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Page 31
Now, during the last two or three months he had been put into wholly
changed conditions. An habitual visitor to this family into whose life
he had accidentally entered, he had been a daily witness of Mrs.
Douglas's self-forgetting love, which was by no means content with
ministering to the happiness of her own loved home ones, but continually
reached out to an ever widening circle, blessing whomever it touched. He
could not be unconscious that every act of Robert Sumner's busy life was
directed by the desire to give of himself to help others; that a high
ideal of beneficence, not gain, was always before him, and was that by
which he measured himself. The wealth, the position of both, served only
to make their lives more generous.
And he saw that the younger people of the household had caught the same
spirit. Malcom, Margery, Barbara, and Bettina forgot themselves in each
other, and were most generous in all their judgments. They esteemed
people according to that which they were in themselves, not according to
what they had, and shrank from nothing save meanness and selfishness.
As we have seen, he had been attracted in a wonderful way to Barbara
ever since he had first met her. Her beauty, her unconscious pride of
bearing, mingled with her sweet, unaffected enthusiasms, were a swift
revelation to one who had never in his life before given a second
thought to any girl; and a fierce longing to win her love had taken
possession of his whole being, as he had confessed to Mrs. Douglas.
But to-day there was a chill upon him. He had before been confident of
the future. It must not, should not disappoint him, he had said to
himself again and again. Somehow he was not now so sure of himself and
it. There seemed a mystery before him. The way that had always before
seemed to open to his will refused to disclose itself. How could he win
the affection of this noble girl, whose life already seemed so full that
she felt no lack, who was so warm and generous in her feelings to all,
so thoroughly unselfish, so wholesome, so lovable? How he did long to
make all her wishes centre on him, even as his did upon her!
But Barbara's ideals were high. She would demand much of him whom she
could love. Only the other day he had heard her say in a voice deep with
feeling that money and position were nothing in comparison with a life
that was ever giving itself to enrich others. Whom did she mean? he
wondered. It seemed as if she knew some one who was even then in her
mind, and a fierce jealousy sprang up with the thought. She surely
could not have meant him, for he had never lived for any other than
himself, nor did he wish to think of anything but himself. He wanted to
get well and to have Barbara love him. Then he would take her away from
everybody else and lavish everything upon her, and how happy would he
be! Could he only look into the future, he thought, and see that this
was to come, he would ask nothing else.
Poor Howard! Could the future have opened before his wish never so
little, how soon would his restless, raging emotions have become hushed
into a great silence!
* * * * *
A few evenings afterward, as they were all sitting together in the
library, and Howard with them, Mr. Sumner, knowing that the young people
had been reading and talking of Ghirlandajo and Botticelli, said that
perhaps there would be no better time for talking of these artists than
the present.
"With Masaccio," he continued, "we have begun a new period of Italian
painting,--the period of the Early Renaissance. All the former great
artists,--Cimabue, Giotto, and Fra Angelico, whom we have particularly
studied,--and the lesser ones, about whom you have read,--Orcagna,
Taddeo Gaddi, and Uccello, the bird-lover (who gave himself so
untiringly to the study of linear perspective),--belong to the Gothic
period, literally the rude period; in which, although a steady advance
was made, yet the works are all more or less very imperfect
art-productions. All these are wholly in the service of the Church, and
are painted in fresco on plaster or in _tempera_ on wood. In the Early
Renaissance, however, a new impulse was seen. Artists were much better
equipped for their work, nature-study progressed wonderfully, anatomy
was studied, perspective was mastered, the sphere of art widened to take
in history, portraits, and mythology; and in the latter part of this
period, as we shall see, oil-painting was introduced."
"Can you give us any dates of these periods to remember, uncle?" asked
Malcom.
"Roughly speaking, the Gothic period covers the years from about 1250 to
1400; the Early Renaissance, from about 1400 to 1500. Masaccio, as we
have seen, was the first great painter of the Early Renaissance, and he
lived from 1401 to 1428. But these dates are not arbitrary. Fra Angelico
lived until 1455, and yet his pictures belong wholly to the Gothic
period; so also do those of other Gothic painters whose lives overlap
the Early Renaissance in point of time. It is the spirit of the art
that definitely determines its place, although the general dates help
one to remember.
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