Pleasure alone cannot content any one whose character has any force, or mind any high intelligence. Society is, as you say, a book we soon read through, and know by heart till it loses all interest. Art alone cannot fill more than a certain part of our emotions; and culture, however perfect, leaves us unsatisfied. There is only one thing that can give to life what your poet called the light that never was on sea or land—and that is human love.
"Yes, it is a curious thing that we do not succeed in fresco. The grace is gone out of it; modern painters have not the lightness of touch necessary; they are used to masses of colour, and they use the palette knife as a mason the trowel. The art, too, like the literature of our time, is all detail; the grand suggestive vagueness of the Greek drama and of the Umbrian frescoes are lost to us under a crowd of elaborated trivialities; perhaps it is because art has ceased to be spiritual or tragic, and is merely domestic or melodramatic; the Greeks knew neither domesticity nor melodrama, and the early Italian painters were imbued with a faith which, if not so virile as the worship of the Phidian Zeus, yet absorbed them and elevated them in a degree impossible in the tawdry Sadduceeism of our own day. By the way, when the weather is milder you must go to Orvieto; you have never been there, I think; it is the Prosodion of Signorelli. What a fine Pagan he was at heart! He admired masculine beauty like a Greek; he must have been a singularly happy man—few more happy——"
A LEAF IN THE STORM.
The Berceau de Dieu was a little village in the valley of the Seine.
As a lark drops its nest amongst the grasses, so a few peasant people had dropped their little farms and cottages amidst the great green woods on the winding river. It was a pretty place, with one steep, stony street, shady with poplars and with elms; quaint houses, about whose thatch a cloud of white and grey pigeons fluttered all day long; a little aged chapel with a conical red roof; and great barns covered with ivy and thick creepers, red and purple, and lichens that were yellow in the sun.
All around it there were the broad, flowering meadows, with the sleek cattle of Normandy fattening in them, and the sweet dim forests where the young men and maidens went on every holy-day and feast-day in the summer-time to seek for wood-anemones, and lilies of the pools, and the wild campanula, and the fresh dogrose, and all the boughs and grasses that made their house-doors like garden-bowers, and seemed to take the cushat's note and the linnet's song into their little temple of God.
The Berceau de Dieu was very old indeed.
Men said that the hamlet had been there in the day of the Virgin of Orléans; and a stone cross of the twelfth century still stood by the great pond of water at the bottom of the street, under the chestnut-tree, where the villagers gathered to gossip at sunset when their work was done.