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Page 78
"If you found pictures answer to an unknown need within yourself,
that is very well," he declared. "About music I know little; but
concerning painting a great deal. And you desire to know, too, I
see. The spirit is willing, but the spirit probably does not know
yet what lies in front of it. You are groping--blind, childlike--
without a hand to guard and an authority to guide. That is
merely to waste time. When you go back to Italy, you must begin
at the beginning, if you are in earnest--not at the middle. Only
ignorance measures art in terms of skill, for there are no degrees
in art. None has transcended Giotto, because technique and
draughtsmanship are accidents of time; they lie outside the soul
of the matter. Art is in fact a static thing. It changes as the
face of the sea changes, from hour to hour; but it does not
progress. There are great and small artists and great and small
movements, as there are great and small waves, brisk breezes and
terrific tempests; but all are moulded of like substance. In the
one case art, in the other, the ocean, remains unchanged. I shall
plan your instruction for you, if you please, and send you to the
primitives first--the mighty ones who laid the foundations. I
lived five years at Siena--for love of the beginnings; and you
must also learn to love and reverence the beginnings, if you would
understand that light in the darkness men call the Renaissance."
He broke from Mary presently, strove to interest Sir Walter, and
succeeded.
"A benevolent autocracy is the ideal government, my friend--the
ideal of all supreme thinkers--a Machiavelli, a Nietzsche, a
Stendhal, a Gobineau. Liberty and equality are terms mutually
destructive, they cannot exist together; for, given liberty, the
strong instantly look to it that equality shall perish. And
rightly so. Equality is a war cry for fools--a negation of nature,
an abortion. The very ants know better. Doubtless you view with
considerable distrust the growing spirit of democracy, or what is
called by that name?"
"I do," admitted Sir Walter.
"Your monarch and mine are a little bitten by this tarantula. I
am concerned for them. We must not pander to the mob's leaders,
for they are not, and never have been, the many-headed thing itself.
They, not the mob, are 'out to kill,' as you say. But that State
will soon perish that thinks to prosper under the rule of the
proletariat. Such a constitution would be opposed to natural law
and, therefore, contain the seeds of its own dissolution. And its
death would be inconceivably horrible; for the death of huge,
coarse organisms is always horrible. Only distinguished creatures
are beautiful in death, or know how to die like gentlemen."
"Who are on your side to-day, signor?" asked Henry Lennox.
"More than I know, I hope. Gobineau is my lighthouse in the storm.
You must read him, if you have not done so. He was the incarnate
spirit of the Renaissance. He radiated from his bosom its
effulgence and shot it forth, like the light of a pharos over dark
waters; he, best of all men, understood it, and, most of all men,
mourned to see its bright hope and glory perish out of the earth
under the unconquerable superstition of mankind and the lamentable
infliction of the Jewish race. Alas! The Jews have destroyed many
other things besides the Saviour of us all."
They found the Renaissance to be the favorite theme of Signor
Mannetti. He returned again and again to it, and it was typical
of him that he could combine assurances of being a devout Catholic
with sentiments purely pagan.
"Christianity has operated in the making of many slaves and
charlatans," he said. "One mourns the fact, but must be honest.
It has too often scourged the only really precious members of
society from the temple of life. It has cast the brave and clean
and virile into outer darkness, and exalted the staple of humanity,
which is never brave, or virile, and seldom really clean. A
hideous wave submerges everything that matters. The proud, the
beautiful--the only beings that justify the existence of mankind--
will soon be on the hills with the hawks and leopards, and
hunted like them--outcast, pariah, unwanted, hated."
"The spirit of christianity is socialistic, I fear," said Sir
Walter. "It is one of those things I do not pretend to understand,
but the modern clergy speak with a clear voice on the subject."
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