Part IV: The Return of the Gods

The name of Resurrectionist had a horrible meaning, at once grotesque and grisly, as applied to those who dug up dead men in the interests of science. It might seem somewhat harsh to use it of those who dug up dead gods in the interests of art. Nevertheless, Resurrectionism is a word that is wanted in a wider sense. Nor indeed would it be entirely fanciful to compare the Renaissance of Rome in the early sixteenth century with the Resurrectionism in Edinburgh in the early nineteenth. When the stern and scientific Scot gazes with Puritan severity at the palaces of the Borgias, it might be pleasant to prod him with a lighthearted allusion to the later legend of the Body-Snatchers. It is unfair to say that a surgical operation is needed to introduce a joke to a Scotsman; but anyhow some very grim jokes were needed to introduce him to a surgical operation. And if he says that this art of antiquity was indebted to the patronage of mere lust and luxury, it might be suggested that the science of anatomy was indebted at the start to a systematic campaign of murder. If there was in the sixteenth-century festivity a certain element of a dance of death, it would seem that the northern doctors did not disapprove of death but only of dancing. At the end of the mediaeval epoch it was apparently possible, and indeed usual, for the same people to combine scientific curiosity and artistic beauty; in the modern epoch those who started the scientific curiosity started it in conditions of almost bestial ugliness. And though the comparison is here but a parenthesis it is something of a parable; and in nothing more than this; that, with whatever defensible objects, the body-snatchers dug up complete bodies in order to dismember and scatter them, while the antiquaries of the Renaissance dug up scattered limbs and features of stone, in order to fit them together into the statues that still amaze the world. It is a hackneyed business to talk of analysis and synthesis; but considering only the complete conception of the body, it is true to say that Leonardo could take it to pieces, but also put it together again. That combination of curiosity with creation has not been revived in the modern world. That is a Resurrectionism that has not been resurrected.

But there is another and stranger sense of analogy suggested by those early Italian archaeologists gathering up from field and river-bed the broken gods of their remote fathers. They might in a more serious sense be called Resurrection men; since it was exactly so that their religious pictures and parables conceived the Last Trumpet as gathering from all the ends of the earth the scattered bodies and even the separated bones of mankind. It had terrible aspects, more easily conceived in turbulent times, but it was at least a summons to life and not to death, to completeness and not to corruption or dissolution; to the remarriage of mind and body and not to the infinite subdivision of body and disappearance of mind. Above all, this old creative curiosity had a savour of Resurrection, because its spontaneity and swiftness swept over the world almost in the manner of a miracle. It happened so quickly, as historical movements go, that it did seem as if the last dry bones of the Middle Ages clothed themselves with flesh at the sound of a trumpet. It did seem as if God Himself had commanded the dead gods to be gathered and to arise and stand; and it is something in that spirit or suggestion that makes all purely pagan treatment of the Renaissance fail and ring false to us, when we actually stand before its monuments. About the Renaissance there was something mystical, since its origin was after all mediaeval; and there went along with all its curiosity a confidence which a modem would call credulity.

C HRISTIANITY is the religion of the Resurrection; in which it differs, for instance, from Buddhism, which is the religion of the Recurrence or Return, which in practice means little more than what men of science used to call the Conservation of Energy. That is, the idea that every elemental force or expression returns in some form; but the form does not return. When Mr. H. G. Wells said that Buddhism was fully in accordance with our modem ideas, this is what he meant. It resembles our modem ideas in many respects, including that of being no longer modem. The Conservation of Energy seemed the most obvious of cosmic principles; and modern philosophers have a taste in the obvious. It is supremely typical of our time that when a score of modem philosophers had founded their modem philosophies on this solid fact of science, the men of science began to discover that it is not a fact. But however that quarrel between modem rationalism and more modem science may stand at the moment, it is broadly true that any number of philosophies, ancient and modem, have assumed this cosmic conservation and recurrence, from the large philosophy of Buddha to the much more limited philosophy of Herbert Spencer. Sometimes this philosophy accepts some form of Immortality. But it is always in the form of Reincarnation and not Resurrection. More often it adopts one of St. Thomas Aquinas's arguments against Immortality (which that almost irritatingly fair-minded rationalist carefully ranges against himself) and argues that a thing will never recover its identity when once it has really lost its form. Nothing but the Christian Creed has ever had the audacity to assert that a thing will actually recover its identity because it will recover its form. That is what the Anglican Bishop of Birmingham means by calling the Christian religion materialistic. And that is why a material argument was offered to another St. Thomas, who was also something of a rationalist.

The history of Christianity cannot be understood unless it is realised that it started with the staggering miracle of a dead man who was a live man, and who was not a ghost. It was not merely the spirit triumphing over the body; it was the body triumphing over the tomb. There are any number of admirable people who cannot believe in this story. But for the argument here, we do not ask them for belief in it; we only ask them for belief in the belief in it.

We ask them to consider an interesting historical idea and development; and not to be too irritated to understand it, merely because they do not believe in it. For it is the key to very nearly everything in the development of two thousand years; and in nothing is it so much the key to Christendom as in the recurrent reversions to Paganism.

Every educated person has heard over and over again the phrase “ The Renaissance." Nearly every educated person (and many much more valuable but imperfectly educated persons) have read a text in their Bibles which runs, “ Unless a man be bom again." Few among the educated or uneducated persons have ever stopped to notice that the two phrases are exactly the same phrase, translated into French or English. And though there is a great deal more to be said, both good and bad, about what wc call the Renaissance of the sixteenth century in Europe, the first fact to be seized about it is that it was emphatically a Christian movement; because it was a Renaissance; because it was a Resurrection. Nobody but a Christian was ever mad enough to dig up anything so dead as that. We all understand the sense in which it is called Pagan, for it was certainly in that sense a resurrection of Paganism. But only the Paganism was Pagan; not the resurrection. I think it highly doubtful whether any real Pagans would ever have attempted anything so romantic and ridiculous. The ancient Greeks did not attempt to reconstruct the whole daily life of the ancient Egj'ptians. The notion that when the mansions of Marius and Camillus had mouldered into dust of one thousand live hundred years, when their gods were forbidden and forgotten, when every detail of their daily ritual was lost, when a new universal religion from the East had exterminated their old religion and in its turn grown old, that anytliing could persuade a whole generation of human beings to live again that lost antiquity like a masquerade — that would have seemed to almost any heathen a mere insult to his heathen common sense, That the reading of a few manuscripts should madden men who had never heard of Martial or Catullus before, to imitate those men, in the carving of their door-posts or the exact metre of their love-songs, was the manifestation of a new sort of human vitality. There ran through the whole of it a rage of material reconstruction. It was no question of a moral maxim, of wise and wide application, handed down from some primitive philosopher; of some universal commandment carved in stone or proclaimed by a prehistoric prophet; of the remote founder of a religion bequeathing some idea that could still be used as an idea. It was a question of carving.

building, painting, dressing and as far as possible talking like men who had been dead for fifteen centuries. There was a lust for detail, especially domestic detail. There was that almost arrogant obtrusion, there was that almost wearisome repetition, which even to this day lends something overpowering and crushing to the works of the classical Renaissance. The mediaeval idea of making an image was almost lost in the crowds of gesticulating statues. The medieval idea of going to a shrine was almost forgotten in cities of jostling and competing temples. In a sense it was Paganism. In a sense it was almost Polytheism. But there was written across all that solid exuberance the strangest of mortal words: The Resurrection of the Body.

The more sensitive complain of the Renaissance sculptors that they made Christ as solid and material as Venus. It is a more just complaint that they made Venus as solid as Christ. The corporeal reality belongs to Christ rising from the tomb and not Venus rising from the sea. But if we would understand the real relations of the Church to the Pagans we must go back to things more grim and rigid and more archaic. Let us begin with an obelisk; no Puritan, however sensitive, will find the allurements of Venus in an obelisk; nor has any lover of Cleopatra been caught embracing Cleopatra’s

Needle. I will therefore take the most obvious example. The obelisk of the Piazza del Popolo is in itself very ancient and unique, having been raised in adoration of the Egj'ptian Sun-God, Ra, in the time of Rameses the Third, famous as the Pharaoh who consented to the exodus of Moses and the Israelites. Being taken to Rome, it was rededicated to Apollo, the Sun-God of the Latins, if I remember right, by the Emperor Augustus. Now this also stands surmounted by a cross and in front of a Christian Church, the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo; and bearing a Latin inscription pertinent and to our purpose. I find this inscription somewhat quaintly translated, in an excellent little guidebook written for Englishmen, but I should imagine by Italians; and Italians unaware of some nuances of our national speech. " Before the sanctuary of the one, in whose womb the Sun of Justice was bom, under the reign of Augustus, I arise more cheerful and with more dignity.”

There is something pleasing in the thought of a hoary and primeval Egyptian monolith announcing that it rises more cheerful, and with more dignity. It is as if it were all the better for a sea voyage, and had been quite bright at breakfast on the following day. But the announcement, however we translate it, is profoundly true. And it is the truth most necessary to grasp if we are to begin to understand the part played by Rome in history. It is not only a joke about being bright at breakfast; it is a very serious fact that this stone, once dedicated to two sun-gods, now stands in a light that is brighter than twenty suns. If the jest in any way obscures it, I will try my hand here at rendering what I imagine it to mean, in parallel English phrases; it would have to read something like this: " Before her shrine of whose body was born the very Sun of Justice, in the Empire of Augustus, more joyfully and with a nobler dignity I arise.”

What is to be done with the dingy and inky little people who laboriously prove to us that Christianity (if they are atheists) or Catholicism (if they are Protestants) is “only” a rehash of Paganism or borrowed its ideas from the Pagans? A man standing here in Rome is reduced to silence; he can only answer that such stupidity is stupefying. It is rather as if somebody said that Science may pretend to be independent, but it has really stolen all its facts from Nature; or that Protestants professed to be Christians, and yet filched things from the sacred books of the Jews. Science boasts of being based on Nature; and Protestants, when they were Protestants, boasted of being based on the Bible. Christian Rome boasts of being built on Pagan Rome; of surmounting and transcending, but also of preserving it. From the thousand carven throats of the city, from the hollow wreathing horns of the Tritons, from the golden mouths of the trumpets, from the jaws of flamboyant lions and the lips of rhetorical attitudinising statues, from everything that can be imagined to speak or testify, there is as it were one solid silent roar of exultation and victory: " We have saved Old Rome; we have resurrected Old Rome; we have resurrected Pagan Rome, save that it is more Roman for not being Pagan.” There is no question of hiding the connection between the two epochs; the new epoch emphasises every point at which it touches the old. Nearly every Christian Church is carefully built on the site of a Pagan temple. In one place it distinguishes a particular church by combining the name of Maria with that of Minerva. In another place it preserves the seven niches of the Pagan Planets for seven corresponding Christian Saints. Up on the rock of the Ara Coeli the little broken altar of the temple of Augustus is carefully preserved, like a relic, inside the larger Christian building; that men may remember how even a heathen looked in that place for an altar of heaven. There is no question of the Church disguising Pagan ideas as Christian ideas, for there never was any disguise about the matter. The heathen things the Church preserved she preserved openly.

The heathen things she destroyed she destroyed openly. If, on the whole, she destroyed first and preserved afterwards, there was a frank and rational reason, as we shall see. And she preserved some things and destroyed others, for a reason which the dismal rationalists cannot use their reason enough to understand. Science finds its facts in Nature, but Science is not Nature; because Science has co-ordinated ideas, interpretations and analyses; and can say of Nature what Nature cannot say for itself. The Faith finds its facts and problems in humanity, even heathen humanity; but the Faith is not merely humanity; because it brings to it principles of life and order and understanding, and comprehends humanity as humanity cannot comprehend itself. And it is not true, but totally false, to say that these principles, in the sense in which they are valued by Catholics, were equally known to Pagans. If you had said to any Pagan in the street, “ Jupiter died for love of you, as though there were no other man alive, and every time you sin, you torture him anew,” the Pagan would not have had the wildest notion of what you were talking about.

The essential word is written on the obelisk; the Sun of Justice. The sun the heathen worshipped had not been a sun of justice and had not pretended to be. It was a sun of beauty, a sun of terror, and. sometimes most gloriously a sun of joy; but not of justice. Nobody understands Paganism who does not realise that its highest gods could be irresponsible like goblins and elves; friendly but also capricious or cruel. It may be said that some things attributed to the Christian God were unjust; but that is not the point. The}’' were not conceived as unjust; they were, at worst, excesses of a fury for justice. But nobody who told the story of Niobe or Marsyas told it to show that the Sun-God was just. He was constantly doing things that had no more to do with justice than a pestilence. On the balance, it is strictly true that the Christians got the sunshine and the Pagans got the sunstroke. In short, the Christians had a theory of cosmic justice, right or wrong, controlling the mere caprice which did not even pretend to be just; and, in having that, the followers of the Sun of Justice did think they had eclipsed the Sun of the Sun-Worshippers. But so far from wishing to conceal the great works of the Sun-Worshippers, they went out of their way to display them. So far from hiding the fact that they inherited much from their heathen fathers, they filled Rome with proclamations which positively brag of their inheritance. To anyone looking at such an obelisk, the truth is obvious. Paganism is left in full view, all the bird-headed gods and sacred serpents graven on the stone; and a cross merely clapped on the top, almost like a sort of iron hat; as much as to say, " That will keep you quiet.” The heathen splendours are shown, hut perhaps it is rather as the captive kings were shown in a triumph. Doubtless, some heathen things were not shown; and a good thing too. Doubtless, in a case like the cross on the obelisk, there was some vague sense among sensitive Christians that signing it with the cross was safer; for fear it should walk. But anyhow, there is no disguise of the Pagan part or the additional and even artificial character of the Christian part. Nothing could be more unlike people secretly indebted to mythology and ashamed of their debt.

The desire of all nations, the dream of all religions, the imaginative craving that in some way something heroic might save the sufferings that are human — that indeed existed everywhere and that was the need which the Gospel was sent to supply. But the need was not the same as the supply. And the supply was a supply of perfectly definite and even detailed moral and metaphysical ideas, which nobody but a fool could possibly identify with myths. And the sceptic only makes a fool of himself, when he first complains that Catholic dogmas are dogmatic, that they are in their nature precise claims to a knowledge of unknowable things; and then pretends that he can find these very precise dogmas in the irresponsible and inconsistent fairyland of heathen mythology. If the Catholic doctrine of Christ is a hard, positive, inflexible, infallible dogma imposed on the intellect, then it most certainly is not like the Greek story of Hercules. Some may think theology a bad thing; but those who believe in it naturally think it a good thing, and they are at least quite certain that the Pagans were never theologians. There never was a theology about Jupiter and Juno and Hercules. But if there was not a theology, still less was there a theodicy, or any systematic attempt to justify the ways of gods to men.

That is the deep significance of the inscription about the Sun of Justice. That is the meaning of the “ cheerful ” or confident tone of the obelisk. The men who so inscribed it had not the smallest doubt, nor have I, that they knew a great deal more about the Sun than the SunWorshippers. To hear some of the critics talk, one would think that the Christians had secretly stolen the sun out of the sky, and, having pinched it from paganism, attempted to hide it from posterity. The Christians knew quite well that the sun was a grand golden object and that people had worshipped it; they were not afraid of it, they were not ashamed of using it as an instrument or symbol of worship; only it was the worship of something better. They thought the Catholic philosophy about the Sun of Justice was something entirely superior to a Solar Myth; and so it was. They were not in the least disposed to hide the matters in which the inferior thing had suggested the superior; though they were ready, sometimes to excess, to denounce the errors of the inferior when it contradicted the superior. It was about the superiority that they had no doubt: Santa Maria sopra Minerva.

The muddle has arisen because men started again to study mythology when they had abruptly refused to study theology; chiefly because it was Calvinist theology. They rather hurriedly advanced the view that we can have no knowledge of theistic things. When they were very muddle-headed they maintained that we can have theism without theology. But there is a perfectly fair case for those who threw over the whole problem as insoluble; those who adopted what is commonly called Agnosticism. But even men who know nothing cannot settle everything. And even men who follow their reason as far as it will go, cannot contradict themselves without limit, or have it both ways every time. And if they refuse to read any theology, they cannot say that everything in it is to be found in mythology. And, as a mere matter of fact, it is not. Ideas like the true doctrines of Fruition, of Free Will, of the Hypostatic Union, of the Immaculate Conception, of

Expiation and Purgatory, are in every possible sense ideas; positive ideas; to the ordinary human mind additional ideas; in the only permanent sense, new ideas. It is all nonsense to say that they can be found in the ritual of Adonis or the cult of Atys; they can not. The answer of the Agnostic to these mystical ideas is that he does not know anything about them; not that ancient Ionians or Egyptians knew all about them. They knew nothing of the sort, and they would have been the first to say so. The ancients were Agnostics, as the modems are Agnostics. Between them stands something different from anything else. It may be mad; but it is certainly different.

The distinction must be made very distinct, because it is exactly that which throws into sharp relief the extraordinary experiment of the Renaissance. Whatever else it was, it most emphatically was not the action of men who had merely veiled the Venus as the Virgin and now raised the veil; or who had set on the head of Jupiter a stone mask of Christ and now could throw off the mask. Anybody who knows the deep and even painful intensity of the most ascetic mediaeval art will know better than that. It was a deliberate revival of the form of the old mythology, but because the forms were now lifeless, not because the gods were still alive. It would be truer to say that the world had waited

154 the resurrection of some until it was safe to see once more the faces of the forsaken gods. If they dug up a dead religion, they dug it up because it was dead. None of them, as I shall remark, had the least doubt that his own religion was alive. Nevertheless, though we may say in this sense that they had waited till it was safe, it was not yet by any means self-evident to everybody that it was safe. Indeed if we may judge by the modern misunderstanding in the North and the shrill cry of the Puritans against the Pagans who painted the palaces of the Pope, it was not safe. The authorities of the Catholic Church really took a considerable risk when they threw themselves with such reckless generosity, from the very beginning, into the revival of Greek and Italian art. That Pope of the Dark Ages who defied the golden palace of Byzantium in defence of the right to make statues, was certainly supported with equal courage by the Popes of the Renaissance, when there were some more defiant and sometimes perhaps less defensible statues to be made. But the Pope is always pelted as much for defending the rights of the world as the rights of the Church.

It is believed, somewhat inaccurately, that there is a conviction among Catholics that the Pope cannot possibly be wrong. Anyhow, there is a more solidly supported conviction among Anti-Catholics that the Pope cannot possibly be right, which seems an even more special and supernatural distinction. There would seem to rest upon him alone a mysterious cloud, not of inerrancy but of inevitable errancy. This may seem fanciful to the fastidious; but it is very common among many people who boast of their common sense. The people in the Protestant countries, who for generations flatly refused to use the new astronomical calendar, merely because it was offered to them by the Pope, would certainly have based their action on their sturdy common sense. The newspapers might occasionally, by the way, mention that incident, as well as the incident of Galileo, since they are so passionately preoccupied with the progress of astronomy. But in sober truth it is no exaggeration to say that in many such sturdy political constitutions, as the King can do no wrong, so the Pope can do no right. I have already dwelt a little on one historical incident, because it related to some outstanding features of Rome; the example of the Papal decision on the lawfulness of statues. I defy anybody of sense to say that, on a point like that, the No Popery critics would not have had it both ways, or either way. If the Pontiff had' condemned images, would they not say it was a Papal veto on sculpture? If he allowed images, will they not say it was a Papal permit for idolatry? And this sort of dilemma recurs with almost every discussion; and specially concerns the discussion about the luxury and laxity of the Renaissance. Nobody says there was nothing to be condemned in any parts of the Papal action. But everybody must admit that anything would have been condemned; and that if their action had been the exact opposite, it would have been condemned more.

To put the matter shortly; they would have been abused if they had been merely mediaeval. They are abused because they were not merely mediaeval. And then they are called mediaeval after all, merely because mediaeval is a term of abuse. Nobody need have been very much surprised if they had been merely mediaeval, in the sense of clinging close to the special and splendid but sometimes limited things of the Middle Ages; to the Gothic in architecture, to the Scholastic in philosophy; to the pointed arch and the pointed argument. It would have been no very inexcusable narrowness, if they really had been contented to be as broad as St. Thomas Aquinas or as deep as Dante or as high as the spire of Old St. Paul’s. Mediaevalism had its vices, which idiots imagine us to deny, but it had a system that had seen Europe survive like one nation, through shock after shock of barbarian war and oriental pestilence; and no great shame would lie upon prudent rulers and guardians of the past, if they had preserved all the details and disciplines of the past, rather than trust themselves to a new and perhaps anarchic future. But, as a fact, the Popes did trust to the future. They trusted with very unusual hope and confidence to the future. It was not their mistake alone, if trusting to the future is sometimes only trusting to the fashion. Anyhow, they were in the forefront of the fashion; and were the leaders of the age towards its own particular vision of liberty and light. But the very men who would have mocked at them for clinging to the Middle Ages still sternly reprove them for accepting the Renaissance. If a Pope read Plato he was called a hedonist and a heathen, and if he had only read Aristotle, he would have been called a fanatical old fool. If a Pope dug up Greek marbles, he was worship-ping strange gods; if he was satisfied with grey Gothic stones, he was a survival from the twilight of the Goths. We are familiar with those two horns of the dilemma, which look a little like the two horns of the devil. At least that shape and shadow has always been thrown upon the wall in the presence of that light. " We have piped to you and you have not danced; we have mourned to you and you have not lamented.”

The Popes have paid heavily for their support of Progress, and their belief in education and the advancement of learning. If they had always been behind the times, they would by this time be quite in the fashion. They have for a moment lost their chance among the Modernists through having so often been Modern. Because there are too many competent convincing classical statues in St. John Lateran, because there is too much workmanlike Renaissance sculpture in Rome, because they multiplied gods and heroes till men grew weary of them as of a common crowd, because they cheapened and popularised anatomy and physiology and perspective, till many men could do the trick and most men could apply the test — because they thus gorged and glutted the world with good work of the sort that the whole world then desired, they have suffered for their aesthetic generosity and left the world demanding more aesthetic economy. If the statues in St. John Lateran had been stricter and narrower and more monastic, they would have been almost worshipped by Ruskin and Rossetti and the Romantics of the nineteenth century. If they had been blank-faced, harsh-featured, with eyes flat like fishes and drapery as severe as conic sections, they would now be revered, and doubtless rightly revered, by the newer school of Mr. Eric Gill. If they had looked like the lumps of stone that are the idols of the Fiji Islanders, they might have seemed as subtle and sophisticated as the work of Mr, Epstein. I say this without animosity; I have a very great admiration for Mr. Eric Gill, I have no particular quarrel with Mr. Epstein. But it is true to say that the art of Rome would have been nearer to the new spirit of these new masters, if it had never progressed at all. The Popes had only to neglect art; and it would have produced all the naked monsters needed to inspire even the newest of the moderns. But the Popes encouraged art; as they encouraged science and education and most other things. It is a very dangerous thing to do.

At least, that long line of statues in St. John Lateran ought to teach us something about the psychology of this perpetual quarrel of old and new art. What is the matter wdth them is that there seem to be too many of them, and that they manage to remind us of having seen the same thing too often before. When art has reached that point, it does become natural and even necessary to do something different. But let us remember that what we are asking for is * difference rather than dominance. I am puzzled that critics allow so little in this matter for the personal fact of fatigue. If I am compelled to walk ten miles down a stone corridor, engraved on each side with fine reproductions of the Elgin Marbles, it is probable that I shall be rather less thrilled by the last Centaur than I was by the first. But that is no reflection on that particular Centaur, or his status in Centaur l6o THE RESURRECTION OF ROME society. That does not make any difference to the quality of the carving, as it strikes another gentleman just starting cheerfully from the other end. Doubtless I shall emerge from the classic corridor crying out for Gothic gargoyles and Chinese dragons; ready to fall in love with Mr. Epstein’s Night or kiss the spacious hands of Rima herself. But my feelings do not affect the works of Phidias or the feelings of more fortunate people about them. It is the custom to say that we must have reform or improvement, but that there is no good in mere change. I am rather inclined to say that we must have change, so long as it does not pretend to be improvement.

Anyhow, that is what is wrong with Rome of the Renaissance. In the vulgar phrase, it is Too Much Of A Good Thing. But that ought not to force us to forget that the thing is good. The achievement of man, by which he can carve living features and well-balanced bodies, and imitate the rush or ripple of drapery and muscle, is a good thing; it is a gift of God; a monkey cannot do it; a man cannot do it till he has reached a high mastery and cultural conquest, found only on the heights of history. If we found one of these florid statues for the first time in a featureless desert, we should know well enough that it was a wonderful thing. If the art of the future were really to stretch before us as a corridor decorated only with broken curves and triangles, if we could advance not for ten miles but for two or three centuries through a world of which the whole art was in diagram and dehumanised pattern, if we saw nothing on every side but the blank planes and proportions of pure mathematics, then I fancy that it would be with a rather strange and primitive freshness, like that of seeing the first flower or even the first fairy, that we should behold afar off, at the end of that telescopic perspective, the figure of the Dancing Faun.

Therefore does a little fear fall upon me, over our own satiety and restlessness in the presence of the great works of the past. I am not sure there is not something thankless, as well as thoughtless, about a world which only tosses and struggles because it is weighed down with too much beauty and bounty, crushed with too much culture and stunned with the weight of too many masterpieces. I am not superstitious about these things; still less am I Puritan or Manichean; but I should not find it quite incredible if a wise man said that the cure for our trouble is to fast from statues and pictures, and wait hopefully for an aeon or two in a bare wilderness or before a blank wall. But in these fancies too there is danger of exaggeration and heresy, and upon the heresy of the

Iconoclasts, I have already explained that I am entirely on the side of St. John Lateran and the Pope.

Before leaving St. John Lateran and the subject of such classical Christian churches, it will be well to add that what is really to be said for them, and what I have here attempted to say, does not (in my judgment) get rid altogether of the real criticism, which remained true however often Ruskin repeated it; that this art does express something, but that the something is not the religious sentiment, certainly not the Christian sentiment. They are a witness to the work religion has done for the world, to the common sense of the Catholic Church in using and moulding the materials of this earth; to the needs of all normal people; to the desire of all nations; to all that huge and human and colossal compliment which prigs and Puritans and Manichees and mystics with myopic eyes and thin noses pay to Catholicism, when they say it is Pagan. But it does not seem to me specially designed to express the true mystical emotion any more than the false one. Only here and there, and as if by accident, you will find in Rome that sort of bright transparency, that sort of intensified innocence, that sort of delicate distortion, like the beautiful clumsiness of a child, that is suggestive in the Little Flowers of St. Francis or the coloured daylight of Chartres. Here and there a scrap of gay mosaic that seems to have stuck to the wall like a moth, though it has been there since the dim days of Byzantine Caesars, will recall that nameless quality in the primitive which we can only insult by calling quaint. Here and there an old and dusty apse of gold, almost unnoticed like a quiet evening sky, will bring another tone into the riot of merely gilded things and remind us that behind the Renaissance was the childhood of the Church. But, broadly speaking, it is true that Rome is given over to another mood of manhood; and sometimes of excessively muscular manhood. Always, from its first tribal battles, a city of triumphs, it is the city of the Church in Triumph rather than of the Church in Ecstasy or the Church in Trial. To those who dislike the style intensely, this may be a good reason for turning their backs on the Holy City, but not a good reason for turning their backs on the Holy Catholic Church. The Church uses every style and will soon be using quite new styles. The Early Victorian aesthete venerated the Virgin of Raphael, and was quite annoyed when the Late Victorian aesthete venerated the Virgin of Botticelli. But Eric Gill venerates the Virgin, and can therefore produce the Virgin of Eiic Gill.

Of course, as the style of the Renaissance turned later into what is sometimes called the Rococo, otherwise known as the Baroque, it was regarded even more as a bombshell; especially as it was spread by the Jesuits, who were credited with consistent readiness to throw a bomb. To say the least, this later caricature of classic architecture does sometimes remind the sensitive of a display of fireworks There has recently been a fashion through which it seems likely to be as much overrated as it was once underrated. But I am only indirectly interested to decide these technical questions of art, in so far as they throw a light on the moral and political forces in the story of Rome. And it is quite obvious that the real objection to Baroque is a moral as well as a technical objection. It is bound up with a certain sincere desire for greater simplicity and directness in religion; with a sentiment that is sometimes mediaeval and sometimes rather Puritan.

The Puritan before Ruskin wanted his buildings flat and classic and considered Gothic a sinful riot of ritualism. The Puritan after Ruskin wants his buildings Gothic and considers the classic not flat but florid, a sinful riot of Renaissance heathenism. He is perhaps not very consistent in his course, but he is in his way consistent in his object; and especially in his objection. What he objects to is what I should call Catholic culture and he would call

Popish Paganism. In plain words, the real question that is raised by Renaissance and especially Rococo art is not an artistic question but a religious question; the old religious question of Protestant protest against Catholic ornament or display. It would be absurd for me to pretend that I am impartial on the point; but I fancy I am rather more capable of seeing both sides of it than is generally supposed by those of the other side. Catholic history contains much more of Protestantism than Protestant history does of Catholicism.

I can imagine some primitive figure like St. Peter, standing at the very first foundations of Christianity, in serious reflection, and indeed in reasonable doubt, about this question of whether the religion should or should not have a ritual like that of the Pagan religions. In fact some of the first Councils did really stand wavering thus; and the images which are now so much the mark, and especially the mock of Catholicism were taken out of their niches and put back again through a long period of simple and sincere hesitation. I think it is true that the Catholic faith might have scored in some ways if it had remained absolutely austere and unworldly; as poor as the birth in the Stable; as naked as the victim on the Cross. But I think a thousand times more certainly that unless it could have been kept at the last extreme of severity, it was right to rush to the last extremes of splendour. It was charged with something too great for mankind; it had to express something that can never be expressed, but which can only be faintly indicated by something startlingly plain or startlingly beautiful. It can be weakly suggested by the thirst and desolation of the desert, which seems to extort the cry of prophecy like a cry of pain. It can also be feebly hinted at by ten thousand trumpets blaring before a golden throne; robes of angry crimson or peacock fans unfolding the hundred-fold eyes of night. But a religion that merely dresses for church, as it dresses for dinner, a religion that merely prays into a top-hat and calls a suit of funeral black its Sunday best — that does not express what is expressed either by a hermit or a hierarchy; that does not express anything, except that its followers would have been equally contented with anything else. Whatever it is, the Church of Christ must not merely be what some of my Anglican friends used humorously to call Mod. High. It must be very high, like the spire of Cologne Cathedral or the tower of Salisbury; or else it must be very low, like the Catacombs or the Cave of Bethlehem. St. Francis is the Mirror of Christ, and is ragged and barefoot with bleeding hands and feet. And the Pope is the Vicar of Christ, and when he goes splendid in white and silver and gold, with the ostrich plumes and the peacock fans borne before him, he is only making the approximate attempt that every sort of picture makes, to symbolise a sort of vision. But a bland and prosperous parson in a dog collar, a little supercilious since being made an Archdeacon or a Rural Dean, he (though his counterpart exists in all religions) does not in any sort of way suggest that religion is at all remarkable. He ought either to be poorer in the practice of his religion or else richer in his expression of it. I do not mean, of course, that as an individual he is under any direct moral obligation to do otherwise than as he does, in his circumstances and with his lights. But I am talking not about normal morals, but about the inadequate expression of an abnormal magnificence. For that purpose he should either be in a hovel such as covered the humility of Christ or else in a palace painted like the heavens that show forth the glory of God. I do not think, therefore, that the Papacy was wrong when, having once decided to meet human nature on the subject of ceremonial, it made it a very gorgeous ceremonial. I can see no good at all in it having made it a mean or doubtful or third-rate or threadbare ceremonial. But I can quite imagine the first of the Popes wondering whether it would not be more sublime to do without ceremonial altogether. And the only answer to that is the deepest answer of all, which comes to us in the words of the Mass like a movement of distant music, and to me always somehow suggests the innocent sway and rhythm of some dim antediluvian dance: “ His delight is with the sons of men.”

If you will, the Church is very willing to amuse us with picture-books, because we cannot for long endure the strain of understanding everything by diagrams. But it is no very irrational part of human nature that She should try to make the pictures as good as possible, or sometimes even as gorgeous as possible. The alternative is the idea of no pictures, which, as we have seen, was essentially the ideal of Mahomet and the Iconoclasts. But even the case of the Moslem will itself serve to show that this ideal, of not expressing the divine at all, is really even more unattainable than that of expressing it adequately. Moslem art and culture have not really remained simply staring at the unity of God. Their instinct of self-expression has developed, only it has developed defectively. The banishment of the human face from their ornament did not make it less ornamental, but only less human. It did not leave the whole page a blank, or even limit it to the simplest and severest pattern. It only made it an unmeaning pattern, though it was also an involved one. It only made such art, magnificent indeed within its limitations, a labyrinth of headless serpents and eyeless fishes; of birds without motion and trees and flowers without root. The avoidance of idolatry has not led to simplicity, but merely to a more dead and dehumanised complexity. It is of course excellent, and even exquisite, of its kind, but it illustrates the fact that an ideal simplicity is not really maintained, by any methods or by any men. The Arab out of the desert, crying the terrible truism that God is God, was of all men the wildest worshipper of simplicity. He came out of the golden glare of sand and sunlight, to proclaim that all religion must be as single as the sun and as naked as the drawn sword. Yet it is curious that even the most perfect sword-blade of his own forging is famous for being “ damascened ”; and that the one word which art has gathered from the Arab is Arabesque.

The point is here that Rome had to decide whether it would express the simplicity of Christ in simplicity or the glory of God in glory. Granted the latter, though I do not care for all the manifestations of it, I think it was right to make the glorification very glorious. In a hundred human and ordinary things the Church is very human and ordinary; her common sense completely accepts the medium or centre of gravity of Aristotle; the true doctrine of the golden mean. But in this special matter of expressing a spiritual prodigy, she was right not to go by the golden mean, but rather by the golden extravagance. That ground is not so much the via media as the place where extremes meet. In this matter it is really all or nothing, and the only outrage is mediocrity. When it comes to the reaction to a revolution, to the result or effect of a miracle, to the attempt to utter something ultimately unutterable, the expressions of it must be in extremes; and even in opposite extremes. So in such a moment a man would either be struck silent or cry aloud; so under such a visitation men would either spring to their feet or fall on their faces. It is exactly the intermediate shade of refined hesitation that would really be vulgar; more vulgar than anything that is merely loud. To see a man rise from the dead and say " Dear me! ” is worse than to say " Good God I ” or to say nothing. Anyhow, anybody with any sort of instinct of art or letters in him will see, in such things, the case for extremes or even extravagances. A startling truth might be symbolised by pointing to a stone by the roadside or by building a tower of brass that seemed to break

THE RETURN OF THE GODS 17 J.

the clouds in the sky; but not by building a post of brass and making it a little shorter to save the expense. Epics could be written about a loose pebble or a large pyramid; but not about a small pyramid in a small front garden in Clapham. When we first see the monuments of Papal Rome, we may perhaps think the pyramid is rather too large; we may think that the brazen tower is rather too brazen. There is truth in the impression; for mortal motives are mixed, and there were impurities in the devotion as well as the decoration. But the evil was not in feeling that the tower could not be too high or the tomb too enduring; and the evil, I may add, was not in this case avoided by cautiously avoiding the good. Indeed those in other places who did avoid the good did not avoid the evil. The contemporaries of the Italian classicists, though in another way from the Arab Iconoclasts, illustrated the problem I mean; that there are a great many other ways in which complexity can return. Simplicity is not so simple as it looks.

Wherever there is pomp there is some peril of pomposity. But it is only fair to remember that most rebels against it have not ultimately avoided pomposity, even when they avoided pomp. When we see the Roman churches of the Baroque period, especially of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, we naturally feel a revulsion against them, because of something overloaded in their magnificence and something garish in their very gaiety. We rightly rebel against something that is meant to be glorious, and is often only vainglorious. But, as I say, it is only just to remember what has in history been the real alternative. If it were anything so simple as a choice between simplicity and luxury, the world, to say nothing of the Church, would never have made these brilliant blunders on quite so large a scale. If organised Christianity could at any moment choose between Francis Bernadone the beggar and Alexander Borgia the Pope, none of us would in that sense be Papists. If every age could turn at once either to Giotto the shepherd or to Bandinelli the blatant and swaggering courtier of the Renaissance, there would not be much hesitation in any age; not even the age of the Renaissance. But things are not so simple as that. Those who walk haughtily out of the Church of Rome, or even out of the churches of Rome (which is an uncommonly different thing) must walk somewhere and build something; they will probably build more churches, or possibly more chapels. But they also will take on in time an inevitable routine and respectability. They also will have their ritual, though it is a duller ritual; they also will have their conservatism, though they will have less interesting things to conserve. And we can see this at once if we glance at the powerful Protestant churches flourishing in the same period as the Baroque in Rome; the churches of England or Holland or the German States, with their royal patronage or their commercial wealth. They have the same turgid touch of the time, but in a gloomier and less genial fashion; like a French funeral compared with a French fete. The memory of them is a sort of nightmare of dark cherubim made of black marble instead of white. The name of religion in the eighteenth century of Erastian England does not call up a vision of Primitive Christianity. It calls up a vision of bishops in big wigs and bellying black robes or lawn sleeves, their draperies overflowing, we might almost say boiling over, the carved pulpits and lowering galleries of the churches of their time; the strictly classified pews, the huge exclusive volumes; the heavy indigestible decoration. It is a religious age remembered rather by the beadle than the bishop. It was hardly an age that had avoided pomposity by avoiding pomp. It had only given to its pomp something indescribably sulky and swollen-headed, which is not really present in the crazy confectionery of white and gold to be found in the worst of the Rococo of the South. Indeed, if there was a little less pomp, there was a little more pride.

The swagger was more in the soul, and especially in the mind. That fashion was quite as florid; if it was florid in its eloquence rather than its elegant accessories. That fashion was quite as self-important; and indeed the importance was more entirely in the self.

At least in the Roman churches there is something better than what was called Roman luxury; there is also what may be called Latin levity. For levity is not to be confounded with frivolity; certainly not with mere superficiality. There is a sort of sacred levity that is not inappropriately represented in saints rising, and even rushing, out of the grave, or angels soaring and sweeping into the sky. There is really some analogy between levity and levitation. There is at least a true touch of the Christian miracle in any sort of defiance of gravitation, which in every sense is associated with quite the wrong sort of gravity. To some these Baroque extravagances are even ghastly; but they are not gloomy. These shattering explosions of porphyry and gold, with their shafts of solid sunshine and their bubbles of buoyant cloud, are at least expressions of life and not of death; and are not entirely unworthy of this our recurrent theme of resurrection.

Most of the modern critics have made a great hash of the subject of religious art. First, because they cannot bring themselves to believe that it is theological art. And second, because nobody ever told them how wide and many-sided and sympathetic a thing theology is; so long as it is the right theology. They have made the Christian artists, especially of Italy, differ from each other much more than they did; or rather not differ as they did, as artists and therefore as individuals, but differ as hopelessly as the hopeless modern philosophies differ. That is because they do not know the nature of the older philosophy, and do not know that there is room in it for all sorts of differences of temper and tone. To take one instance at random; Pater and the Pagans of our time talked of the sadness of Botticelli as if it were merely heathen, or half-heathen; because his angels look as wistful and unsatisfied as his graces; or the same cadaverous light falls on the Virgin as on the Venus. They simply did not happen to know that this is one aspect of Catholic theology; just as the most majestic Mater Tnumphalis, stiff with Byzantine gold, is another aspect of it. It is an entirely Catholic sentiment that Mary is the second Eve and in that sense the second Venus; and that she feels the full pathos of the human fall and the fruitless but tireless search for a heathen happiness. She knows that pagan passion is beautiful, and she certainly knows that it is

X76 THE RESURRECTION OF ROME sad. Botticelli did not have to wait for Swinburne to feel all that; it is in the Creed. Then the modern critic will turn to somebody else and find something gloomy and violent in Michael Angelo and perhaps call that heathen; though it is exactly what a heathen would call gloomy and violent in Dante. The Faith faces every possible way, so far as angle and attitude to life is concerned; and there is no artistic style it cannot use. The jewel has a hundred facets, and reflects every colour and corner of the sky; but that does not mean that it wavers or wobbles; and those who would break it find it the hardest stone in the world.

It is necessary to grasp this, especially when we come upon an angle or attitude that we do not happen to like; as is the case with a multitude of northern people, living in the Ruskinian tradition, when they first see the Baroque; especially such boiling and foaming masses of the Baroque as bubble up from the very depths of Rome. I see that Mr. Karel Capek has written a most amusing and disarming little book about Italy; and among other foreign critics I think he is a thousand times more likely to be right because he continually confesses that he may be wrong. This attitude is so startling in an art critic, that I hail it with the veneration due to something great and heroic; and all the more so because I think he

THE RETURN OF THE GODS Jl77 is wrong. He thinks that Christianity died with the Gothic and the Byzantine and that Catholicism, something different and practically Pagan, came in with the classical and the florid. There are a hundred answers to this; over and above an obvious query about Catholicism only beginning about the same time as Protestantism. Perhaps the shortest answer is to point out that the very period which plastered all the churches with naked cherubim and saints looking like sun-gods was the period that produced some of the most sensitive and humble and sympathetic of all the great Christians of history; that people like St. Vincent de Paul and St. Francis of Sales and St. Theresa walked in some such wilderness of white new marble and glaring tropic gold; their souls as delicate and transparent and tenderly coloured as any window of the Middle Ages. The real explanation is not that they thought so much more of gold and marble, but that they thought so much less of them.

Christianity or Catholicism (and, with best wishes to Mr. Capek, they are not different) is something more than a mood. It is something more like an event; an event like a baby being bom in a family. The parents know they will have hundreds of moods about the baby; ranging from something approaching idolatry to something drifting towards infanticide. But the fact is not altered, and other things, including moods, are adjusted to the fact. There can be all sorts of discussions in the family about the best style of toys for the baby; just as there are all sorts of discussions about the best style of art for the Church. There is a Golliwog School as there is a Gothic School; there are people who do not feel a wax doll from the Lowther Arcade as too florid or foolish, just as there are people who do not feel a Madonna of Murillo as too like a wax doll from the Lowther Arcade. There are others who would have every puppet in the nursery as perfect in form and balance as a Greek god in a temple; like that little figure of the Flying Mercury which was knocked off a motor-car in one of Mr. Wells’s novels and picked up by a child, who preferred it to all his Punches and Teddy Bears. There is an endless and equal quarrel between the classic and the fantastic. It can always be said that reason and order are better than unreason and anarchy; and answered that there lies beyond our reason a world of wilder and more wonderful mysteries; and answered again that pure harmony is really the same as perfect liberty; and answered yet again that a more perfect liberty would seem to our limited vision imperfect. It is quite true, on the one hand, that the straight limbs of the Greek hero, or even the straight lines of the stiff Egyptian god, may be in truth a still whirlwind of perfect motion and energy. It is true again that there is something in us at once antic and domestic. Something for which a thing is not quite familiar unless it is a little outlandish. Something that is more at home with the goblins than the gods. That dispute can rage round the dolls of the nursery as round the idols of the temple. But those of us who are really concerned to apply it to the nursery or the temple do not really treat the differences as differences of deep loyalty or allegiance; they are a matter of means and not of ends. We, in the sense of those whose allegiance is the same as mine, do not feel about these schools of taste as the modern critics imagine, when they treat them as schools of thought. We like the doll that is as graceful as a dryad, or the golliwog that is as hideous as a gargoyle. We pit them against each other and urge that this or that will be the more educational emblem; but we are not in the last resort thinking about these things. We are not merely comparing pleasures or merely pleasing ourselves; for to us a child is born.

This is what a man must understand first in contemplating the bold historic experiment of the Baroque. For the Church it was a very bold experiment; and, as I note elsewhere, it was by no means the first or last of such bold experiments. The Catholic Church, so often noted for its sleepy and hoary antiquity, has again and again been in the very vanguard of an advancing and changing world; and it is part of the joke that she has always suffered for it at the next change. She had filled the world with too many vigorous masterpieces when they were in the fashion; so there are too many of them to be pointed at as old-fashioned. So it was with the Aristotelian logic of the Middle Ages; when men produced so much logic that it came at last to choke up the path of progress like lumber. So it was with the classical revival of the Renaissance; when it produced so much classical sculpture and statuary as to choke up the streets of Rome like a barricade of colonnades and fountains, or an obstacle-race of statues and shrines. Those who do not like it need not look at it; those who do like it will probably admit that there is rather too much of it. But at least let them remember that it was because the Church did move with the times that she has so entrenched and entangled herself in the memorials of the times. Indeed Rome is almost like somebody caught in the act of “ moving,” hemmed in by boxes and baggage.

I say that a man who would begin to be reconciled to this Rococo sequel of the Renaissance must first remember that it was a means to an end, like a doll for a child. It was a new doll but not a new child; and the child is more important than the doll. If we think of it in this way, we shall have the proportion and emphasis right, even if we continue to think it is an overdressed and tawdry doll, much inferior to the hard Dutch Doll of the Primitives. But indeed the infantile parallel applies even more in detail. When I want, as an old medievalist, to force myself to be fair to the Baroque, I find that the most sympathetic medium is to take a pencil, especially one or two coloured pencils, and let the point wander over the paper in dashing and sprawling designs such as might be made for the back scenes of a child’s toy theatre. In fact when people complain that this style is theatrical, they are not wrong and not necessarily hostile. There is in all the churches, that look like palaces, a broad quality of scene-painting; there is also something like a quality of scene-shifting. Many of them have been removed and recast and raised again as by the gestures of a gigantic stage carpenter. But there is nothing necessarily false in this nameless air of being, not even palaces, but rather the pavilions of a moving pageant of progress. All that is necessary is to put ourselves, as a child would do, in sympathy with that sort of scenery. Preferably, as I say, to take a pencil and design that sort of scenery. The draughtsman will find that the crayon moves quite swiftly and naturally to create such forms, if he does not bother about whether they belong to any school of architecture. For the truth is that they are not architecture but draughtsmanship, like the swirl of flying figures sketched on the Sistine Chapel. I quite concede that there is something strictly more sincere in the architecture which is architecture, and which is especially building. Mr. Eric Gill once said that in sculpture a man must be a stone man, but the sort of man that God would have made if he had used stone. It is the glory of the great Gothic, and the best Romanesque, that no liveliness of detail ever makes us forget that the house of God is still a house, and a house made of stone. I agree that the Baroque does not do this; it is rather the work of a magician drawing pictures in the air. He sweeps up his hand and makes the curve of a cloud; he cleaves it and lets forth a shaft of sun. It is not real cloud or real sun, and does not pretend to be; but it does, as it were, pretend to pretend. It is theatrical; but a theatrical performance is not a falsehood, for it does not profess to be a fact. Still, there is the difference; it does not really look like cloud or sunshine, but then it does not really look like plaster or timber. It does not really look like what it really is. That does, I think, mean a deep and real separation from the Stone House or the Stone Man.... But what does it matter, so long as the child is pleased?

All churches are built to please the Child in heaven; but these churches were rather specially built to please the children of men. Perhaps, in spite of the apparent sophistication of the style and the period, they were in a peculiar sense addressed to the child in man. And that is why they remind me of the bold scenery of a pantomime or a toy-theatre; and even St. Peter’s Dome sometimes looks like Aladdin’s Palace. There really were historical and political reasons. This riot is the CounterReformation; the great raid made by Rome to recapture her popularity in the lost provinces and among the alienated groups. If in this style there is something explosive, if there is something which some not unnaturally call vulgar, it is partly because the Church is deliberately playing the demagogue. I think it was Monsignor Benson who pointed out that, with all the tenderness of the Gothic churches, there is more uninterrupted access to the altar in the Renaissance shrines; and that is connected with the sort of thing that the Counter-Reformation, whatever its faults, really did do. It flung open the gates. No longer counting on the devout populace to wait outside, it called on the doubtful populace to come in and see. It at once defied and implored the world. I have said that some of the Renaissance statues in St. Peter’s are flowing with lines that are akin to rhetoric. It may fairly be said of some of the Baroque effects in churches that they are akin to tub-thumping. All this men will blame or praise or pardon, according to their tastes or temperaments; but it will be well for them first of all to understand.

In short the Counter- Reformation, which used the Baroque like a blazon or a blare of trumpets, was but another example of the special sort of energy we have seen everywhere in this history; the energy of resurrection. It was the return of the dead or at least of the defeated; the counter-attack of the conquered; the surprise attack made by those supposed to have been disarmed. If some of the strokes of this surprise attack are a little surprising, we need not in our turn be surprised. In fact the Baroque effects in Rome have really rather a suggestion of somebody storming the high places, and even the holy places of the city; like that kingdom which the violent take by storm. It is really rather as if men were setting stone and brass on fire, or rolling the reeling columns in smoke, or pouring down molten marble as the old fighters poured down melted lead. The Church is using, and using up, the materials of the world, burning up gold and gorgeous substances in one furious battle for popularity and public appeal; and those who like it least should look upon it as a battle-field, and remember that the battle was won. For since the seventeenth century Popes and the Society of Jesus splashed all Europe with this splendid vulgarity, there has never been any question of their religion really disappearing among the populace of the Latin and the old Catholic lands. Whatever our own beliefs or unbeliefs, we shall not understand the human history of the thing, until we realise that what many not unreasonably regard as the decay of art was the resurrection of religion. It may be that a degenerate art was used recklessly for a resurrected religion, though there may be two opinions even about the degeneration. It is often said, for instance, that the Jesuit use of the genius of Rubens in itself marked a degeneracy from the most sincere Christian art. I need not discuss that here. But, after all, what sort of a decay is it which in corruption breeds not worms but giants; and what sort of strength of which Rubens was the weakness and the decline?

To sum up; Baroque architecture is not architecture, but it is art. It is rather as if I, for one, should say that Walt Whitman’s poetry is not poetry, but it is literature. Baroque architecture seems to me to belong rather to the art of painting, and especially, as I have said, of scene-painting. It is in fact simply painting a Renaissance picture in three dimensions instead of two. It is attempting to give solidity and substance to those dreams of Rococo curve and colour which we all recognise, without much resentment, in the corresponding school of pictures. A column and a cloud and a sunburst and a careering seraph are normal enough in any number of pictures; but here they are deliberately turned into furniture. They are given thickness and stereoscopic solidity and all that is necessary for seeing them from all sides like a statue. But a cloud and a sunburst and a seraph are not building; they could not possibly build anything or assist in the building of anything, and as a matter of fact they are not meant to. It may have been an exaggeration to call them false, for they were not meant to deceive, any more than they were meant to construct. But it is not an exaggeration to call them sensational, for they were meant to make a sensation and not to make a building. When all this was allowed for, we can enjoy what is really fascinating and stimulating in such fancies as we should in our childhood have enjoyed a transformation scene in a pantomime; and only a too sensitive reverence will be very much annoyed if the transformation is called a transfiguration. But there does remain a vast distance between that sort of thing and the strong craftsmanship, that can make a thing ornamental in the very act of making it useful. The mediaeval tradition is still superior, in so far that it can make a beautiful tool, which is not merely a pantomime sceptre or a property sword. There is a simpler and nobler sort of work, which has, from the beginning made a boat beautiful because it could float and a building beautiful because it can stand. But Rome is not the place where one can reasonably look for such simplicities. By the very nature of its complex story, it has every virtue except simplicity.

I have treated this matter of Renaissance art and its sequel at some length and yet insufficiently; first because I do not claim the right to treat it technically; and second because I do claim the right to treat it more or less morally. Never was art less unmoral than the art discussed here. Never was art less for art's salce than that which was done in Rome by some of the greatest artists of the world. The whole matter was not only moral but theological; and any treatment of that is always insufficient. But I am very glad that I have ventured to talk like a Christian and not a cultured person; that I have borne some sort of testimony to the things to which these men really wished to testify; and that I have unburdened my mind of an unaffected and even affectionate contempt for the numerous varieties of fool who third' tint the Remiccance was Pagan; that Pan is living but that Christ is dead. I have said what I think of them and got it off my mind. I arise more cheerful, like the Obelisk.