plete were we reduced to seek it in their pages alone. They represent it, indeed, under but one aspect, and that its darkest, leaving us in a state of bewilderment, caused by the contrast, not, as in the Renaissance epoch, between moral and intellectual-but between intellectual and social advancement.

From the picture of savage violence and lawless excesses transmitted to us by the chronicles, we turn in amazement to the sublime verse of Dante and the marble miracle of Giotto. In a short breathing-place between barbarous civil feuds we find the Florentines founding in one year, 1293, the two great churches of Santa Maria del Fiore and Santa Croce. After reading with admiration Giovanni Villani's enumeration of the glories of Florence of her four great schools of grammar and logic-of her thirty hospitals with a thousand beds of her innumerable churches and monasteries-we receive a sort of shock on passing to the next sentence, in which he boasts, in the same strain of exultation, of the number of public officers who have the power of applying the torture to criminals. When Dino Compagni tells us how Guido Cavalcanti, un giovane gentile, deliberately attempts to assassinate Corso Donati in the street, only failing to do so through the swerving of his horse, we ask ourselves, Can this be the student and philosopher, the friend of Dante, and writer of exquisite verses breathing a spirit of contemplative tenderness? And Dante himself makes Forese Donati, in the "Purgatorio," utter a sentence of ferocious exultation over the death of his brother, this same Corso; while in the midst of the poet's sublime theological speculations the blessed shade of his ancestor is represented as shrinking from him in abhorrence, because his murder was still unavenged by his kinsfolk on earth.

This blending of factious turbulence and intellectual culture, not only in the same society but in the same individuals, would be inexplicable, had we no other record of the times than that which registers their civil disorders. The Middle Ages would be an enigma incapable of solution, did we not know that beside and within society without cohesion or stability-with force for its law and violence as its principle-there existed another body, disciplined, orderly, and stable, whose essence was obedience, whose strength was meekness, whose ideal, humility, whose watchword, peace. The cathedral square often, indeed, ran red with blood, but within the Mother and Child smiled in divine serenity from the altar. The great fortress palaces shook to the din of tumult and assault, but the campanile filled the upper air with its call to praise aud prayer. The sword ruled supreme in the narrow streets, but high above the roof-tops the Cross was set in heaven. Thus, while all civil authority was dead, and the reign of violence unchecked by any material obstacle, it never gained a complete moral victory. However it might seem to colour men's minds, there was, in the teaching of Christian morality, a pʊʊpetual protest against it, a perpetual vindication of a higher law; and

the ark of civilization which had survived the universal deluge of ignorance and anarchy during the earlier centuries, still contained the principle of vitality that was to reanimate the world. Otherwise, the mediæval barbarism of Italy would have been hopeless as the barbarism of Central Africa, and the feuds of Florence and Bologna of as little interest to humanity as the wars of Unyoro or Uganda. But the germ of progress, though dormant, was not dead, and the subsiding of the dark waters left a living force of development behind. Thus it was that the outburst of civil fury in which Italy awoke delirious from the stupor of centuries was but the manifestation of returning civil life, and that the convulsions of the Middle Ages were the birth-throes of the Renaissance.

Without keeping in mind that there was always this nucleus of order in the midst of chaos, of knowledge in the depth of ignorance, of civilization in the heart of barbarism, we should be utterly bewildered by the medieval records-by finding how, during the carnival of savage passion and ferocity described in the Florentine chronicles, art was receiving its most powerful impulse, and how amid the feuds of the Cerchi and Donati, Dante was possible. For not even Dante's genius could have produced the " Divine Comedy," unless surrounded by an atmosphere of general culture. If from the first it drew the gigantic vigour and intensity of its conceptions, it owed to the second the exquisite polish of form which fits it to satisfy the taste and defy the criticism of all time. Dante, rude and unlettered, writing for a rude and unlettered public, would still have been a great poet, but for his own age alone; and his verse, even if it survived like some rugged northern saga, as a curious relic of antiquity, could never, as now, form an integral part of the literature of Europe. Modern thought, the heir of all the ages," is scarcely sufficiently mindful of all it owes to the trustee of that inheritance during its own long minority and prefers to forget that the faith it has cast off was the nurse of infant civilization of Europe. For the sole surviving memory of society, after its long lapse of civil consciousness, was the Church which had baptized Constantine and anointed Charlemagne; and which, enthroning itself on the majestic ruins of paganism, made Rome still the centre of the civilized world, and the Latin language and literature the common inheritance of Christendom. It linked ancient and modern culture, for there was no gulf of time between classical and monastic erudition. Boethius, the heir of the Manlii, the last great disciple of the school of Rome and Athens, was still a young man when the boy Benedict fled from the world to the mountain solitude of the Apennines; and the martyrdom of the former at the hands of the Arian Goth, which may be considered the extinction of classical philosophy, preceded by but four years the foundation by the latter of the famous Abbey of Monte Cassino, the headquarters of medieval learning.

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The so-called Dark Ages had their own special form of culture

their own special goal of intellectual effort-and "the ten silent centuries" have their utterance in the works of the early Fathers. Had they been altogether mute, the medieval world could not have burst into song in its great canticle: had their darkness not been redeemed by "the little spark hidden in the ashes," they could not have heralded the intellectual noon of the Renaissance. The object of their study was God, as that of the following epoch was man, and of later times, the visible universe. If excessive concentration on supernatural ideas produced occasionally the exaggeration of mysticism, it at least kept man's higher nature prominently in view; while forgetfulness of it led the pure humanism of the Renaissance into unblushing cynicism, and is now dragging the daring votaries of science into the hopeless cul de sac of modern materialism.

The task of the earlier centuries was the amplification of the broad truths of Christianity into a system, which should meet the complicated requirements of advancing knowledge. As various forms of heresy arose to threaten the infancy of the new belief, the Church was compelled to gird herself with armour of proof, and gather about her champions capable of defending her cause in the arena of controversy. It was not, however, merely by reason of its usefulness as a defensive weapon, but also by the novelty and freshness of the ideas it called into play, that theology exercised so powerful an attraction on the greatest intellects of the first centuries. Christianity, regarded from a purely intellectual point of view, was the greatest stimulus to thought the human mind had ever received, and came to it when the vital force of classical culture was utterly spent. Apart from all enthusiasm for its dogmas, it was the most novel and interesting moral phenomenon the world then offered to the study of its inhabitants. It absorbed the thoughts even of men whose actions it failed to influIt introduced among mankind a new intellectual ferment, and supplied the great mental excitement, even more than the great guiding principle of life. It furnished the learned with inexhaustible food for thought and discussion, and the ignorant with an endless variety of subjects for their rude attempts at spectacle or drama. It gave a fresh impulse to the human intelligence in its various grades of capacity, and developed new forms of culture adapted to all classes of minds.

ence.

For it was not by her theological teaching alone that the early Church exercised her civilizing influence, as the masses of mankind were then, as now, inaccessible to pure reason. Feeling her way, as it were, in the blind darkness of minds unreached as yet by any intellectual stirrings-blank of all ideas unconnected with visible objects-she appealed to the sole faculty by which man can realize spiritual truth, and set herself to awaken the dormant imagination, as her channel of communication with the unresponsive soul. Το minds unaccustomed to dealing with abstract ideas, she addressed herself in symbols, and associated dramatic representations of her

great mysteries with the celebration of their anniversaries. In rude pictorial form, again, she depicted the scenes of the Gospel narrative, and the striking actions of the saints or martyrs, and taught by the language of visible signs those whom no other eloquence could reach. Music and dancing, too, had their part in thus educating the soul through the senses, and even the Mystery Plays, with what seems to modern feeling their profane familiarity with sacred subjects, had their uses, among people for whom written language had no existence, and spoken but a very limited range. Poetry, however, is the spontaneous voice of man's spiritual nature, as is abundantly proved by its invariable choice, among primitive people, of supernatural subjects; and its use by the Church as a form of imaginative culture produced those medieval hymns, of which some-those, for example, by Jacopone da Todi-are inimitable in their exquisite pathos.

Now, Dante's majestic allegory-almost the greatest intellectual fruit of Christianity-reflects perfectly the twofold teaching of the Church in its subtleties of theological disquisition, on the one hand, and in its realistic treatment of spiritual beliefs, recalling the simplicity of popular representations, on the other. So far it is the product of the culture of the past, while it also contains the intensest personification of the spirit of its own age, and the presage of what that spirit was yet to bring forth. For into its shadowy twilight, peopled by spectres and abstractions, the human passion which was to dominate the art of the future is projected with a foreglow of anticipation; and in the introduction of the mere woman, transfigured, indeed, in celestial radiance, but still warm with living interest, the subtle change of key is already struck, which preludes the triumphant pæan of humanity. If the austere teaching of the past is personified in the shade of Virgil, and the living force of contemporary feeling in the fierce Florentine himself, the dawning Renaissancethe apotheosis of humanity-is prefigured in the mystic smile of Beatrice. For the past, indeed, was Dantes's teacher, but the future was his inspiration, and all the eloquence gathered up from the dumb centuries behind him was tuned to prophetic harmony with the manifold voices of the coming time.

The rapid accomplishment of the change thus foreshadowed is shown by a glance from Beatrice, the spiritualized essence of immortal love, to Laura, the ideal woman of mere earthly passion. For while Dante and Petrarch were all but contemporaries, a great revolution in thought is compassed by the brief interval between them, and the purely natural treatment of emotion is, in the latter poet, already fully recognized as the guiding impulse of art. In another clime, indeed, and a later age, this principle was to find its chief exponent in him who was the voice of the Renaissance as Dante of the Middle Ages, the prophet of an epoch which had definitively abandoned the supernatural in art. Shakspeare, whose Italian culture was not the least wonderful part of his many-sided nature, was the first of the

world's great singers who dealt with humanity in its visible aspect alone, without any reference to another life or a higher order of being. But the Renaissance, while thus making human nature its sole theme, never lost sight of the immaterial side of that nature, which it was left to a later age to ignore or deny. The perfect balance in which it held mind and matter was its strength, till the proponderance of the grosser element in the scale destroyed its delicate equilibrium; and the genius of Michael Angelo, the leading spirit of his age, precipitated its decline, by his final preference of muscle to mind, and abandonment of all other expression for that of mere animal force*

This cursory glance at the spirit of the following age is necessary to understand fully Dante's position, as he stood on its threshold, alive to its awakening impulses, but still fully dominated by the ecclesiastical culture of the past. While, however, he thus embodied the intellectual teaching of the Church, his moral feeling was identical with that of the lay society in which he moved, and of which in this respect he was not a step in advance. Had he been so he would have been at once less strong and less narrow-would have sung more wisely, but scarce so well. For it is strange, though true, that the greatest minds, apart from the Saints, are never those which see most clearly and combat most vigorously the errors of their time, but those which move for good or evil, in blind sympathy with the strongest current of contemporary thought.

Now the temper of the age of Dante was that of recently converted paganism, and the Gospel, accepted without question, had as yet scarcely leavened the tone of society. The spirit of Christianity required a more gradual preparation in the mind than its dogma, and it took many ages of faith to mature, as it will many of scepticism to extirpate it among mankind. Nevertheless, even the thirteenth century had seen some striking instances of the triumph of Christian meekness; but with these Dante has as little sympathy as a Homeric hero. The story of the young noble who, meeting his brother's murderer on Good Friday, by a way-side shrine, spared his life, and believed he saw the Image on the crucifix bow its head in approbation, was one of the favourite traditions of his native Florence; yet Giovanni Gualberto has no place in the poet's heaven. Filippo Benizi again, an apostle of peace in that age of violence, who travelled from town to town preaching reconciliation to the divided citizens, was an actual contemporary of Dante, and one of the most prominent figures of his time, yet his name does not occur in the "Divine Comedy." "The good Mar

*The degrading effect of materialism, conscious or unsconscious, on modern art, is visible in all its productions, but is most strikingly exemplified by comparing any contomporary portrait with one by Raphael or Titian. The one is a hollow mask--the shallow and empty semblance of a man; the other portrays his whole moral nature at its best or worst.