§ XLI. Let us hear two stories of those rougher times.
At the debate of King Edwin with his courtiers and priests, whether he ought to receive the Gospel preached to him by Paulinus, one of his nobles spoke as follows:
“The present life, O king! weighed with the time that is unknown, seems to me like this. When you are sitting at a feast with your earls and thanes in winter time, and the fire is lighted, and the hall is warmed, and it rains and snows, and the storm is loud without, there comes a sparrow, and flies through the house. It comes in at one door and goes out at the other. While it is within, it is not touched by the winter’s storm; but it is but for the twinkling of an eye, for from winter it comes and to winter it returns. So also this life of man endureth for a little space; what goes before or what follows after, we know not. Wherefore, if this new lore bring anything more certain, it is fit that we should follow it.”[13]
That could not have happened in a Renaissance building. The bird could not have dashed in from the cold into the heat, and from the heat back again into the storm. It would have had to come up a flight of marble stairs, and through seven or eight antechambers; and so, if it had ever made its way into the presence chamber, out again through loggias and corridors innumerable. And the truth which the bird brought with it, fresh from heaven, has, in like manner, to make its way to the Renaissance mind through many antechambers, hardly, and as a despised thing, if at all.
§ XLII. Hear another story of those early times.
The king of Jerusalem, Godfrey of Bouillon, at the siege of Asshur, or Arsur, gave audience to some emirs from Samaria and Naplous. They found him seated on the ground on a sack of straw. They expressing surprise, Godfrey answered them: “May not the earth, out of which we came, and which is to be our dwelling after death, serve us for a seat during life?”
It is long since such a throne has been set in the reception chambers of Christendom, or such an answer heard from the lips of a king.
Thus the Renaissance spirit became base both in its abstinence and its indulgence. Base in its abstinence; curtailing the bright and playful wealth of form and thought, which filled the architecture of the earlier ages with sources of delight for their hardy spirit, pure, simple, and yet rich as the fretwork of flowers and moss, watered by some strong and stainless mountain stream: and base in its indulgence; as it granted to the body what it withdrew from the heart, and exhausted, in smoothing the pavement for the painless feet, and softening the pillow for the sluggish brain, the powers of art which once had hewn rough ladders into the clouds of heaven, and set up the stones by which they rested for houses of God.
§ XLIII. And just in proportion as this courtly sensuality lowered the real nobleness of the men whom birth or fortune raised above their fellows, rose their estimate of their own dignity, together with the insolence and unkindness of its expression, and the grossness of the flattery with which it was fed. Pride is indeed the first and the last among the sins of men, and there is no age of the world in which it has not been unveiled in the power and prosperity of the wicked. But there was never in any form of slavery, or of feudal supremacy, a forgetfulness so total of the common majesty of the human soul, and of the brotherly kindness due from man to man, as in the aristocratic follies in the Renaissance. I have not space to follow out this most interesting and extensive subject; but here is a single and very curious example of the kind of flattery with which architectural teaching was mingled when addressed to the men of rank of the day.
§ XLIV. In St. Mark’s library there is a very curious Latin manuscript of the twenty-five books of Averulinus, a Florentine architect, upon the principles of his art. The book was written in or about 1460, and translated into Latin, and richly illuminated for Corvinus, king of Hungary, about 1483. I extract from the third book the following passage on the nature of stones. “As there are three genera of men,—that is to say, nobles, men of the middle classes, and rustics,—so it appears that there are of stones. For the marbles and common stones of which we have spoken above, set forth the rustics. The porphyries and alabasters, and the other harder stones of mingled quality, represent the middle classes, if we are to deal in comparisons: and by means of these the ancients adorned their temples with incrustations and ornaments in a magnificent manner. And after these come the chalcedonies and sardonyxes, &c., which are so transparent that there can be seen no spot in them.[14] Thus men endowed with nobility lead a life in which no spot can be found.”