VERNON LEE, (continued 3)

C minor chords (ff. in rapid succession). "Knowest thou him not? Knowest thou him not? See, he stretches forth his burning claw to my heart! He masks himself in all sorts of absurd grimaces—as a free huntsman, as a concert director, tapeworm doctor, ricco mercante; he pitches snuffers into the strings to prevent my playing! Kreisler, Kreisler, shake thyself up? Seest thou it hiding, the pale ghost with the red burning eyes, stretching out its clawy, bony hand from beneath its torn mantle—shaking the crown of straw on its smooth bald skull? It is Madness! Johannes, be brave! Mad, mad, witch-revelry of life, wherefore shakest thou me so in thy whirling dance? Can I not escape? Is there no grain of dust in the universe on which, diminished to a fly, I can save myself from thee, horrible torturing phantom? Desist, Desist! I will behave. My manners shall be the very best. Hony soit qui mal y pense. Only let me believe the devil to be a galantuomo! I curse song and music; I lick thy feet like the drunken Caliban; free me only from my torments! Aï! Aï! abominable one! Thou hast trodden down all my flowers: not a blade of grass still greens in the terrible desert—

Dead! Dead! Dead!…"

When Chapelmaster Kreisler ended, all were silent; poetry, passionate, weird, and grotesque, had poured from their friend's lips; a strange nightmare pageant had swept by them, beautiful and ghastly, like a mad Brocken medley of the triumph of Dionysos and the dance of Death.

They were all silent—all save one, and that one said: "This is all very fine, but I was told we were to have music; a good, sensible sonata of Haydn's—would have been much more the thing than all this." He was a Philistine, no doubt, but he was right; a good, sensible sonata of Haydn's—nay, the stiffest, driest, most wooden fugue ever written by the most crabbed professor of counterpoint would have been far more satisfactory for people who expected music. A most fantastic rhapsody they had indeed heard, but it had been a spoken one, and the best strings of the piano had remained hanging snapped and silent during the performance.

Poor Chapelmaster Kreisler! He has long been forgotten by the world in general, and even those few that still are acquainted with his weird portrait, smile at it as at a relic of a far distant time, when life and art and all other things looked strangely different from how they look now. Yet the crazy musician of Hoffmann is but the elder brother of all our modern composers. With the great masters of the last century, Haydn, Mozart, Cimarosa, who were scarcely in their graves when he improvised his great word fantasia, he has no longer any connection with our own musicians, born half a century after his end, he is closely linked, for, like him, they are romanticists. They do not indeed wear C sharp minor coloured coats, nor do they improvise in the dark on pianos with broken strings; they are perfectly sane and conscious of all their doings; yet, all the same, they are but Kreisler's younger brothers. Like the poor chapelmaster of Hoffmann, music itself has a fantastic madness in it; like him, it has been crazed by disappointment, by jealousy, by impotent rage at finding that it cannot now do what it once did, and cannot yet do what will never be done; like Kreisler it deals no longer with mere sequences of melody and harmony, but with thoughts, feelings, and images, hopes and fears and despair, with wild chaotic visions of splendour and of ghastliness. But the position of our music differs from that of Kreisler in this much, that no friendly pair of snuffers crashes on to the strings and makes them fly asunder; that, while Kreisler spoke, our music can only play its fancies and whimsies; and that, instead of hearing intelligible spoken words, we hear only musical sounds which are gibberish and chaos.

For the time when men sought in music only for music's own loveliness is gone by; and the time has come when all the arts trespass on each other's ground, and, worst of all, when the arts which can give and show envy poetry, the art which can neither give nor show but only suggest, and when, for the sake of such suggestion, they would cheat us of all the real gifts—gifts of noble forms of line and colour, and sweet woofs of melody and harmony which they once gave us. The composer now wishes to make you see and feel all that he sees and feels in his imagination, the woods and seas, the joys and sorrows, all the confused day-dreams, sweet and drowsy, all the nightmare orgies which may pass through his brain; the sound has become the mere vehicle for this, the weak, vague language which he can only stammer and we can only divine; the artist breaks violently against the restraint of form, thinking to attain the unattainable beyond its limits, and sinks down baffled and impotent amidst ruin.

We are apt to think of music as of a sort of speech until, on examination, we find it has no defined meaning either for the speaker or for the listener. In reality, music and speech are as different and as separate as architecture and painting, as wholly opposed to each other as only those two things can be which, having started from the same point, have travelled in completely opposite directions, like the two great rivers which, originating on the same alp, flow respectively to the north, and to the south, each acquiring a separate character on its way—the one as the blue river of Germany, ending amidst the tide-torn sandbanks of the North Sea; the other as the green river of Provence, dying amidst the stagnant pools and fever-haunted marshes of the Mediterranean. As long as the Rhine and the Rhone are not yet Rhine and Rhone, but merely pools of snow-water among the glaciers, so long are they indistinguishable; but as soon as separated into distinct streams, their dissimilarity grows with every mile of their diverging course. So as to speech and music: as long as both exist only in embryo in the confused cries and rude imitations of the child or of the primitive people, they cannot be distinguished; but as soon as they can be called either speech or music, they become unlike and increase in dissimilarity in proportion as they develop. The cry and the imitative sound become, on the one hand, a word which, however rude, begins to have an arbitrary meaning, and, on the other hand, a song which, however uncouth, has no positive meaning; the word, as it develops, acquires a more precise and abstract signification, becomes more and more of a symbol; the song, as it develops, loses definite meaning, becomes more and more a complete unsymbolical form, until at length the word, having become a thing for use, a mere means of communication, ceases to require vocal utterance, and turns into a written sign; while the song, having become an object of mere pleasure, requires more and more musical development, and is transported from the lips of man to the strings of an instrument. But while speech and music are thus diverging, while the one is becoming more and more of an arbitrary symbol conveying an abstract idea, and the other is growing more and more into an artistic form conveying no idea, but pleasing the mind merely by its concrete form—while this divergence is taking place, a corresponding movement accompanies it which removes both speech and music farther and farther from their common origin: the cry of passion and the imitative sound. The Rhone and the Rhine are becoming not only less like each other, but as the one becomes green and the other blue, so also are both losing all trace of the original dull white of the snow water. In the word, the cry and the imitation are being effaced by arbitrary, symbolical use, by that phonetic change which shows how little a word as it exists for us retains of its original character; in the song they are being subdued by constant attempts at obtaining a more distinct and symmetrical shape, by the development of the single sounds and their arrangement with a view to pleasing the ear and mind. Yet both retain the power of resuming to a limited extent their original nature; but in proportion as the word or the song resumes the characteristics of the cry or of the imitation does each lose its own slowly elaborated value, the word as a suggester of thought, the song as a presenter of form. Now, in so far as the word is a word, or the song a song, its effect on the emotions is comparatively small: the word can awaken emotion only as a symbol, that is, indirectly and merely suggestively; the song can awaken emotion only inasmuch as it yet partakes of the nature of the brute cry or rude imitation. Thus, while language owes its emotional effects to the ideas arbitrarily connected with it, music owes its power over the heart to its sensuous elements as given by nature. But music exists as an art, that is to say, as an elaboration of the human mind, only inasmuch as those sensuous brute elements are held in check and measure, are made the slaves of an intellectual conception. The very first step in the formation of the art is the subjection of the emotional cry or the spontaneous imitation to a process of acoustic mensuration, by which the irregular sound becomes the regular, definite note; the second step is the subjection of this already artificial sound to mensuration of time, by which it is made rhythmical; the third step is the subjection of this rhythmical sound to a comparative mensuration with other sounds, by which we obtain harmony; the last step is adjustment of this artificially obtained note and rhythm and harmony into that symmetrical and intellectually appreciable form which constitutes the work of art, for art begins only where the physical elements are subjected to an intellectual process, and it exists completely only where they abdicate their independence and become subservient to an intellectual design.

Music is made up of two elements: the intellectual and the sensuous on the one hand, of that which is conceived by the mind and perceived by the mind (for our ears perceive only the separate constituent sounds of a tune, but not the tune itself); on the other hand, of that which is produced by the merely physical and appreciated by the merely physical, by the nerves of hearing, through which it may, but only indirectly, affect the mind. Now if, from an artistic point of view, we must protest against any degradation of the merely sensuous part, it is because such a degradation would involve a corresponding one in the intellectual part, because the physical basis must be intact and solid before we can build on it an intellectual structure, because the physical element through which mentality is perceived must be perfect in order that the mental manifestation be equally so; but the physical must always remain a mere basis, a mere vehicle for the mental. The enjoyment obtainable from the purely physical part may indeed be very great and very valuable, but it is a mere physical enjoyment; and the pleasure we derive from a fine voice, as distinguished from a fine piece or a fine interpretation, is as wholly unartistic as that which we receive from a ripe peach or a cool breeze: it is a purely sensuous pleasure, given us ready-made by nature, to give or to perceive which requires no mentality, in which there is no human intention, and consequently no art. Now, the effect of the cry or of the imitation, and that of certain other manifestations of sound, such as tone, pitch, volume, rhythm, major or minor intervals, which are cognate with, but independent of, the cry or the imitation—the effect of all this is an entirely sensuous one, an effect of unintelligent matter on the nerves, not of calculating intelligence on the mind, and it is to these physical effects, and not to the mentally elaborated form, that music owes its peculiar power of awaking or even of suggesting emotion.

That this is the case is shown by various circumstances. The ancients, who, as is now proved beyond dispute, possessed very little of the intellectual part of music, little of what we should deem its form, enjoyed its emotional effects to a far higher degree than could we in our present musical condition; the stories of Timotheus, Terpander, and other similar ones, being at least founded on fact, as is evident from the continual allusions of Greek writers to the moral or immoral effect of the art, and their violent denunciations of people whose only social crime was to have added a string to a lyre or a hole to a flute. We ourselves have constant opportunities of remarking the intense emotional effects due to mere pitch, tone, and rhythm; that is to say, to the merely physical qualities of number, nature, and repetition of musical vibrations. We have all been cheered by the trumpet and depressed by the hautboy; we have felt a wistful melancholy steal over us while listening to the drone of the bagpipe and the quaver of the flute of the pifferari at the shrine; we have felt our heart beat and our breath halt on catching the first notes of an organ as we lifted the entrance curtain of some great cathedral; we have known nothing more utterly harrowing than a hurdy-gurdy playing a cheerful tune, or a common accordion singing out a waltz or a polka. Nay, it is worthy of remark that the instruments capable of the greatest artistic development are just those which possess least this power over the nerves: the whole violin and harpsichord tribe, the human voice when sound and natural—saying least themselves, are capable of saying most for others; whereas the trumpet, the accordion, the harp, the zither, are condemned by their very expressiveness to a hopeless inferiority; they produce an effect spontaneously by their mere tone; the artist can produce on them but that effect, and can scarcely heighten even it. A musical critic of the beginning of this century, Giuseppe Carpani, wishing to defend Rossini from the accusation of being unemotional, boldly laid down the principle that it never is the composer who makes people cry, but the author of the words and the singer. As to the composer, he can only please, but not move.

Never (he says) were people more moved than by a certain scene in Metastasio's Araserse, set by Mortellari, and sung by the famous Pacchierotti (about 1780); and do you think perhaps that it was Mortellari, who made them cry? Mortellari, the stupidest mediocrity, Dio l'abbia in gloria! No, it was Metastasio and Pacchierotti, the verse and the voice.

This was a mere absurd exaggeration, and a mere captious plea for Rossini, who, had he only had Metastasio to write the words and Pacchierotti to sing, would doubtless have moved the whole universe to tears, with "Di tanti palpiti." Yet in this exaggeration, an important truth has been struck out. This truth is that the writer of the libretto, having at his disposal the clear, idea-suggesting word, can bring up a pathetic situation before the mind; that the singer, having at his command the physical apparatus for producing an effect on the nerves, can sensuously awaken emotion; while the composer, possessing neither the arbitrary idea-suggesting word, nor the nerve-moving sound, but only the artistic form, can please to the utmost, but move only to a limited degree.

Thus, there is a once popular but now deservedly forgotten air in the Romeo e Giulietta of Zingarelli, which some seventy years ago possessed the most miraculous power over what people called the heart, and especially over the not too sensitive one of Napoleon, who, whenever it was sung by his favourite Crescentini, invariably burst into tears. The extraordinary part of the matter is that this air happens to be peculiarly insipid, without any very definite expression, but, on the whole, of a sort of feeble cheerfulness, and certainly is the last piece that we should judge capable of such deeply emotional effects. But the situation of Romeo is an intensely pathetic one, and it is probable that the singer's voice may have possessed some strange power over the nerves, something of the purely sensuous pathos of an accordion or a zither, especially in the long, gradually diminished notes, "fine by degrees and beautifully less," which move like an Æolian harp. But, if the pathetic effect of "Ombra adorata" could not be ascribed to the composition neither could it be ascribed to the interpretation. For this sensuous pathos, though enhanced by the singer's intellectual qualities, in no way depends upon them; the intellect can make him graduate and improve the form of a piece, all that which is perceived by the mind, but it has no influence on the nerves; Crescentini's musical intelligence may have enabled him to make "Ombra adorata" a beautiful song, but only his physical powers of voice could have enabled him to make it a pathetic one.

As these physical elements are the material out of which artistic forms are moulded by the musician, he necessarily deals with and disposes of those powers over the nerves which are inherent in them. When he creates a musical form out of minor intervals, he necessarily gives that form something of the melancholy effect of such intervals; when he composes a piece with the peculiar rhythm of a march, he necessarily gives his piece some of the inspiriting power of that rhythm; when he employs a hautboy or a trumpet, he necessarily lends his work some of the depressing quality of the hautboy or some of the cheering quality of the trumpet. Thus the intellectually conceived and perceived forms are invested with the power over the nerves peculiar to certain of the physical elements of music; but it is in those component physical elements, and not in the forms into which they are disposed, that lies the emotional force of the art. Nor is this all: the physical elements, inasmuch as they are subdued and regulated and neutralized by one another in the intellectual form, are inevitably deprived of the full vigour of their emotional power; the artistic form has tamed and curbed them, has forbidden their freely influencing the nerves, while at the same time it—the form—has exerted its full sway over the mind. The mountains have been hewn into terraces, the forests have been clipped into gardens, the waves have been constrained into fountains, the thunder has been tuned down into musical notes; nature has submitted to man, and has abdicated her power into his hands. The stormy reign of instinctive feeling has come to an end; the serene reign of art has begun.

In order to see these sensuous elements of music in their unmixed purity, in their unbridled strength, we must descend to the lowest stages of the art, compared with whose emotional effects those of modern music are as nothing, and least of all in the classic periods of the art; but even in modern music, what really strong emotional effects there may be are due to a momentary suspension of artistic activity, to a momentary return to the formless, physically touching music of early ages. The most emotional thing ever written by Mozart is the exclamation of Donna Elvira, when, after leaving Don Giovanni at his ill-omened supper, she is met on the staircase by the statue of the commander; this exclamation is but one high, detached note, formless, meaningless, which pierces the nerves like a blade; submit even this one note to artistic action, bid the singer gradually swell and diminish it, and you at once rob it of its terrible power. This is Mozart's most emotional stroke; but was a Mozart, nay, was any musician, necessary for its conception? Would not that cry have been the same if surrounded by true music? A contrary example, but to the same effect, is afforded by Gluck in his great scene of Orpheus at the gate of Hades, which may have moved our great-grandfathers, accustomed to fugues and minuets and rigaudons, but which seems coldly beautiful as some white antique group to us, accustomed as we are to romantic art. The No! of the Furies loses all its effects by being worked into a definite musical form, by being locked into the phrase begun by Orpheus; it is merely a constituent note and no more, until after some time it is repeated detached, and without any reference to the main melody sung by Orpheus: at first it is part of a work of art, later it becomes a mere brute shout, and then, and then only, does it obtain a really moving character.

When these potent physical elements are held in subjection by artistic form, emotion may be suggested, more or less vaguely, but only suggested: we perceive them in the fabric which imprisons them, and we perceive their power, but it is as we should perceive the power of a tiger chained up behind a grating: we remember and imagine what it has been and might be, but we no longer feel it; for us to again feel it, the artistic form must be torn down; the physical elements unchained, and then, and then only, shall we tremble once more before them. Mozart may be on his door-step as a regiment passes: he may feel the inspiring, courage-awakening effect of its rough rhythm and discordant, screeching trumpets: he may go upstairs, sit down to his piano, make use of all those sensuous elements, of the rhythm and of the wind instruments, which have stirred him in that regimental music: he may use them in a piece professedly suggested by that music; the piece will be "Non più andrai," and a masterpiece. We shall be reminded of military music by it, and we shall be aware of the fact that its rhythm and accompaniment are martial; we shall even call it a martial piece; but will it stir us, will it make us step out and feel soldier-like as would the coarsest regimental trumpets? Jommelli may enter a cathedral as the bells are tolling to mass, and all seems undulating and heaving beneath their swing; he may feel the awful effect of those simple, shapeless sounds: he may listen to their suggestion and frame the opening of his Mass for the Dead on that deep monotonous sway; he will produce a masterpiece, the wondrous Introitus of his Requiem, in which we shall indeed recognize something of the solemn rhythm of the bells, something that will awaken in us the recollection of that moment when the cathedral towers seemed to rock to their movement, and the aisles re-echoed their roar, and when even miles away in the open country the clear deep toll floated across the silent fields; but that effect itself we shall never hear in the music. The artist has used the already existing emotional elements for his own purposes, but those purposes are artistic ones; they aim at delighting the mind, not at tickling the nerves.

The composer, therefore, inasmuch as he deprives the emotional elements of music of their freedom and force of action, cannot possibly produce an effect on the emotions at all to be compared with that spontaneously afforded by nature; he can imitate the rush of waters or the sob of despair only so distantly and feebly that the effect of either is well-nigh lost, and even for such an imitation he must endanger the artistic value of his work, which is safe only when it is the artist's sole aim and object. The most that the composer can legitimately do is to suggest a given emotion by employing in his intellectual structure such among the physical elements of his art as would in a state of complete freedom awaken that given emotion; he may choose such sensuous elements as would inspire melancholy, or joy, or serenity; he may reject any contrary element or any incongruous effect, and he may thus produce what we shall call a pathetic piece, or a cheerful piece, or a solemn piece.

But this pathetic, cheerful, or solemn character depends not upon the intellectual forms imagined by the composer, but upon the sensuous elements afforded by nature; and the artistic activity of the composer consists in the conception of those forms, not in the selection of those physical elements. When, therefore, a composer is said to express the words which he is setting, he does so by means not of the creation of artistic forms, but by the selection of sensuous materials; the suggestion of an emotion analogous to that conveyed by the words is due not to the piece itself, but to its physical constituents; wherefore the artistic value of the composition in no way depends upon its adaptation to the words with which it is linked. There is no more common mistake, nor one which more degrades artistic criticism, than the supposition that the merit of "He was despised and rejected of men," or of "Fin ch'an del vino," depends upon their respective suitableness to the words: the most inferior musician would perceive that such and such physical elements were required to suggest a mental condition in harmony with either of these verbal expressions of feeling; the most inferior musician could have given us a piece as melancholy as "He was despised," or as cheerful as "Fin ch'an del vino," but—and here lies the unique test of artistic worth—only Handel could have given us so beautiful a melancholy piece as the one, and only Mozart so beautiful a cheerful piece as the other. As it is with the praise, so likewise is it with the blame: a composer who sets a cheerful piece to dismal words, or a dismal piece to cheerful words, may be reprehensible for not reflecting that the mind thus receives together two contrary impressions, and he may be condemned for want of logic and good sense; but not a word can be said against his artistic merit, any more than we could say a word against the artistic merit of the great iron-worker of the Renaissance, who closed the holy place where lies the Virgin's sacred girdle with a screen of passion flowers, in whose petals hide goats and ducks, on whose tendrils are balanced pecking cranes, and in the curling leaves of which little naked winged Cupids are drawing their bows and sharpening their arrows even as in the bas-reliefs of a pagan sarcophagus. In the free and spontaneous activity of musical conception, the composer may forget the words he is setting, as the painter may forget the subject he is painting in the fervour of plastic imagination; for the musician conceives not emotions, but modulations; and the painter conceives not actions, but gestures and attitudes. Thence it comes that Mozart has made regicide Romans storm and weep as he would have made Zerlina and Cherubino laugh, just as Titian made Magdalen smite her breast in the wilderness with the smile of Flora on her feast-day; hence that confusion in all save form, that indifference to all save beauty, which characterises all the great epochs of art, that sublime jumble of times and peoples, of tragic and comic, that motley crowding together of satyrs and anchorites, of Saracens and ancient Romans, of antique warriors and mediæval burghers, of Gothic tracery and Grecian arabesque, of Theseus and Titania, of Puck and Bottom, that great masquerade of art which we, poor critics, would fain reduce to law and rule, to chronological and ethnological propriety.

Those times are gone by: we wish to make every form correspond with an idea; we wish to be told a story by the statue, by the picture, most of all by that which can least tell it—by music. We forget that music is neither a symbol which can convey an abstract thought, nor a brute cry which can express an instinctive feeling; we wish to barter the power of leaving in the mind an indelible image of beauty for the miserable privilege of awakening the momentary recollection of one of nature's sounds, or the yet more miserable one of sending a momentary tremor through the body; we would rather compare than enjoy, and rather weep than admire. Therefore we try to force music to talk a language which it does not speak and which we do not understand; and succeed only in making it babble like a child or rave like a madman, obtaining nothing but unintelligible and incoherent forms in our anxiety to obtain intelligible and logical thoughts. We forget that great fact, forever overlooked by romanticism, that poetry and music are essentially distinct in their nature; that Chapelmaster Kreisler's improvisation was not played but spoken; and that had not the snuffers fallen into the piano, had not the strings snapped asunder, Hoffmann would have had to record, not a grandly grotesque series of images, but a succession of formless and meaningless chords.

CHERUBINO.

A PSYCHOLOGICAL ART FANCY.

It is a strange and beautiful fact that whatsoever is touched by genius, no matter how humble in itself, becomes precious and immortal. This wrinkled old woman is merely one of thousands like herself, who have sat and will sit by the great porcelain stove of the Dutch backshop, their knitting or their bible on their knees. There is nothing to make her recollected; yet we know her after two centuries, even as if we had seen her alive, because, with a few blurred lines and shadows hastily scratched on his etching plate, it pleased the whim of Master Rembrandt to pourtray her. And this little commonplace Frankfurt shopkeeper's maiden, in her stiff little cap and starched frill, who should remember her? Yet she is familiar to us all, because she struck the boyish fancy of Goethe. For even as the fact of its once having sparkled on the waistcoat of Mozart makes us treasure up a tarnished brass button; and as the notion of their having been planted by the hand of Michael Angelo made us mourn the cutting down of a clump of sear and rusty old cypresses, so also the fact of having been noticed, noted down by genius, with brush, or pen, or chisel, makes into relics men and things which would else have been forgotten; because the stroke of that pen, or brush, or chisel removes them from the perishable world of reality to the deathless world of fancy. Nay, even the beautiful things, the perfect, physically or morally, of the world, those which called forth admiration and love as long as they existed: Antinous and Monna Lisa, Beatrice and Laura, would now be but a handful of nameless dust, were it not for the artists and poets who have made them live again and for ever: the deeds and sufferings of the Siegfrieds and Cids, of the Desdemonas and Francescas, would have died away had they not been filched out of the world of reality into the world of fiction. And even as the perishable, the humble, the insignificant reality becomes enduring and valuable by the touch of genius; so also in the very world of fiction itself the intellectual creations of one man may be raised to infinitely higher regions by the hand of another, may be transported into the kingdom of another and nobler art, and there be seen more universally and surrounded by a newly acquired radiance. In this manner the tale of Romeo and Juliet, graciously and tenderly narrated by the old Italian story-teller, was transfigured by Shakespeare and enshrined in all the splendours of Elizabethan poetry; the figure of Psyche, delicately graceful in the little romance of Apuleius, reappeared, enlarged and glorified by the hand of Raphael, on the walls of the Farnesina; and thus also our Cherubino, the fanciful and brilliant creature of Beaumarchais, is known to most of us far less in his original shape than in the vague form woven out of subtle melodies to which Mozart has given the page's name. Mozart has, as it were, taken away Cherubino from Beaumarchais; he has, for the world at large, substituted for the page of the comedy the page of the opera. Beaumarchais could give us clear-spoken words, dialogue and action, a visible and tangible creature; and Mozart could give only a certain arrangement of notes, a certain amount of rhythm and harmony, a vague, speechless, shapeless thing; yet much more than the written words do those notes represent to our fancy the strange and fascinating little figure, the wayward, the amorous, the prankish, the incarnation of childishness, of gallantry, of grace, of fun, and of mischief, the archetype of pages—the page Cherubino. What could music do for Cherubino? of what means could it dispose to reproduce this type, this figure? and how did, how should music have disposed of those means? About this fantastic and brilliant little jackanapes of a page centres a curious question of artistic anomaly, of artistic power, and of artistic duty.

The part of Cherubino: the waywardness, the love, the levity, the audacity, the timidity, the maturity and immaturity of the page's feelings, are all concentrated by the admirable ingenuity of the Venetian D'Aponte, who arranged Beaumarchais's play for Mozart's music, into one air, the air sung by Cherubino in that very equivocal interview with the Countess and Susanna, so rudely to be broken by the thundering rap of the Count at the door. The air is "Voi che sapete"—Cherubino's description, half to the noble and sentimental lady, half to the flippant and laughing waiting-maid, of the curious symptoms, the mysterious hankerings, and attractions which the boy has of late begun to experience—symptoms of which he is half ashamed, as calculated to bring down laughter and boxes on the ear, and half proud, mischievously conscious that they make him a personage for all this womankind. Every one has heard "Voi che sapete" sung a hundred times by dozens of singers in dozens of fashions, till it has become in the recollection a sort of typical jumble of all these various readings; but we once chanced to hear a reading of "Voi che sapete" which has remained strangely distinct and separate in our remembrance; which made that performance of the hackneyed piece remain isolated in our mind, almost as if the air had never before or never since been heard by us. The scene of the performance has remained in our memory as a whole, because the look, the attitude, the face of the performer seemed to form a whole, a unity of expression and character, with the inflexions of the voice and the accentuation of the words. She was standing by the piano: a Spanish Creole, but, instead of the precocious, overblown magnificence of tropical natures, with a something almost childlike despite seriousness, something inflexible, unexpanded, unripe about her; quite small, slender, infinitely slight and delicate; standing perfectly straight and motionless in her long, tight dress of ashy rose colour; her little dark head with its tight coils of ebony hair perfectly erect; her great dark violet-circled eyes, with their perfect ellipse of curved eyebrow meeting curved eyelash, black and clear against the pale, ivory-tinted cheek, looking straight before her; self-unconscious, concentrated, earnest, dignified, with only a faint fluttering smile, to herself, not to the audience, about the mouth. She sang the page's song in a strange voice, sweet and crisp, like a Cremonese violin, with a bloom of youth, scarcely mature yet perfect, like the honey dust of the vine-flower; sang the piece with an unruffled serenity, with passion, no limpness or languor, but passion restrained, or rather undeveloped; with at most a scarcely perceptible hesitation and reticence of accent, as of budding youthful emotion; her voice seeming in some unaccountable manner to move in a higher, subtler stratum of atmosphere, as it dextrously marked, rounded off, kissed away each delicate little phrase. When she had done, she gave a slight bow with her proud little head, half modestly and half contemptuously, as, with her rapid, quiet movement, she resumed her seat; she probably felt that despite the applause, her performance did not really please. No one criticised, for there was something that forbade criticism in this solemn little creature; and every one applauded, for every one felt that her singing had been admirable. But there was no warmth of admiration, no complete satisfaction: she had sung with wonderful delicacy and taste and feeling; her performance had been exquisitely finished, perfect; but something familiar, something essential had been missing. She had left out Cherubino: she had completely forgotten and passed over the page.

How was it? How could it be that the something which we felt was the nature of the page, the something which even the coarsest, poorest performers had brought out in this piece, had completely disappeared in this wonderfully perfect rendering by this subtle little singer? Perhaps the rendering had been only materially perfect: perhaps it was merely the exquisite tone of the voice, the wonderful neatness of execution which had given it an appearance of completeness; perhaps the real meaning of the music had escaped her; perhaps there was behind all this perfection of execution only a stolid dulness of nature, to which the genius of Mozart was not perceptible. None of all these possibilities and probabilities: the chief characteristic of the performance was exactly the sense of perfect musical intuition, of subtle appreciation of every little intonation, the sense that this docile and exquisite physical instrument was being played upon by a keen and unflinching artistic intelligence. The more you thought over it, the more you compared this performance with any other performance of the piece, the more also did you feel convinced that this was the right, the only right reading of the piece; that this strange, serious little dark creature had given you the whole, the perfection of Mozart's conception; no, there could be no doubt of it, this and this alone was Mozart's idea of "Voi che sapete." Mozart's idea? the whole of Mozart's conception? here, in this delicate, dignified, idyllic performance? The whole? Why then, where, if this was the whole of Mozart's conception, where was Cherubino, where was the page? Why, nowhere. Now that the song had been presented to us in its untampered perfection, that the thought of the composer was clear to us—now that we could begin to analyse the difference between this performance and the performances of other singers—we began to see, vaguely at first and not without doubts of our powers of sight, but to see, and more and more distinctly the longer we looked, that Cherubino was not in Mozart's work, but merely in Beaumarchais. A very singular conclusion to arrive at, but one not to be shirked: Cherubino had passed into the words of Mozart's Italian libretto, he had passed into the dress, the face, the feature, the action of the thousands of performers who had sung the "Marriage of Figaro" on the stage; but he had not passed into Mozart's notes; and because he had not entered into those notes, that subtle and serious little Spaniard, who had seen and understood so well the meaning and beauty of Mozart's music, had known nothing of Cherubino.

Now, after all this discussion respecting his presence and his absence, let us stay awhile and examine into the being of this Cherubino, so familiar and so immediately missed by us; let us look at the page, whom the clever playwright D'Aponte transported, with extraordinary success, out of the French comedy into the Italian opera text. Very familiar to all of us, yet, like the things most familiar, rather vaguely; seen often and in various lights, fluctuating consequently in our memory, as distinguished from the distinct and steadfast image of things seen only once and printed off at a stroke on to our mind. At the first glance, when we see him sitting at the feet of the Countess, singing her his love songs, he seems a delicate poetic exotic, whose presence takes us quite aback in the midst of the rouged and pigtailed philosophy, the stucco and tinsel sentimentality of the French eighteenth century. In these rooms, all decorated by Boucher and Fragonard, in this society redolent with the theories of Diderot and the jests of Voltaire, this page, this boy who is almost a girl, with his ribbons and his ballads, his blushes, his guitar, and his rapier, appears like a thing of long past days, or of far distant countries; a belated brother of Shakspeare's Cesario and Fletcher's Bellario, a straggler from the Spain of Lope de Vega, who has followed M. Caron de Beaumarchais, ex-watchmaker and ex-musicmaster to Mesdames the daughters of Louis XV., from Madrid, and leaped suddenly on to the planks of the Comédie Française … a ghost of some mediæval boy page, some little Jehan de Saintré killed crusading with his lady's name on his lips. Or is not Cherubino rather a solitary forerunner of romanticism, stumbled untimely into this France of Marie Antoinette; some elder brother of Goethe's Mignon … nay, perhaps Mignon herself, disguised as or metamorphosed into a boy…. But let us look well at him: let him finish his song and raise his audacious eyes; let him rise and be pulled to and fro, bashful with false bashfulness half covering his mischievous, monkish impudence, while Susanna is mumming him up in petticoats and kerchiefs; let us look at him again now, and we shall see that he is no Jehan de Saintré, no male Mignon, no Viola in boy's clothes, no sweetly pure little romantic figure, but an impertinent, precocious little Lovelace, a serio-comic little jackanapes, sighing and weeping only to giggle and pirouette on his heels the next moment. From the Countess he will run to the gardener's daughter, from her to the waiting-maid, to the duenna, to all womankind; he is a professed lady-killer and woman-teaser of thirteen. There is indeed something graceful and romantic in the idea of this pretty child consoling, with his poetical, absurd love, the poor, neglected, ill-used lady. But then he has been smuggled in by that dubious Abigail, Susanna; the sentimental, melancholy Countess is amused by dressing him up in women's clothes; and when, in the midst of the masquerade, the voice of the Count is heard without, the page is huddled away into a closet, his presence is violently denied, and the Countess admits her adored though fickle lord with a curious, conscious, half-guilty embarrassment. We feel vaguely that Shakspeare would never have introduced his boy Ganymede or his page Cesario into that dressing-room of the Countess Almaviva; that the archly jesting Maria would never have dreamed of amusing the Lady Olivia with such mummings; we miss in this proudly sentimental lady, in this sly waiting-woman, in this calf-loving dressed-up boy the frank and boisterous merriment of Portia and Nerissa in their escapades and mystifications; there is in all this too much locking of doors and drawing of curtains, too much whispered giggling, too little audible laughter; there hangs an indefinable sense of impropriety about the whole scene. No, no, this is no delicate and gracious young creature of the stock of Elizabethan pages, no sweet exotic in the France of 1780; this Cherubino is merely a graceful, coquettish little Greuze figure, with an equivocal simplicity, an ogling naïveté, a smirking bashfulness, a hidden audacity of corruption; a creature of Sterne or Marivaux, tricked out in imitation Mediæval garb, with the stolen conscious wink of the eye, the would-be childlike smile, tinged with leer, of eighteenth century gallantry. He is an impertinent, effeminate, fondled, cynical little jackanapes; the youngest, childish, monkeyish example, at present merely comic and contemptible, of the miserable type of young lovers given to France by the eighteenth century; the enfant du siècle, externally a splendid, brilliant, triumphant success, internally a miserable, broken, unmanned failure; the child initiated into life by cynicism, the youth educated to love by adultery; corrupt unripeness; the most miserable type of demoralisation ever brought into literature, the type of Fortunio and Perdican, and of their author Alfred de Musset; a type which the Elizabethans, with their Claudios and Giovannis, could not have conceived; which the Spaniards, with their Don Juans and Ludovic Enios, would have despised, they who had brought on to the stage profligacy which bearded death and hell, turning with contempt from profligacy which could be chastised only with the birch. Cherubino is this: his love is no poetic and silly passion for a woman much older than himself, before whom he sinks on his knees as before a goddess; it is the instinct of the lady-killer, the instinct of adventures, the consciousness in this boy of thirteen that all womankind is his destined prey, his game, his quarry. And womankind instinctively understands and makes the Lovelace of thirteen its darling, its toy, its kitten, its pet monkey, all whose grimacings and coaxings and impertinences may be endured, enjoyed, encouraged. He is the graceful, brilliant, apish Ariel or Puck of the society whose Mirandas and Titanias are Julie and Manon Lescaut; he is the page of the French eighteenth century.

Such is, when we analyse him, the page Cherubino; looking at him carelessly, with the carelessness of familiarity, these various peculiarities escape our notice; they merge into each other and into the whole figure. But although we do not perceive them consciously and in detail, we take in, vaguely and unconsciously, their total effect: we do not analyse Cherubino and classify his qualities, we merely take him in as a general type. And it is this confused and familiar entity which we call the page, and which we expect to have brought home to us as soon as we hear the first notes, as we see the title of "Voi che sapete." It is this entity, this character thus vaguely conceived, which forms for us an essential part of Mozart's music; and whose absence from that music made us feel as if, despite the greatest musical perfection, Mozart's idea were not completely given to us. Yet, in reality, this psychological combination called Cherubino does not exist in the work of Mozart. It exists only by the side of it. We speak of the "Marriage of Figaro" as Mozart's work; we are accustomed to think of the Countess, of Figaro, of Susanna, of Cherubino as belonging to Mozart; but in reality only one half of the thing we call the "Marriage of Figaro" belongs to Mozart—that half which consists in melodies and harmonies; and as it happens, it is not in that, but in the other half belonging to Beaumarchais and D'Aponte, the half consisting of words and their suggestions of character, of expression and of movement, that really exists, either the Countess, or Figaro, or Susanna, or Cherubino. Those notes, which alone are Mozart's and which are nothing more than notes, have been heard by us in the mouths of many women dressed and acting as Beaumarchais's characters; they have been heard by us associated to the words of Beaumarchais; they have been heard delivered with the dramatic inflections suggested not by themselves but by those words; and thus, by mere force of association, of slovenly thought and active fancy, we are accustomed to consider all these characters as existing in the music of Mozart, as being part and parcel of Mozart's conception; and when we are presented with those notes, which, to the musician Mozart, were merely notes without those dramatic inflections suggested solely by Beaumarchais's words, when we hear in "Voi che sapete" only Mozart's half of the work, we are disappointed and indignant, and cry out that the composer's idea has been imperfectly rendered.

Cherubino, we say, is not in Mozart's half of the work; he is in the words, not in the music. Is this a fault or a merit? is it impotence in the art or indifference in the artist? Could Mozart have given us Cherubino? and if able, ought he to have given him? The question is double; a question of artistic dynamics, and a question of artistic ethics: the question what can art do; and the question what art ought to do. The first has been answered by the scientific investigations of our own scientific times; the second has been answered by the artistic practice of the truly artistic days of music. The questions are strangely linked together, and yet strangely separate; and woe betide us if we receive the answer to the one question as the answer to the other; if we let the knowledge of what things are serve us instead of the instinct of what things should do; if we let scientific analysis step into the place of ethical or æsthetical judgment; and if, in the domain of art or of morals we think to substitute a system of alembics and microscopes for that strange intangible mechanism which science tells us does not exist, and which indeed science can never see or clutch, our soul. For science has a singular contempt for all that is without its domain; it seeks for truth, but when truth baffles and eludes it, science will turn towards falsehood; it will deny what it cannot prove, and call God himself a brain-phantom because he cannot be vivisected. So, when logic, which can solve only logical propositions, remains without explanation before the dicta of the moral and æsthetic parts of us, it simply denies the existence of such dicta and replaces them by its own formulæ; if we ask for the aim of things and actions, it tells us their origin; if we trustingly ask when we should admire beauty and love virtue, it drops the rainbow into its crucible to discover its chemical components, and dissects the brain of a saint to examine the shape of its convolutions; it meets admiration and love with experiment and analysis, and, where we are required to judge, tells us we can only examine. Thus, as in ethics, so also in æsthetics, modern philosophy has given us the means instead of the aim, the analysis instead of the judgment; let us therefore ask it only how much of human character and emotion music can express; the question how much of it music ought to express must be answered by something else: by that artistic instinct whose composition and mechanism and origin scientific psychology may perhaps some day explain, but whose unformulated, inarticulate, half-unconscious dicta all the scientific and logical formulæ in the world can never replace. As yet, however, we have to deal only with the question how much of human character and emotion music can express, and by what means it does so; and here modern psychology, or rather the genius of Herbert Spencer, is able to answer us. Why does dance music cheer us, and military music inspirit us, and sacred music make us solemn? A vague sense of the truth made æstheticians answer, for well-nigh two centuries, "by the force of association." Dance music cheers us because we are accustomed to hear it in connection with laughing and quips and cranks; military music inspirits us because we are accustomed to hear it in connection with martial movements and martial sights; sacred music depresses us because we are accustomed to hear it at moments when we are contemplating our weakness and mortality; 'tis a mere matter of association. To this easy-going way of disposing of the problem there was an evident and irrefutable objection: but why should we be accustomed to hear a given sort of music in connection with these various conditions of mind? Why should dance music, and martial music, and sacred music all have a perfectly distinct character, which forbade, from the very first, their being exchangeable? If it is a matter of association of ideas, tell us why such characters could have been kept distinct before the association of ideas could have begun to exist? To this objection there was no reply; the explanation of musical expression by means of association of ideas seemed utterly hollow; yet the confused idea of such an association persisted. For it was, after all, the true explanation. If we ask modern psychology the reason of the specific characters of the various sorts of music, we shall again be answered: it is owing to the association of ideas. But the two answers, though apparently identical, are in fact radically different. The habit of association existed, according to the old theory, between various mental conditions and various sorts of music, because the two were usually found in connection; hence no explanation why, before habit had created the association, there should have been any connection, and, there being no connection, no explanation why the habit and consequently the mental association should ever have been formed. According to the modern theory, on the contrary, the habit of association is not between the various mental conditions and the various styles of music; but between specific mental conditions and specific sounds and movements, which sounds and movements, being employed as the constituent elements of music, give to the musical forms into which they have been artistically arranged that inevitable suggestion of a given mental condition which is due to memory, and become, by repetition during thousands of years, an instinct ingrained in the race and inborn in the individual, a recognition rapid and unconscious, that certain audible movements are the inevitable concomitants of certain moral conditions. The half-unconscious memory become part and parcel of the human mind, that, just as certain mental conditions induce a movement in the muscles which brings tears into the eye or a knot into the throat, so also certain audible movements are due to the muscular tension resulting from mental buoyancy, and certain others to the muscular relaxation due to mental depression, this half-unconscious memory, this instinct, this inevitable association of ideas, generated long before music existed even in the most rudimentary condition, carried with the various elements of pitch, movement, sonority, and proportion into the musical forms constructed out of these elements, this unconscious association of ideas, this integrated recollection of the inevitable connection between certain sounds and certain passions is the one main cause and explanation of the expressiveness of music. And when to it we have added the conscious perception, due to actual comparison, of the resemblance between certain modes of musical delivery and certain modes of ordinary speaking accentuation, between certain musical movements and certain movements of the body in gesticulation; when we have completed the instinctive recognition of passion, which makes us cry or jump, we know not why, by the rapidly reasoned recognition of resemblance between the utterance of the art and the utterance of human life, which, when we listen for instance to a recitative, makes us say, "This sentence is absolutely correct in expression," or, "No human being ever said such a thing in such a manner;" when we have the instinctive perception of passion, and the conscious perception of imitation; and we have added to these two the power of tone and harmony, neither of them connected in any way with the expression of emotion, but both rendering us, by their nervous stimulant, infinitely more sensitive to its expression; when we have all this, we have all the elements which the musician can employ to bring home to us a definite state of mind; all the mysterious unspoken, unwritten words by means of which Mozart can describe to us what Beaumarchais has described in clear, logical, spoken, written words—the page Cherubino.

Now let us see how much of Cherubino can be shown us by these mere musical means. Cherubino is childish, coquettish, sentimental, amorous, timid, audacious, fickle; he is self-conscious and self-unconscious, passionately troubled in mind, impudently cool in manner; he is brazen, calm, shy, fluttered; all these things together. Sometimes in rapid alternation, sometimes all together in the same moment; and in all this he is perfectly consistent, he is always one and the same creature. How does the playwright contrive to make us see all this? By means of combinations of words expressing one or more of these various characteristics, by subtle phrases woven out of different shades of feeling, which glance in irridescent hues like a shot silk, which are both one thing and another; by means also of various emotions cunningly adapted to the exact situation, from the timid sentimentality before the countess, down to the audacious love-making with the waiting-maid; by means, in short, of a hundred tiny strokes, of words spoken by the page and of the page, by means of dexterously combined views of the boy himself, and of the reflection of the boy in the feelings of those who surround him. Thus far the mere words in the book; but these words in the book suggest a thousand little inflections of voice, looks, gestures, movements, manners of standing and walking, flutter of lips and sparkle of eyes, which exist clear though imaginary in the mind of the reader, and become clearer, visible, audible in the concrete representation of the actor.

Thus Cherubino comes to exist. A phantom of the fancy, a little figure from out of the shadow land of imagination, but present to our mind as is this floor upon which we tread, alive as is this pulse throbbing within us. Ask the musician to give us all this with his mere pitch, and rhythm and harmony and sonority; bid him describe all this in his language. Alas! in the presence of such a piece of work the musician is a mere dumb cripple, stammering unintelligible sounds, tottering through abortive gestures, pointing we know not whither, asking we know not for what. Passionate music? And is not Othello passionate? Coquettish music? and is not Susanna coquettish? Tender music? and is not Orpheus tender? Cool music? and is not Judas Maccabæus cool? Impudent music? And is not the snatch of dance tune of a Parisian grisette impudent? And which of these sorts of music shall fit our Cherubino, be our page? Shall we fuse, in wonderful nameless abomination of nonsense, all these different styles, these different suggestions, or shall, as in a masquerade, this dubious Cherubino never seen with his own face and habit, appear successively in the musical trappings of Othello, of Orpheus, of Susanna, of Judas Maccabæus, and of the Grisette? Shall we, by means of this fusion, or this succession of musical incongruities, have got one inch nearer to Cherubino? Shall we, in listening to the mere wordless combination of sounds, be able to say, as we should with the book or the actors before us, this is Cherubino? What, then, can music give us, with all its powers of suggestion and feeling, if it cannot give us this? It can give us one thing, not another: it can give us emotion, but it cannot give us the individual whom the emotion possesses. With its determined relations between the audible movement and the psychical movement, it can give us only musical gesture, but never musical portrait; the gesture of composure or of violence, the solemn tread of self-possessed melody, the scuffling of frantically rushing up and down, of throbbing, quivering, gasping, passion-broken musical phrases; it can give us the rhythm which prances and tosses in victory, and the rhythm which droops, and languishes, and barely drags itself along for utter despair. All this it can give us, even as the painter can give the ecstatic bound-forwards of Signorelli's "Calling of the Blessed," or the weary, dreary enfolding in gloomy thought of Michael Angelo's "Jeremiah:" this much, which we can only call gesture, and which expresses only one thing, a mood. Let the hopeful heroes of Signorelli, stretching forth impetuous arms towards Paradise, only lose sight of the stately viol-playing angels who guide them, let them suddenly see above them the awful sword of the corsleted Angel of Judgment, and they will sink, and grovel, and writhe and their now up-turned faces will be draggled in the dust; let the trumpet of warfare and triumph shrill in the ear of Michael Angelo's "Jeremiah," and the dreary dream will be shaken off; he will leap up, and the compressed hand-gagged mouth will open with the yell of battle; let only the emotion change, and the whole gesture, the attitude, plastic or musical, must change also; the already existing, finite, definite work will no longer suffice; we must have a new picture, or statue, or piece of music. And in these inexplicit arts of mere suggestion, we cannot say, as in the explicit art of poetry, this grovelling wretch is a proud and hopeful spirit; this violent soldier is a vague dreamer; this Othello, who springs on Desdemona like a wild beast, loves her as tenderly as a mother does her child. Unliterary art, plastic or musical, is inexorable: the man who grovels is no proud man; the man who fells down to the right and left, is no dreamer; the man whose whole soul is wrath and destruction, is no lover; the mood is the mood; art can give only it; and the general character, the connection between moods, the homogeneous something which pervades every phase of passion, however various, escapes the powers of all save the art which can speak and explain. How then obtain our Cherubino, our shiftiest and most fickle of pages? How? Why, by selecting just one of his very many moods, the one which is nearest allied to fickleness and volubility; the mood which must most commonly be the underlying, the connecting one, the mood into which all his swagger and sentiment sooner or later resolve; the tone of voice into which his sobs will quickest be lost, the attitude which will soonest replace the defiant strut; the frame of mind which, though one and indivisible itself, is the nearest to instability: levity.

Let Cherubino sing words of tenderness and passion, of audacity and shyness, to only one sort of music, to light and careless music; let the jackanapes be for ever before us, giggling and pirouetting in melody and rhythm; it will not be Cherubino, the whole Cherubino; it will be only a miserable fragmentary indication of him, but it will be the right indication; the psychological powers of music do not go far, but thus far they can go. Analysis of the nature of musical expression has shown us how much it may accomplish; the choice of the artist alone can tell us how much it should accomplish; the scientific investigation is at an end, the artistic judgment must begin. Chapelmaster Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, here are your means of musical expression, and here is the thing to be expressed; on careful examination it appears distinctly that the only way in which, with your melodies, rhythms, and harmonies, you can give us, not a copy, but a faint indicative sketch, something approaching the original as much as four lines traced in the alley sand of your Schloss Mirabell Gardens at Salzburg resemble the general aspect of the Mirabell Palace; that the only way in which you can give us such a distantly approximative….

Signor Maestro Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Vice-Chapelmaster of His Most Reverend Highness the Prince Archbishop of Salzburg, has meanwhile sat down at his table near his thin-legged spinet, with the bird-cage above and the half-emptied beer-glass at his side; and his pen is going scratch, scratch, scratch as loud as possible.

"The only way in which you can possibly give us such a distantly approximative copy of the page Cherubino as shown" … (Scratch, scratch, scratch goes the pen on the rough music paper), "as shown in the words of Beaumarchais and of your librettist D'Aponte, is to compose music of the degree of levity required to express the temper jackanapes."

The Chapelmaster Mozart's pen gives an additional triumphant creak as its point bends in the final flourish of the word finis; Chapelmaster Mozart looks up—

"What was that you were saying about jackanapes? Oh, yes, to be sure, you were saying that literary folks who try to prescribe to musicians are jackanapes, weren't you? Now, do me the favour, when you go out, just take this to the theatre copyist; they are waiting in a hurry for Cherubino's song…. Yes, that was all very interesting about the jackanapes and all the things music can express…. Who would have thought that musical expression is all that? Lord, Lord, what a fine thing it is to have a reasoning head and know all about the fundamental moods of people's characters! My dear sir, why don't you print a treatise on the musical interpretation of the jackanapes and send it to the University of Vienna for a prize? that would be a treatise for you! Only do be a good creature and take this song at once to the copyist…. I assure you I consider you the finest musical philosopher in Christendom."

The blotted, still half-wet sheet of note paper is handed across by Chapelmaster Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It is the manuscript of "Voi che sapete."

"But dearest Chapelmaster Mozart, the air which you have just written appears to be not in the least degree light—it is even extremely sentimental. How can you, with such phrases, express the Cherubino of Beaumarchais?"

"And who, my dear Mr. Music Philosopher, who the deuce told you that I wanted to express the Cherubino of Beaumarchais?"

Chapelmaster Mozart, rising from his table, walks up and down the room with his hands crossed beneath his snuff-coloured coat-tails, humming to himself—

Voi che sapete che cosa è amor,

Donne, vedete s'io l'ho nel cor,

and stops before the cage hanging in the window, and twitching the chickweed through the wires, says—

"Twee! twee! isn't that a fine air we have just composed, little canary-bird, eh?"

"Twee! twee!" answers the canary.

Mozart has willed it so: there is no possible appeal against his decision; his artistic sense would not listen to our logic; our arguments could not attain him, for he simply shook from off his feet the dust of logic-land, and calmly laughed defiance from the region of artistic form, where he had it all his own way, and into which we poor wretches can never clamber. So here is the page's song irrevocably sentimental; and Mozart has been in his grave ninety years; and we know not why, but we do shrink from calling in Offenbach or Lecocq to rewrite that air in true jackanapsian style. What can be done? There still remains another hope.

For the composer, as we have seen, could give us—as could the painter or the sculptor—only one mood at a time; for he could give us only one homogeneous artistic form. But this artistic form exists so far only in the abstract, in the composer's brain or on the paper. To render it audible we require the performer; on the performer depends the real, absolute presence of the work; or, rather, to the performer is given the task of creating a second work, of applying on to the abstract composition the living inflexions and accentuations of the voice. And here, again, the powers of musical expression, of awaking association by means of sounds or manner of giving out sounds such as we recognize, automatically or consciously, to accompany the emotion that is to be conveyed; here again these powers are given to the artist to do therewith what he choose. This second artist, this performer, is not so free indeed as the first artist, the composer; he can longer choose among the large means of expression the forms of melody and rhythm, the concatenation of musical phrases; but there are still left to him the minor modes of expression, the particular manner of setting forth these musical forms, of treating this rhythm; the notes are there, and their general relations to one another, but on him depends the choice of the relative stress on the notes, of the tightening or slackening of their relations; of the degree of importance to be given to the various phrases. The great outline cartoon is there, but the cunning lights and shades, transitions, abrupt or insensible, from tint to tint, still remain to be filled up. A second choice of mood is left to the singer. And see! here arises a strange complication: the composer having in his work chosen one mood, and the singer another, we obtain in the fusion or juxtaposition of the two works, of the two moods, that very thing we desired, that very shimmer and oscillation of character which the poet could give, that dualism of nature required for Cherubino. What is Cherubino? A sentimental jackanapes. Mozart in his notes has given us the sentiment, and now we can get the levity from the performer—unthought-of combination, in which the very irrational, illogical choice made by the composer will help us. Here are Mozart's phrases, earnest, tender, noble—Mozart's love song fit for a Bellario or a Romeo; now let this be sung quickly, lightly, with perverse musical head-tossing and tripping and ogling, let this passion be gabbled out flippantly, impudently—and then, in this perfect mixture of the noble and ignoble, of emotion and levity, of poetry and prose, we shall have, at last, the page of Beaumarchais. A brilliant combination, a combination which, thus reasoned out, seems so difficult to conceive; yet one which the instinct of half, nay, of nearly all the performers in creation would suggest. A page? A jackanapes? Sing the music as befits him; giggle and ogle, and pirouette, and languish out Mozart's music: an universal idea now become part and parcel of tradition: the only new version possible being to give more or less of the various elements of giggling, ogling, pirouetting, and languishing; to slightly vary the style of jackanapes.

But no, another version did remain possible: that strange version given by that strange solemn little Spanish singer, after whose singing of "Voi che sapete" we all felt dissatisfied, and asked each other, "What has she done with the page?" That wonderful reading of the piece in which every large outline was so grandly and delicately traced, every transition so subtly graduated or marked, every little ornament made to blossom out beneath the touch of the singular crisp, sweet voice: that reading which left out the page. Was it the blunder of an idealess vocal machine? or the contradictory eccentricity of a seeker after impossible novelty? Was it simply the dullness of a sullen, soulless little singer? Surely not. She was neither an idealess vocal machine, nor a crotchetty seeker for new readings, nor a soulless sullen little creature; she was a power in art. A power, alas! wasted for ever, of little or no profit to others or herself; a beautiful and delicate artistic plant uprooted just as it was bursting into blossom, and roughly thrown to wither in the sterile dust of common life, while all around the insolent weeds lift up their prosperous tawdry heads. Of this slender little dark creature, with the delicate stern face of the young Augustus, not a soul will ever remember the name. She will not even have enjoyed the cheap triumphs of her art, the applause which endures two seconds, and the stalkless flowers which wither in a day; the clapping which interrupts the final flourish, the tight-packed nosegays which thump down before the feet, of every fiftieth-rate mediocrity. Yet the artistic power will have been there, though gone to waste in obscurity: and the singer will have sung, though only for a day, and for that day unnoticed. Nothing can alter that. And nothing can alter the fact that, while the logical heads of all the critics, and the soulless throats of all the singers in Christendom have done their best, and ever will do their best to give us a real musical Cherubino, a real sentimental whipper-snapper of a page, this utterly unnoticed little singer did persist in leaving out the page most completely and entirely. Why? Had you asked her, she would have been the last person in the world capable of answering the question. Did she consider the expression of such a person as Cherubino a prostitution of the art? Had she some theory respecting the propriety of dramatic effects in music? Not in the very least; she considered nothing and theorised about nothing: she probably never had such a thing as a thought in the whole course of her existence. She had only an unswerving artistic instinct, a complete incapacity of conceiving the artistically wrong, an imperious unreasoning tendency to do the artistically right. She had read Mozart's air, understood its exquisite proportions, created it afresh in her appreciation, and she sang it in such a way as to make its beauty more real, more complete. She had unconsciously carried out the design of the composer, fulfilled all that could be fulfilled, perfected the mere music of Mozart's air. And as in Mozart's air there was and could be (inasmuch as it was purely beautiful) no page Cherubino, so also in her singing of the air there was none: Mozart had chosen, and she had abided by his choice.

Such is the little circle of fact and argument. We have seen what means the inherent nature of music afforded to composer and performer for the expression of Beaumarchais's Cherubino; and we have seen the composer, and the performer who was true to the composer, both choose, instead of expressing an equivocal jackanapes, to produce and complete a beautiful work of art. Were they right or were they wrong? Criticism, analysis, has said all it could, given all its explanations; artistic feeling only remains to judge, to condemn, or to praise: this one fact remains, that in the work of the great composer, we have found only certain lovely patterns made out of sounds; but in them, or behind them, not a vestige of the page Cherubino.

IN UMBRIA.

A STUDY OF ARTISTIC PERSONALITY.

… grande, austera, verde,

Da le montagne digradanti in cerchio,

L'Umbria guarda.—Carducci.

The autumn sun is declining over the fields and oak-woods and vineyards of Umbria, where—in the wide undulating valley, inclosed by high rounded hills, bleak or dark with ilex, each with its strange terraced white city, Assisi, Spello, Spoleto, Todi—the Tiber winds lazily along, pale green, limpid, scarce rippled over its yellow pebbles, screened by long rows of reeds, and thinned, yellowing poplars, reflecting dimly the sky and trees, the pointed mediæval bridges and the crenelated towers on its banks; so clear and placid that you can scarcely bring home to yourself that this can really be the Tiber of Rome, the turbid mass of yellow water which eddies sullen and mournful round the ship-shaped island, along by Vesta's temple, beneath the cypressed Aventine, and away into the desolate Campagna. Gradually, as the sun sinks, the valley of the Tiber fills with golden light moving along, little by little, travelling slowly up the wooded hillocks; covering the bluish mountains of Somma and Subasio with a purple flush, making the white towns rosy on their flanks, and then dying away into the pale amber horizon, rosy where it touches the hill, pearly, then bluish where it merges imperceptibly into the upper sky. Bluer and bluer become the hills, deeper and deeper the at first faint amber; the valley is filled with grey-blue mist; the hills stand out dark blue, cold, and massive; the sky above becomes a livid rose colour; there is scarcely a filament of cloud, and only a streak of golden orange where the sun has disappeared. There is a sudden stillness, as when the last chords of a great symphony have died out. All the way up the hill on which stands Perugia we meet the teams of huge oxen, not merely white, but milky, with great, deep, long-lashed eyes, swaying from side to side with their load of wine-vats; and the peasants returning home from ploughing up the last corn stubble. All is peaceful and very solemn, more so than after sunset in other places, in this sweet and austere Umbria, the fit home of the Christian revival of the early Middle Ages. And it makes us think, this beautiful and solemn evening, of the little book which epitomises all the emotions of this new birth, of this charming new childhood of humanity, when the feelings of men seem to have somewhat of the dewy freshness of dawn. The book is the "Fioretti di San Francesco," a collection of legends and examples relating to the cycle of St. Francis of Assisi by some monk or monks of the end of the thirteenth century. Flowerets they may well be called—flowers such as might grow, green and white-starred and delicately pearled with gold, in the thick grass across which dance Angelico's groups of the Blessed. Yet with a certain humanness, a certain reality and naturalness of sweetness, such as the great paradise painter, with his fleshless madonnas, his glory of radiant, unearthly draperies and golden skies, never could have conceived. A singular charm of simplicity and lucidness in this little book; no fever visions or unhealthy glories; an earnestness not without humour: there is nothing grim or absurd in the credulity and asceticism of these Umbrian saints. The asceticism is so gentle and tender, the credulity so childish and poetical, that the ridiculous itself ceases to be so. These monks, so far from being engrossed with the care of their own souls, or weighed down by the dread of hell, seemed to have awakened with perfect hope and faith in celestial goodness, with perfect desire to love all around them in the most literal sense: religion for them is love and reliance on love. The gentleness with which they admonish the sinning and back-sliding, the confidence in the inner goodness of man, from whose soiled surface all evil may be washed, extends in these men to the whole of creation, and makes them fraternise with beasts and birds, as is shown, with a delicate, slightly humorous grace, in the stories of St. Francis and the turtle doves, and of the ferocious wolf "Frate Lupo" of Gubbio, whom rather than kill, it pleased the saint to bring round to harmlessness by fair words, expostulations, and faithfully kept promises, expecting from the wolf fidelity to his word as much as from a human being. There is in this little book a vague, floating, permeating life of affection, of love unbounded by difference of species. Communion with all men, with Christ, with angels, with doves, and with wolves; the force of love bringing down God and raising up brutes to the level of these saints. And as we think over the little book we feel in a way as if we, to whom Francis and his companions are mere mortal men, and the tales of the "Fioretti" mere beautiful fancies, hollow and sad for their very sweetness, were looking down upon a sort of holy land, as we look down in the white twilight upon the misty undulations of this solemn and beautiful Umbria.

A serene country, neither rugged and barren, nor flat and fertile, not the grey, sharp Florentine valley, whose thin soil must be irrigated and ploughed, and on whose hillsides the carefully nurtured olives are stunted with winter wind and summer scorchings, where every outline is clear and bone-like in that same hard, light atmosphere which, as Vasari says, makes all appear hard and clear and logical to the minds of the Florentines. Not the endless flatness and fruitfulness of Lombardy, where the mists steam up in the evening golden round the great misty golden descending sun-ball, and the buildings flush like the cheeks of Correggio's joy-drunken seraphs, and the thin, clear outline of the rows of poplars looks against the sky like the outshaken golden hair combed into minute filaments of one of Lionardo's women. Nor the dreary wastes of sere oakwoods and livid sand-hills of Orvieto; nor the sea of lush vegetation gilded by the sun, merging into the vaporous damp blue sky of the plain of Lucca. None of these things is the Tiber valley, not harsh nor poor nor luxuriant; sober and restrained, without excess or scantness, an undulating country of pale and modest tints, and, save in the distant Apennine tops, of simple outline, with what glory of colours it may have, due mainly to sky and sunset of cloud, and even in that more chaste than other parts of Italy; neither poor nor rich; without the commerce of Lombardy or the industry of Tuscany, wholly without any intellectual movement, rural, believing, with but little of the imported influence of reviving Paganism, and still much of the clinging moral atmosphere of Christian contemplation and ecstacy of the days of St. Francis. Such is this isolated Tiber valley, whose skies and whose legends are so perfectly in harmony, and in it was born, of the country and of the traditions, a special, isolated school of art.

Is it a school or a man?—A school concentrated in one man, or a man radiating into a school. There are a great many men all about the one man Perugino, masters or pupils; the first seem so many bungled attempts to be what he is, the second so many disintegrations of him. Even the more powerful individualities are lost in his presence; at Perugia we know nothing of the real Pinturicchio, the bright, vain, thoughtless painters of the pageant scenes, brilliant like pages of Boiardo's fairy tales, on the walls of the Sienese Library. Raphael is no separate individual, has no personal qualities before he leaves Perugia. Everything is Perugino, in more or less degree. The whole town, nay, the surrounding country, is one vast studio in which his themes are being developed, his works being copied, his tricks being imitated. A score of artists of talent, one or two like Lo Spagna and the young Raphael, of first-rate powers, and a host of mere mechanical drudges, give us, in all Perugia, nothing new, nothing individual, no impression which we can disentangle from the general, all-pervading impression given by the one man Perugino. The country, physical and moral, has exhausted itself in this one artistic manifestation. One not merely, but unique and one-sided. What Perugino has done has been done by no other master; and what Perugino has done is only one thing, and that to all eternity. The sense of complete absence of variety, of difference; the impression of all being reduced to the minimum of everything, the vague consciousness that all here is one, isolated and indivisible, which haunts us all through the churches and galleries of Perugia, pursues us likewise through all the works of the school, that is to say, of Perugino himself. This unique school, consisting in reality of a single man, possesses only one theme, one type, one idea, one feeling; it does, it attempts but one thing, and that one thing means isolation, concentration, elimination of all but one single mood.

It is the painting of solitude; of the isolated soul, alone, unaffected by any other, unlinked in any work, or feeling, or suffering, with any other soul, nay even with any physical thing. The men and women of Perugino are the most completely alone that any artist ever painted, alone though in fours, or fives, or in crowds. Their relations to each other are purely architectural: it is a matter of mere symmetry, even as it is with the mouldings or carvings of the frame which surrounds them. Superficially, taken merely as so many columns, or half-arches of the pinnacled whole of the composition, they are, in his larger works, more rigorously related to each other than are the figures of any other painter of severely architectural groups; compared with Perugino, the figures in Bellini's or Mantegna's most solemn altarpieces are irrelevant to each other: one saint is turning too much aside, another looking too much on his neighbour. Not so with Perugino: his figures are all in relation to one another. The scarf floating in strange snakelike convolutions, from the shoulder of the one angel flying, cutting across the pale blue air as a skater cuts across the ice, floats and curls in distinct reference to the ribbons which twist, like lilac or yellow scrolls, about the head and neck of the other angel; the lute, with down-turned bulb, of the one seraph, his shimmering purple or ultramarine robe clinging in tight creases round his feet in the breeze of heaven, is rigorously balanced by the viol, upturned against the stooping head, of his fellow-seraph; the white-bearded anchorite stretches forth his right foot in harmony with the outstretched left foot of the scarlet-robed cardinal; the dainty arch-angelic warrior drolly designated as Scipio, or Cincinnatus on the wall of the Money Changer's Hall turns his delicate, quaintly-crested head, and raises his vague-looking eyes to match the upturned plumed head of the other celestial knight. All the figures are distinctly connected with each other; but they are connected as are the pillarets, various, but different, which balance each other in length and thickness and character, a twisted with a twisted one, a twin, strangely linked pair with another such, on the symmetrically sloping front of some Lombard cathedral; the connection is purely outer, purely architectural; and the solitude of each figure as a human being, as a body and a mind, is only the more complete. There is no grouping in these cunningly balanced altarpieces; there is no common employment or movement, no action or reaction. Angels and warriors and saints and sibyls stand separate, the one never touching the other, apart, each alone against the pale greenish background. They may look, the one towards the other, but they never see each other. They exist quite single and isolated, each unconscious that there is any other. Another—indeed, there is no other; in reality, every one is in complete solitude; it is only the canvas which makes them appear in the same place. They are not in the same place, or rather there is no place; the soft green field, the blue hills, darkening against the greenish evening sky, the spare, thinly leaved little trees, the white tower in the distance, this little piece of Umbrian country has nothing to do with any of them. They are nowhere; or rather each taken singly is nowhere. Place, like subject and action, has been eliminated; everything has, which possibly could. The very bodies seem reduced to the least possible: there is no interest in them: all is concentrated upon the delicate nervous hands, on the faces; in the faces, upon eyes and mouth, till the whole face seems scarcely more than tremulous lips, half parted, raised vividly to kiss, to suck in the impalpable; than dilating pupils, straining vaguely to seize, to absorb, to burn into themselves the invisible. It is the embodiment, with only as little body as is absolutely required, of a soul; and that soul simplified, rarefied into only one condition of being: beatitude of contemplation. As place and action have been eliminated, so also has time: they will for ever remain, alone, in the same attitude; they will never move, never change, never cease; there exists for them no other occupation or possibility. And as the bodies are separate, isolated from all physical objects, so is the soul: it touches no other human soul, touches no earthly interest: it is alone, motionless, space and time and change have ceased for it: contemplating, absorbing for all eternity that which the eye cannot see, nor the hand touch nor the will influence, the mysterious, the ineffable.

Are they really saints and angels, and prophets and sibyls? Surely not—for all such act or suffer; for each of these there is a local habitation, and a definite duty. These strange creatures of Perugino's are not supernatural beings in the same sense as are those robed in iridescent, impalpable glory of Angelico; or those others, clothed in more than human muscle and sinew, of the vault of the Sixtine. What are they? Not visions become concrete, but the act of vision personified. They are not the objects of religious feeling; they are its most abstract, intense reality. Yes, they are reality. They are no far-fetched fancies of the artist. They are souls and soul-saturated, soul-moulded bodies which he saw around him. For in that Umbria of the dying fifteenth century—where the old cities, their old freedom and industry and commerce well-nigh dwindled to nothing, had shrunk each on its mountain-side into mere huge barracks of mercenary troopers or strongholds of military bandit nobles, continually besieged and sacked and heaped with massacre by rival families and rival factions; where in the open country, the villagers, pent-up in fortified farms and barns, were burnt, women and children, with the stored-up fodder, or slaughtered and cast in heaps into the Tiber, and every year the tangled brushwood of ilex and oak and briars encroached further upon the devastated cornfields and oliveyards, and the wolves and foxes roamed nearer and nearer to the cities—in this terrible barbarous Umbria of the days of Cæsar Borgia, the soul developed to strange unearthly perfection. It developed by the force of antagonism and isolation. This city of Perugia, which was governed by the most ferocious and treacherous little mercenary captains; whose dark precipitous streets were full of broil and bloodshed, and whose palaces full of evil, forbidden lust and family conspiracy, was one of the most pious in all Italy. Wondrous miraculous preachers, inspired and wild, were for ever preaching in the midst of the iniquity; holy monks and nuns were for ever seeing visions and curing the incurable; churches and hospitals were being erected throughout town and country; novices crowded the ever-increasing convents. Sensitive souls were sickened by the surrounding wickedness, and terrified lest it should triumph over them; resist it, bravely expose themselves to it, prevent or mitigate the evil of others they dared not: a moral plague was thick in the air, and those who would escape infection must needs fly, take refuge in strange spiritual solitude, in isolated heights where the moral air was rarefied and icy. Of the perfectly human, sociable devotion of the days of St. Francis, of the active benevolence and righteousness, there was now no question: the wolves had become too frightfully numerous and ravenous to be preached to like that Brother Wolf of the Flowerets of St. Francis. Active good there could now no longer be: the pure soul became inactive, passive, powerless over the evil around, contemplating for ever a distant, ineffable excellence; aspiring, sterile, and meagre, at being absorbed into that glory of perfect virtue at which it was for ever gazing. This solitary and inactive devotion, raised far above this world, is the feeling out of which are moulded those scarce embodied souls of Perugino's. Those emaciated hectic young faces, absorbed in one ineffable passion, which in their weakness and intensity are so infinitely feminine, are indeed mainly the faces of women—of those noble and holy ladies like Atalanta Baglioni, living in moral solitude among their turbulent clan of evil fathers and brothers and husbands: the victims, or worse, the passive spectators, the passive accomplices, of iniquity of all sorts, whom the grand old chronicler, Matarazzo, shows by glimpses, walking through the blood and lust-soiled houses of the brilliant and horrible Gianpavolos and Semonettos and Griffones of Perugia, pure and patient like nuns, and as secluded in mind as in any cloister. Theirs are these faces, and at the same time the faces which vaguely, confusedly looked down upon them, glorified reflections of their own, from above. These creatures of Perugino's are what every great artist's works must be—at once the portrait of those for whom he paints, and the portrait of their ideals, that is, of their intenser selves. He is the painter of the city where, in the Italian Renaissance, the unmixed devotional feeling, innate in the country of St. Francis, untroubled by Florentine scepticism or Lombard worldly sense, thrust back and concentrated upon itself by surrounding brutal wickedness, existed most intense; he is the painter of this kind of devotion. The very daintiness of accessory, the delicate embroidered robes, the long fringed scarves, the embossed armour, light and pliable like silk, which cannot wound the tender young archangels, the carefully waved and curled hair—all this is the religious luxuriousness of nuns and novices, the one vent for all love of beauty and ease and costliness of the poor delicate creatures, worn and galled by their shapeless hair cloth, living and sleeping in the dreary whitewashed cell. This is unmixed devotion, religious contemplation and aspiration absolutely separated from any other sort of moral feeling; there is the destructive wrath of righteousness in the prophets of Michael Angelo, and the gentleness of candour and charity in the Florentine virgins of Raphael; there is the serenity and solemnity of moral wisdom in Bellini, and the sweetness and cordiality of domestic love in Titian; there is even the half-animal motherly love in Correggio; there is, in almost all the schools of Italian painting, some character of human goodness; but in Perugino there is none of these things. Nothing but the one all-absorbing, abstract, devotional feeling—intense passive contemplation of the unattainable good; souls purged of every human desire or will, isolated from all human affection and action, raised above the limits of time and space; souls which have long ceased to be human beings and can never become angels, hovering, half pained, half joyful, in a limbo of endless spiritual desire.

Such is the work. Let us seek the master. Pietro Vannucci, of Città della Pieve, surnamed Perugino, Petrus de Castro Plebis, as he signed himself, lived, as tradition has it, in a very good house in Via Deliziosa. Via Deliziosa is one of the many quiet little paved lanes of Perugia, steep and tortuous, looking up at whose rough scarred houses you forever see overgrown plants of white starred basil or grey marjoram bursting out of broken ewers and pipkins on the boards before the high windows, or trails of mottled red and green tomatos, or long crimson-tasselled sprays of carnation dangling along the broken, blackened masonry, crevassed and held together by iron clamps; where, at every sudden turn, you get, through some black and oozy archway, a glimpse of green sun-gilded vineyard and distant hills, hazy and blue through the yellow summer air. Here, in the best part of the town, Perugino had his house and his workshop. In the house, full of precious stuffs and fine linen and plate and everything which a wealthy burgher could desire, lived the handsome wife of the master, for whom he was for ever designing and ordering new clothes, and whose beautiful hair he loved himself to dress in strange fantastic diadems and helmets of minute plaits and waves and curls, that she might go through the town as magnificent and quaintly attired as any noble lady of the Baglionis or Antinoris or Della Staffas. In the workshop was the master and a host of pupils: Giannicola Manni, Doni, the Alfani, Tiberio d'Assisi; the exquisite anonymous stranger, of whom we know only as John the Spaniard, and perhaps that gentle fair feminine boy from Urbino, whom, in half-womanish gear and with wonderful delicate feathers and jewels in his hair, Perugino painted among the prophets in the Money Changer's Hall. A workshop indeed. Not merely the studio of a master and his pupils, but an enormous manufactory of works of devotional art; the themes of Perugino, the same saints, the same madonnas, the same angels, in the same groups, for ever repeated in large and small, some mere copies, others slightly varied or composed of various incoherent portions, by the pupil; some half by the master, half by the pupil, some possibly touched up by him, one or two wholly from his own exquisite hand. Things of all degrees of merit and execrableness, to suit the richest and the poorest; all could be had at that workshop, for Master Pietro had the monopoly of the art, good bad, or indifferent, of the country. You could order designs for wood carvings or silver ware; you could hire church banners, of which store was kept to be let out for processions at so much the hour. You could obtain men to set up triumphal arches of cardboard, and invent moulds for ornamental sweetmeats, like those of Astorre Baglioni's wedding; patterns, doubtless also for embroidery and armour embossing; you could have a young Raphael Santi set to repeating some Marriage of the Virgin for a Sforza or a Baglioni, or some tattered smearer to copy a copy of some madonna for a village church; or you could commission the master himself to go to Rome and paint a wall of Pope Sixtus's Chapel. For there never was a manufactory of art carried on more methodically or satisfactorily than this one. There never was a commercial speculator who knew so well how much good and bad he could afford and venture to give; who knew his public so thoroughly. He had, in his youth and poverty, invented, discovered (which shall we call it?) the perfection of devotional painting, that which perfectly satisfied his whole pious Umbria, and every pious man or woman of more distant parts: a certain number of types, a certain expression, a certain mode of grouping, a certain manner of colouring which constituted a perfect whole; a conception to embody which most completely he had in his youth worked like a slave, seeking, perfecting all that which belonged to the style: the clear, delicate colour, the exquisite, never excessive finish, the infinitely delicate modelling of finger and wrist, of eyelid and lip, the diaphanous sheen of light, soft, scarcely coloured hair on brow and temple and cheek; he had coolly turned away from everything else. The problems of anatomy, of perspective, of light and shade, and of grouping, at which in Florence he had seen men like Pollaiolo, Ghirlandaio, Filippino, Lionardo wasting their youth, he never even glanced at. No real bodies were required for his saints as long as he could give them the right, wistful faces; no tangible background, no well-defined composition. All this was unnecessary; and he wanted only the necessary. When he had got the amount and sort of skill required for this narrow style, he stopped; when he had invented the three or four types of faces, attitude, and composition, he ceased inventing. He had the means of making a fortune. All that remained was to organise his mechanism, to arrange that splendid system of repeating, arranging, altering, copying, on the part of himself and his scholars, by which he could, without further enlarging style or ideas, furnish Umbria and Italy with the pure devotional painting it required, in whatever amount and of whatever degree of excellence it might wish. He succeeded. True, other artists sneered at him, like that young Buonarroti, who had called him a blunderer; true, the Florentines complained that when he painted their fresco for them at S. Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi, he had cheated them, giving mere copies of works they had had from him twenty years before. About the judgment of other painters he cared not a fig; success was the only test; to the Florentines he calmly answered that as those figures had pleased them twenty years before, they ought to please them now; that he at least was not going to seek anything new as long as the old sufficed. For men who grew old in constant attempts after new styles, new muscles, new draperies, like Signorelli yonder labouring solitary on the rock of Orvieto, spending years in cramming new figures into spaces which he, Perugino, would have finished in a month with six isolated saints and a bit of blue sky; or frittered away time in endless sketches, endless cooking of new paints and trying of new washes, like Lionardo da Vinci: or who ruined themselves buying bits of old marble to copy, like crazy Mantegna at Mantua; for all such men as these Perugino must have had a supreme contempt. As long as money came in, all was right; new ideas, improvements, all such things were mere rubbish. Thus he probably preached to his pupils, and kept them carefully to their task of multiplying his own works, till his school became sterile and imbecile; and the young Raphael, in disgust, left him and begged the Lady Giovanna della Rovere for a letter to the Gonfaloniere Soderini, which should open to him the doors of the Florentine schools. With what contempt must not Master Perugino have looked after this departing young Raphael; with what cynical amusement he must have heard how the young fool, once successful, kept for ever altering his style, wearing his frail life out, meditating and working himself into the hectic broken creature whom Marc-Antonio has etched, seated, fagged and emaciated on the steps before his work. We can imagine how Perugino descanted on all this folly to the other young men in his workshop. For he was a cynical man as well as a grasping: he saw no wisdom beyond the desire for money and comfort. He had begun life almost a beggar, sleeping on a chest, going without food, in tatters, giving himself no respite from drudgery, sustained by one idea, one wish!—to be rich. And rich he had become; he had built houses on speculation at Florence, to let them out; and had farms at Città della Pieve, and land near Perugia. He had obtained all he had ever desired or could conceive desirable: safety from poverty. In other things he did not believe: not in an after life, nor in God, nor in good; all these ideas, says Vasari, could never enter into his porphyry hard brain, "This Peter placed all his hopes in the good things of fortune, and for money would have made any evil bargain."