means were fully employed in satisfying men's fancy or expressing men's cravings; it could not exist as long as the artificial and the real were both sufficiently important to dispense with the interest due to comparison between them; nay, such comparison between the reality and the artistic representation required a lazy and objectless activity of the reason, which was impossible in a time when the reason, overburdened with practical problems, had little leisure for play, and when the artistic cravings and activities were too rigorous to be its passive playthings. Above all, the purely intellectual reasoning enjoyment of watching how far art will differ from nature could not exist as long as the mechanical powers, the powers of responding to the artistic wants of mankind, were still growing in their constant efforts after the yet unaccomplished.

There is in all the art of great periods a sad absence of logic; at least of the logic which we expect. Mere chronicle and mere portraiture put aside, the exposition of an event or of a character is generally imbedded in a perfect arabesque of poetical or pictorial digressions. In a play, which is, after all, only the imitation of the manner in which we suppose any given events to have taken place, there is in antiquity a series of musical and lyrical interruptions, a series of odes upon extremely indifferent subjects sung at the most critical moments by people who would either not be present, or be thinking of anything rather than choruses; there is in the Elizabethan period a constant arabesquing off into most elaborate lyrical imagery, of digressing into complete chapters of philosophy, which we disregard from a sort of inherited familiarity with the style, but which would astonish us greatly if we had never before read anything like 'Prometheus Bound' or 'Macbeth;' astonish and shock us as much as some intelligent child or peasant would be astonished and shocked by the orchestral preludes, the roulades, the fugues accompanying the conspiracies and murders of our opera stage. Indeed, an opera, with its symphonies, its airs, its quintets and sextets, its choruses, its ballets, its whole tissue of unrealities woven over a few threads of realism, is perhaps the only artistic form of our day in which we can study the unrealistic, pageant-like art of past times; the only modern thing which can make us realise, with its innumerable incongruities and impossibilities, endured for the sake of mere artistic pleasure, the sort of serious masquerade, the solemn mummery of the plastic and poetic art of former days.

People did not ask for realisation; they did not ask to be shown an artistic fac-simile of a character or of an event. The public which crowded Blackfriars or the Globe Theatre did not ask for a realisation of a tyrant as Becky Sharp is the realisation of an adventuress; they did not ask for a realisation of a tale of murder as any novel of Emile Gaboriau is its realisation: they merely wished to be interested and delighted; and a certain proportion of rough psychologic portraiture, a certain proportion of loosely narrated story, a certain amount of passionate expression, of philosophic rhetoric, of poetic magnificence,

of trap-door and magic-lantern horror, did succeed in interesting and delighting them: and the whole strange compound of developed and half-developed elements was called, as the case might be, Macbeth, Hamlet, or the Duchess of Malfy. And the same with painting. The most subtle Florentine public did not ask for a realisation of a Scripture story, or an episode in history, as Alma Tadema's' Ave Cæsar,' or Morelli's 'Raising of Jairus's Daughter,' may be considered as realisations of events, as representations of men and women, and place and costume, and look and gesture—of the whole occurrence, in short, such as it probably looked. They were satisfied, the people of the Renaissance, with a figure or two which they could recognise as St. Peter, or St. Paul, or the Proconsul, or the priest of Apollo, with the traditional costume belonging to them, the general expression of exhortation or prayer, or command or terror, which might convey to their mind some idea of their action; and then they were satisfied that Masaccio or Filippino or Ghirlandaio should surround the whole scene of altercation or of miracle with a group of Greek soldiers, of mediæval men-at-arms, of robed scholars and magistrates, of ladies in brocaded stomachers, and nymphs in antique draperies, of pretty dandies in kilted tunics and striped hose, of people with baskets, and dogs and horses and musical instruments, all looking in no particular direction, with plenty of vine trellises, perspective streets, peacocks, bas-reliefs or imitation dolmens, with arches of rock overgrown with trees and framing views of towered towns in the distance.

Was it stupidity on the part of the men for whom Shakespeare wrote, of the men for whom Masaccio, or Botticelli, or Signorelli painted? I should not care to tax them with that; or if it were, their stupidity had better results than our wisdom. I do not think that they had all these things done from mere ignorance or dulness. I think they had merely a different system, a different habit of viewing artistic matters. They did not require that all the items of play or picture be portions of an organic logical growth, that each part should depend upon another, and the whole produce a single logical impression, any more than, when you make a nosegay or garland, you expect all the flowers and leaves to be homogeneous: lilies do not grow on melon plants, nor poppies on oak leaves; yet as a combination of form and colour, as a decoration, a garland such as the Robbias were wont to imitate in their altar-pieces is certainly preferable to a garland made all of one flower, or of one sort of flower. I have said as a decoration,' and this brings me to the fact that the art of all great periods is, in point of fact, nothing but a decoration; for just as men made their dwellings delightful by stamping leather with blue and gold patterns (which are certainly not what leather naturally presents) and hanging it on the walls, by weaving the dyed threads of wool and silk into strange figures and devices, by cutting holes into wood and filling them up with bits of ivory or mother-of-pearl, by setting together all manner of various marbles in shapes such as no quarry could ever show; by carving in wood, and painting on plaster, all sorts of shapes, just like

enough to beasts and flowers to show that there never was beast or flower like them; as men united together things and forms from all parts of the world and all orders of creation, and altered and assorted them to beautify their houses; so also men took elements of thought and feeling and form, things which delighted the eye, and things which appealed to the fancy, and united them together into quaint and gorgeous arabesques, with which they patterned their lives. And if we consider for a moment, and put aside all our own habits of considering art as a semi-scientific product, we shall acknowledge how much more natural and spontaneous is such arabesque of form and fancy than our own modern attempt to adorn, to decorate our lives with the museum cases, the rows of pricked and pinned butterflies, and stuffed animals of psychological analysis, to stencil it over with the tables of dates and geological maps of logical realism, whence it is that our lives, for all the attempts we make to adorn them, preserve to the last so dreary a look of schoolrooms and laboratories. Thus we must understand that in the art of the past there is no more logical homogeneousness than in the arabesques of a carved chest or a painted plate; things are juxtaposed and combined with reference only to pleasantness of effect. Hence it is that we constantly meet in the paintings of the Renaissance, and even of the Middle Ages, what appear to us contradictions in the telling of a story,. jumbles of time and place, broken-up or hopelessly muddled allegory. But in reality only a fragment of story was expected to be told, only a small amount of unity of time and place to be observed, only a scrap of allegory to be carried through; what seems to us the contradiction, the jumble in story or allegory, no longer belongs to the story or the allegory; is something else, possibly as foreign to them as the miniature angels along the gilded border, or the griffons and satyrs upon the carved frame. These things were not intended to logically coalesce, they merely pictorially harmonised. The gentlemen in furred robes and ladies in high coifs, who knelt at the foot of the cross, the pages holding the caparisoned horses, and the halfnaked St. Johns and red-hatted St. Jeromes of Van Eyck's and Memling's pictures were not supposed to be really co-existing with the fainting Virgin, the sobbing Magdalen, the bleeding Redeemer; the cross was not really supposed to be erected in front of a Dutch castle farmhouse, with fowls cackling by its barn door, palfreys crossing its drawbridges, and ducks swimming in its moat. All this was neither narrative, nor representation, nor allegory, but a little of each and all, combined into one beautiful-looking picture, into one confused, suggestive, moving, delighting pageant of the imagination; for the agony on the cross, the anguish of the Virgin and her attendants, touched people's hearts; the knights and ladies and horses impressed their fancy; the barn door, the drawbridge, the ducks, the rabbits, the twenty familiar irrelevant details, tickled their fancy; the singing angels sounded delightful; and the whole -to us so incongruous-picture was enjoyed like some great play,

in which there is tragedy and comedy, and pastoral and allegory, all mixed together, and the whole effect of which is delightful.

Such, therefore, was the spirit in which even that strangely modern-minded, reasoning, psychological, archæological Raphael must have conceived his works. And in this lies the explanation of that anomaly of the fiddling Apollo. It is difficult to indicate, with however much sense of their unconsciousness and vagueness, the vague, unconscious thoughts and feelings which form the background of all conscious artistic creations. As soon as ever we speak of them they appear definite, conscious; they are no longer the real thing. We can therefore only vaguely suggest the sort of confused conception which Raphael may have had of his Parnassus. In the first place, and of entirely overbalancing importance, the sense of a great piece of pictorial composition-of perspective, drawing, colour, and so forth; then the sense of an allegory of poetry, of personified abstractions; then, again, the sense of certain individuals, of certain personalities these two purely intellectual conceptions very much mixed up and entirely driven into the shade, or, more properly speaking, absorbed into the the all-important pictorial conception. Thus there would come to be a similar confusion in the conception of the details of the work. There would be an idea of Apollo-of an antique personality, an individual belonging to a definite period of time; then an idea of poetry personified, of poetry in general, modern as well as ancient, not belonging at all to any particular epoch; then again of music, and of music in all probability as something modern -the music which Raphael had heard, not the music which he had not heard. A nebulous, eddying sort of jumble, united, solidified, cast into definite shape by the predominant thought of a young man, a naked young man, a model-yes, seated thus, with his arm thus. The real lad, peasant or colour-grinder, the real, distinct form, fills the mind of Raphael; he takes a piece of paper and rapidly scrawls a figure, the figure of the boy whom he sees in his memory, whom he sees perhaps as a present reality; quick, the outline of his swaying body, of his firmly planted legs, of his upturned, sidelong face; and then-who shall tell how?-from the subsidiary conceptions of the work, from the intellectual notions of his meaning, come his surroundings—the roughly sketched Muses, in antique draperies, belonging to the idea of him as Apollo, as the antique reality; the rapidly indicated figures of the poets-of Father Allighieri and Messer Francesco Petrarca, and perhaps even of Messer Piero Aretino as part and parcel of the idea of poetry, of poetry in general, old and new, embodied in this youth; and finally, as a recollection of the something musical which enters into the vague whole comes into Raphael's head, and emerges from under his pencil, with some recently heard tune starting suddenly into his memory, the final touch-the fiddle.

So the work is done: the anachronism is committed; yet without either unconsciousness of its being an anachronism, or conscious

ness of its being one; without either ignorance or absurdity. And when the men of the Renaissance, the prelates and courtiers, the humanists and antiquaries, come and look upon the work, they do not laugh, they do not ask the meaning, they do not question about anything. For in their minds exists the same decorative arabesque as in that of Raphael. An antique god, a personified art, a remembered tune, a bit of narrative of how King Apollo was wont to sit upon Parnassus, a bit of allegory of poets grouped according to their styles and merits, in company with the personified branches of the art; a bit of realism, a recollection of heard music, a fiddle-ideas running confusedly into each other, pleasing, amusing, reminding; above all, a noble piece of work, a noble group, grandly perspectived, nobly drawn, harmoniously coloured.

But it is different with us; with us who understand so much about all the conditions under which art was produced, and who sympathise with them so little. We come into that prison-like hall of the Signature, we blink and wink in the half-light, we screen our eyes from the shadows, till the frescoed Parnassus gradually emerges from out of the dark wall. We look, appreciate, admire, enjoy (or think we enjoy), and then we laugh. At what? At Apollo, or at his fiddle? Surely not at Apollo. He is but a single figure, very simple and simply worked, not elaborate either in form or in expression, yet perhaps conveying a greater impression of genius than all the dozens of Madonnas, Perugine and Florentine and Roman, than all the great ceremonious allegories like the School of Athens and the Dispute of the Sacrament,' than all the Michelangelesque nudities of the Burning of the Borgo,' with that terrible perfection of drawing and composition and expression, that terrible balance of good qualities, pictorial and psychological, which so often makes Raphael less interesting than many a one-sided, unintelligent little Lombard, or Umbrian, or Venetian. He is but a simple, humanlooking god, yet perhaps more poetical, and poetically charming, with his slightly raised young head, singing, quite gently and sotto voce as yet, humming over the song he has just composed and will sing anon quite loud and joyous to the Muses-more poetically charming, perhaps, this fiddling Apollo of Parnassus, than almost any marble Apollo of antiquity; than the little Lizard-hunter, a lithe and supple young lizard himself, of Praxiteles; than the young Florentine Apollino, the delicate poet-boy, with hair twisted by some admiring Muse; than the long-robed, laurel-crowned Musagetes of fluttering, half-theatrical inspiration, the divinisation of the improvvisatore, of the male or semi-masculine Corinne; than the sombre prophetic Pythian (Cassandra's ill-omened lover, certainly) leaning his half-draped chest upon his cithara, wearily pillowing his braided head upon his arm; nay, even than the wizard statue of the Belvedere, which, for all our wiser judgment, for all our archæology, and all our knowledge of Elgin marbles, does still give us a little shock of surprise, a little shudder of delight, every time that we, the con