This, be sure, is true; and I have its English parallel ready to hand. For I once heard a father and his child talking of the goodness of God. "God," says the father, "gives thee the milk to thy porridge"; and the child thought it a good saying, yet puzzled over it, doubting, as it afterwards appeared, the part to be assigned to a friend of his, the daily milkman. And so he solved it. "God makes the milk and the milkman brings it," he said. The Fioretti, if you must needs break a butterfly on your dissecting-board, was written, as I judge, by a bare-foot Minorite of forty; compiled, that is, from the wonderings, the pretty adjustments and naive disquisitions of any such weatherworn brown men as you may see to- day toiling up the Calvary to their Convent. And in this same story- telling Giotto is an adept. He loves to gather his fellows round him and speak of Saints and Archangels, where our youngsters talk of fairy godmothers and white rabbits. To say this is not Art, as the critics profanely teach, is monstrous. Is not the Fioretti literature, or the Gospel according to Saint Luke literature? And is not Religion the highest art of all, the large elementary poetry in the core of the heart of man? Just so was the craft which disposed the rings of that wonderful ornament round about the Bardi chapel, rings of clean arabesque wrought in line upon pale blue and pink and brown, and which in so doing fitted the Franciscan thaumaturgy with an exact garment tenderly adjusted to every wave of its abandonment—even so was this a great art indeed. For you ask of an art no more than this, that it shall be adequately representative: there are no comparative degrees.
So when I learn from the works of Ruskin that he can "read a picture to you as, if Mr. Spurgeon knew anything about art, Mr. Spurgeon would read it,—that is to say, from the plain, common-sense Protestant side"; or when I learn from the works of Mr. George Moore that Sir Frederick Burton made of the National Gallery a Museum; or when one complains of a picture that it is not didactic, and another that it holds a thought, I make haste to laugh lest I should do wrong to Tuscany, that looked upon the world to love it: for she saw that it was very good.
III
A SACRIFICE AT PRATO
(An Old-fashioned Narrative)
[Footnote: Perhaps I may be allowed to explain that this article was written from the standpoint of a cultivated Pagan of the Empire, who should have journeyed in Time as well as Space.]
The rim of the sun was burning the hill tops, and already the vanguard of his strength stemming the morning mists, when I and my companion first trod the dust of a small town which stood in our path. It still lay very hard and white, however, and sharply edged to its girdle of olives and mulberry trees drenched in dews, a compactly folded town, well fortified by strong walls and many towers, with the mist upon it and softly over it like a veil. For it lay well under the shade of the hills awaiting the sun's coming. In the streets, though they were by no means asleep, but, contrariwise, busy with the traffic of men and pack-mules, there was a shrewd bite as of night air; looking up we could perceive how faint the blue of the sky was, and the cloud-flaw how rosy yet with the flush of Aurora's beauty-sleep. Therefore we were glad to get into the market- place, filled with people and set round with goodly brick buildings, and to feel the light and warmth steal about our limbs.
"It would seem fitting," said I, "seeing that day is at hand and already we enjoy the first-fruits of his largess, that we should seek some neighbouring shrine where we might praise the gods. For never yet was land that had not, as its fairest work, gods: and in a land so fair as this there must needs be gods yet fairer, and shrines to case them in." This I said, having observed pious offerings laid upon the shrines of divers gods by the road. At the which, looking curiously, it seemed to me that the inhabitants of this country were favoured above the common with devout thoughts and the objects of them—gods and goddesses. You might not pass a farm without its tutelary altar to the genius of the place, some holy shade, or—as she was figured as a matron—some great land-goddess, perhaps Cybele, or the Bona Dea; and pleasant it was to me to see that the tufts of common flowers set before her were for the most part smiling and fresh with the dew that assured an early gathering. In the streets of the city, moreover, I had seen many more such, slight affairs (it is true) of painted earthenware, some gaudily adorned with green and yellow colour and of workmanship as raw, some painted flat on the wall of a recess (in which was more skill, though the device was often gross enough—to dwell upon death and despair), and some again of choice beauty, both of form and colour, and a most rare blitheness, as it might be the spirit of the contrivers breaking through the hard stone. And all of these I knew to be gods, but the devices upon them were hard to be read, or approved. There was a naked youth pierced with arrows, wherein the texture of smooth flesh accorded not well with the bitterness of his hurt; a young man also, bearded, of spare and mournful habit and girt with a rope round his middle; in his hands were wounds, as again of arrows, and there was a rent in his garment where a javelin had torn a way into his side. Such suffering of wounds and broken flesh stared sharply up against the young flowers and grasses which spoke of healthy wind and rain and a sun-kissed earth. Goddesses also I saw—a virgin of comely red and white visage; yellow-haired she was, crowned like a king's daughter; at her side a wheel, cruelly spiked on the outer edge and not easily to be related to so heart-some a maid. But before them all (with one grim exception, to be sure) I saw the Earth-Mother who had been upon the farm and homestead- walls, of the same high perfection of form, and in raiment stately and adorned, yet (it would seem) something sorrowful as she might mourn the loss of lover or young child. Now the darkest sight I saw was that exception before rehearsed; and it was this. A black cross stood In the most joyful places of the city, and one suffered upon it to very death. Whereat I marvelled greatly, saying, "Who Is the man thus tormented whom the people worship as a god?" And my companion answered,
"A great god he is, if the country report lie not, and has many names, which amount to this, that he has freed this nation from bondage and died that he may live again, and they too. And of the truth of what they say I cannot speak; but I think he is Bacchus the Redeemer, who, as you, Balbus, know, was no wanton reveller in lasciviousness, but a very god of great benevolence and of wisdom truly dark and awful. Who also took our mortal nature upon him and suffered in the shades: rising whence (for he was god and man) like the dawn from the night's bosom, or the flooding of spring weather from the iron gates of winter, he sped over land and sea, touching earth and the dwellers upon it. And to those he touched tongues were given and soothsaying, and to many the transports of inspiration and divine madness, as of poets and rhapsodists. And tragedy and choral odes are his, and the furious splendour of dances. But of the worship of Dionysus you know something, having been at Eleusis and beheld the holy mysteries.
"Now the god of this people has the same gift of tongues and madness of possession. To him are also sacred priests of the oracle, and high tragedies, and the wailing of music, and streaming processions of virgins and young boys. He too agonised and arose stronger and more shining than before, dying, indeed, and rising at the very vernal equinox we have mentioned. He too is worshipped in certain Mysteries whereat the confession of iniquity and the cleansing of hearts come first: and the sacrifice is just that wheaten cake and fruit of the vine whereof, at Eleusis, you have praised to me the simplicity and ethic beauty. And he can inspire his devotees with frenzy. For I have heard that certain men of the country, on a day, and urged by his dæmon, run naked from place to place in honour of him, lashing their bare backs with ox-goads; and will fast by the week together, they and the women alike; and that pious virgins, under stress of these things, swoon and are floated betwixt earth and heaven, and afterwards relate their blissful encounters and prophesy strange matters; receiving also dolorous wounds (which nevertheless are very sweet to them) like to the wounds which he himself received unto death; and all these things they endure because they are mystically fraught with the wisdom and efficacy of the god. Nay, I have been told that in the parts over sea, towards the North and West, he is worshipped, just as at Eleusis, with pipes and timbrels and brazen cymbals and all excess of music; and there they dance in his service and suffer the ecstasies of the Mænads and Corybants in the Dionysiac revel. But this I find quaint to be believed."