"Therefore I paint no terrors of death, no flesh torn by iron, no passion of an anguish greater than we can ever conceive, no bittersweet ecstasy of Self abandoned or Love inflaming; but instead, serenity, a morning sky, a meek victim, Love fulfilling Law. Shorn of accidents, for the essence is enough; not passionate, for that were as gross an affront in face of such awful death as to be trivial. Nothing too much; Law fulfilling Love; reasonable service.
"And because we are of the earth earthy, and because what I work you must behold with bodily eyes, I limn you angels and gods in your own image; not of greater stature nor of more excellent beauty than many among you; not of finer essence, maybe, than yourselves. But as the priests about that naked altar, so stand they, that the love which transfigures them be absorbed in the fulfilling of law; and the law they exquisitely follow be at once the pattern and glass of their love."
Master Peter drained a beaker of his Orvieto. I admired; for indeed the little man spoke well.
"Now the Lord be good to you, Master Peter," I said; "men do you a great wrong. For there are some who aver that you doubt."
"Who does not doubt?" replied my host. "We doubt whenever we cannot see."
"I believe you are right," said I. "Your great Saint is, after all, your great Seer. For you, then, to question the soul's immortality is but to admit that you do not yet see your own life to come."
"Leave it so," said Perugino. "Let us talk reasonably."
"Did all men love the law as you do," I resumed after a painful pause--for I felt the force of the Master's rebuke to my impertinence (and could hope others will feel it also)--"did all love the law as you do, the world would be a cooler place and passion at a discount. But I cannot conceive Art without passion."
"Nor I," said the painter, "and for the excellent reason that there is no such thing. But remember this: passion is like the Alpheus. Hedge it about with dams, you drive it deeper. Out of sight is not out of being. And the issue must needs be the fairer."
"Happy the passion," I said, "which hath an issue. There is passion of the vexed sort, where the tears are frozen to ice as they start. Of the tortured thus, remember--
"Lo pianto stesso li planger non lascia, E il duol, che trova in su gli occhi rintoppo, Si volve in entro a far crescer l' ambascia."
"You know our Dante?" said Master Peter blandly (though I swear he knew what I was at). "There may be such people; doubtless there are such people. For me, I find a perpetual outlet in my art." I could not forbear----
"Master Peter, Master Peter," I cried out, "how can I believe you when I know that your Madonna's eyes are brimming; when I know why she turns them to a misty heaven or an earth seen blotted by reason of tears? Do these tears ever fall, Master Peter? or who freezes them as they start?"
For I wondered where his patient Imola found her outlet, and whether young Simone has shown her a way. Master Peter drummed on the table and nursed one fat leg.
Before I took leave of the urbane little painter, in fact while I stood in the act of handshaking, I saw her white face at an upper window, looming behind rigid bars. On a sudden impulse I concluded my farewells rapidly and made to go. Vannucci turned back into the house and closed the door; but I stayed in the cortile pretending a trouble with my spurs. Sure enough, in a short time I heard a light footfall. Imola stood beside me.
"Wish me a safe journey," I said smiling, "and no more bare-headed cavaliers on the road." Her lips hardly moved, so still her voice was. "Was he bare-headed?" she asked, as if in awe.
"Love-locks floating free," I answered her gaily enough. "Shall I thank him for his courtesies to you, Madonna, if we meet?"
"You will not meet: he is gone to Spello," she began, and then stopped, blushing painfully.
"But I may stay in Spello this night and could seek him out."
She was mistress of her lips, and could now look steadily at me. "I wish him very well," said Imola.
VI
THE SOUL OF A FACT
In the days when it was verging on a question whether a man could be at the same time a good Christian and an artist, the chosen subjects of painting were significant of the approaching crisis--those glaring moral contrasts in history which, for want of a happier term, we call dramatic. Why this was so, whether Art took a hint from Politics, or had withdrawn her more intimate manifestations to await likelier times, is a question it were long to answer. The subjects, at any rate, were such as the Greeks, with their surer instincts and saving grace of sanity in matters of this kind, either forbore to meddle with or treated as decoratively as they treated acanthus-wreaths. Today we call them "effective" subjects; we find they produce shocks and tremors; we think it braces us to shudder, and we think that Art is a kind of emotional pill; we measure it quantitatively, and say that we "know what we like." And doubtless there is something piquant in the quivering produced, for example, by the sight of white innocence fluttering helpless in a grey shadow of lust. So long as the Bible remained a god that piquancy was found in a _Massacre of the Innocents_; in our own time we find it in a _Faust and Gretchen_, in the Dor Gallery, or in the Royal Academy. It was a like appreciation of the certain effect of vivid contrasts as powerful didactic agents (coupled with, or drowning, a something purer and more devout) which had inspired those most beautiful and distinctive of all the symbols of Catholicism, the _Adoration of the Kings_, the Christ-child cycle, and which raised the Holy Child and Maid-Mother to their place above the mystic tapers and the Cross. Naturally the Old Testament, that garner of grim tales, proved a rich mine: _David and Golias, Susanna and the Elders_, the _Sacrifice of Isaac, Jethro's daughter_. But the story of Judith did not come to be painted in Tuscan sanctuaries until Donatello of Florence had first cast her in bronze at the prayer of Cosimo _pater patria_. Her entry was dramatic enough at least: Dame Fortune may well have sniggered as she spun round the city on her ball. Cosimo the patriot and his splendid grandson were no sooner dead and their brood sent flying, than Donatello's _Judith_ was set up in the Piazza as a fit emblem of rescue from tyranny, with the vigorous motto, to make assurance double, "EXEMPLVM SALVTIS PVBLIC CIVES POSVERE." Savonarola, who knew his Bible, saw here a keener application of Judith's pious sin. A few years later that same _Judith_ saw him burn. Thus, as an incarnate cynicism, she will pass; as a work of art she is admittedly one of her great creator's failures. Her neighbour _Perseus_ of the Loggia makes this only too plain! For Cellini has seized the right moment in a deed of horror, and Donatello, with all his downrightness and grip of the fact, has hit upon the wrong. It is fatal to freeze a moment of time into an eternity of waiting. His _Judith_ will never strike: her arm is palsied where it swings. The Damoclean sword is a fine incident for poetry; but Holofernes was no Damocles, and, if he had been, it were intolerable to cast his experience in bronze. Donatello has essayed that thing impossible for sculpture, to arrest a moment instead of denote a permanent attribute. Art is adjectival, is it not, O Donatello? Her business is to qualify facts, to say what things are, not to state them, to affirm that they are. A sculptured _Judith_ was done not long afterwards, carved, as we shall see, with a burin on a plate; and the man who so carved her was a painter.
Meantime, _pari passu_, almost, a painter who was a poet was trying his hand; a man who knew his Bible and his mythology and was equally at home with either. Perhaps it is not extravagant to say that you cannot be an artist unless you are at home with mythology, unless mythology is the swiftest and most direct expression of your being, so that you can be measured by it as a man is known by his books, or a woman by her clothes, her way of bowing,