more than five years for the erection of his tomb.

[17] Vol. I.

Chap.

I.

[18] Sansovino, lib.

xiii.

[19] Tentori, vi.

142, i. 157. [20] "Jacobus Pisaurius Paphi Episcopus qui Turcos bello, se ipsum pace vincebat, ex nobili inter Venetas, ad nobiliorem inter Angelos familiam delatus, nobilissimam in illa die Coronam justo Judice reddente, hic situs expectat Vixit annos Platonicos.

Obijt MDXLVII.

IX.

Kal.

Aprilis."

[21] Isaiah xlvii.

7, 10, 11, 15. [22] Compare "Seven Lamps," chap.

vii.

§ 3. [23] See the farther remarks on Inspiration, in the fourth chapter.

[24] That is to say, orders separated by such distinctions as the old Greek ones: considered with reference to the bearing power of the capital, all orders may be referred to two, as long ago stated; just as trees may be referred to the two great classes, monocotyledonous and dicotyledonous.

[25] Job xxi: 26-28; Psalm lxxxix.

37. [26] I shall not forget the impression made upon me at Oxford, when, going up for my degree, and mentioning to one of the authorities that I had not had time enough to read the Epistles properly, I was told, that "the Epistles were separate sciences, and I need not trouble myself about them."

The reader will find some farther notes on this subject in Appendix 7, "Modern Education."

CHAPTER III.