BOOKS.

EUPHORION.*

THE author of Euphorion gives so modest an account of the origin of her essays on the Renaissance, that an unwary critic might be led to think that she had a slender claim to write on a subject on which good books are not scarce. According to the author, Euphorion, which is christened after the child of Faust and Helena, the representatives of the Middle Ages and of Antiquity, is simply a record of the impressions made upon her mind by the monuments of the Renaissance. In Italy, she saw the concrete things of the Renaissance, for, except in its great centres, Italy still wears in tatters the garments, half- mediaeval in shape, which were fashioned in the fifteenth century. Having seen the concrete things, she next tried to obtain from books some notion of the original shape of these rags and tatters of a past civilisation. But as she followed up in books only those features of the Renaissance in which she felt a special interest, she warns her readers that she has not mastered the whole history of the period, either at first-hand or at second- hand. It is not often that a critic has to insinuate that a writer knows more than she professes ; but in the present case it is almost necessary to say so. Every page of Euphorion gives evidence of immense reading in Renaissance and in mediaeval literature, and the author possesses the sure instinct so needful in a student of old books, which leads ner to the passages where intellectual booty is to be found. Even pro- fessed students of the Renaissance may find something worthy of their attention in the fresh and singularly independent criticisms of this book, and it may be specially recommended to any who may have hitherto felt little interest in the Re- naissance, judging it to be a dilettante, superficial time, desti- tute of those pathetic human interests which alone to some minds give a value to history. They will learn from Vernon Lee that the Italian Renaissance was one of the trage- dies of history, and none the less so that the actors played their part with a smiling unconsciousness of their tragic destiny. Euphorion is also a remarkable book, as showing how power- fully the scientific movement is influencing literary and artistic criticism. Although professedly criticising works of art, the author's chief interest lies in the social history of the people amid whom the art was produced. We hope we shall not frighten away any readers from a book full of beautiful criti- cisms of poetry and paintings, if we say that the author's main interests appear to us to be sociological ; and this leads her to dwell sometimes upon the repulsive features of a civilisa- tion which she desires to comprehend even more than to enjoy.

The sociological motive of the book is apparent in the opening chapter, which is named " The Sacrifice," and gives a descrip- tion of the condition of Italy at the close of the fifteenth cen- tury. At that period, the Italians were already almost a modern people. Their laws, civic organisation, agriculture, and commerce were of the modern type. In literature, art, and philosophy they had turned away from the effete traditions and mystic dreams which kept the men of Northern Europe in a condition of spiritual slavery. When the soldiers of Charles VIII. discovered Italy for Europe, to borrow the words of Michelet, even they were overawed by the intellectual superiority of the people they had conquered. They were succeeded by

* Ruphorion Studies of the Antique and the Medieval in the Renaissance. By Verson Lee. 2 vole. London T. Fisher IInwin. 1821.

more peaceful invaders, for Italy became to the rest of Europe what Greece had been in antiquity,—the land of pilgrimage for all who shared in the awakening intellectual curiosity of the time. Many travellers went from England to Italy ; but if these.

English travellers were fascinated by the intellectual brilliancy. of Italian society, they were no less shocked by its moral de- pravity. They brought back to England tales of murder and lust, in which priests and nobles were the chief actors. These tales were afterwards put upon the stage by the Elizabethan dramatists, and the union which they exhibited of intellectual greatness and moral baseness fascinated the English people with a fascination of horror. Of the effect of these tales upon the English, Vernon Lee writes :—

" The sense of the rottenness of the country whence they were obtaining their intellectual nourishment, haunted with a sort of sickening fascination the imaginative and psychological minds of the late sixteenth century, of the men who had had time to outgrow the first cynical plunge of the rebellious, immature intellects of the con- temporaries of Greene, Peele, and Marlowe into that dissolved civili- sation. And of the great men who were thus enthralled by Italy. and Italian evil, only Shakespeare and Messinger maintain or regain. their serenity and hopefulness of spirit, and resist the incubus of horror,—Shakespeare from the immense scope of his vision, which permitted him to pass over the base and frightful parts of human nature and see its purer and higher sides ; Messinger from the very, superficiality of his insight and the narrowness of hissympathies, which prevented his ever thoroughly realising the very horrors he had himself invented. But on minds less elastic than that of Shakespeare and less superficial than that of Messinger, the Italian evil weighed like a night-mare. With an infinitely powerful and passionate imagination,. and an exquisitely subtle faculty of mental analysis - only lately freed from the dogma of the Middle Ages ; unsettled in their philosophy ; inclined by wholesale classical reading to a sort of negative Atheism, a fantastic and half-melancholy mixture of epicur- ism and stoicism ; yet keenly alive, from study of the Bible and of religious controversies, to all questions of right and wrong ; thus highly wrought and deeply perplexed, the minds of the Elizabethan poets were impressed by the wickedness of Italy as by horrible deeds of one whom we are accustomed to venerate as our guide, .whom we cannot but love as our benefactor, whom we cannot but admire as our superior ; it was a sense of frightful anomaly, putrescence in beauty and splendour, of death in life and life in death, which made the English psychologist-poets savage and sombre, cynical andf wrathful, and hopeless."

The moral laxity of the Italians in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was the direct result of their intellectual enlightenment. It forced them to turn away from the unnatural morality and foolish beliefs which meant intellectual degradation ; but as those beliefs were the only known sanctions of morality, when they parted with them they were left without moral restraint. They became perfectly unscrupulous, but they were not fiends incarnate, who had made evil their good, as they appear in the- Elizabethan dramas. Unscrupulous when tempted to an evil which they felt no call to resist, they were often in the rest of their lives tolerant, gentle men, who did not a little good to those around them. Even Lorenzo dei Medici, the unprincipled- despot and dishonest banker, shows in his poems with what a

friendly eye be looked upon the peasants who lived around his villas, at a time when the most righteous of northern barons- would have been ashamed to show an interest in the serfs who- tilled his lands. Vernon Lee holds the dangerous doctrine that the

moral laxity of the Renaissance was a necessary stage in develop- ment. It was necessary, she says, that one generation of men

should turn away utterly from the schools and churches where the unnatural and foolish were taught and worshipped, and consequently from all moral restraints, that man might be rein- stated in his human dignity. The men of the Renaissance were-

the sacrifice offered for the moral dignity of the modern world. She bids us look with pity from our calm scientific position on the• murder of the Italian Renaissance, cut off pitilessly at its prime, hurried off before the tribunal of posterity, still bearing its weight of unexpiated, unrecognised guilt. We cannot hold with Vernon Lee that this moral laxity was a necessary stage. Moral evil is seldom necessary, and so far as it is necessary is not evil. But it is, of course, quite true that no generation of men can part with beliefs which have been for centuries the sanctions of morality without grave moral peril; and the Italians of the fifteenth cen-

tury are entitled to the sympathy due to the generation of men who formed the vanguard in the liberation-war of humanity. It is not quite fair, however, to overlook the facts that the Italians, who

were the descendants of the debased population of the Empire,, parted with moral restraints with a very light heart; that they showed an elective-affinity, if we may use the expression, for the fouler parts of ancient literature, and a distinct disinclina- tion to interest themselves in those remains of antiquity, by help of which some other European nations found fresh sane- tions for their moral life. The predispositions of men affect their conduct in a time of moral crisis, no less than historical circumstances.

The chapters " Symmetria Prisca" and the " Portrait Art" contain some fine thinking on the art of the Renaissance, and its relation to ancient art. The human body, which had been so

studied and idolised by the Greeks, was neglected by the mediaeval artist. To him it was " a diseased, deformed piece of

baseness, which the priests told him belonged to the worms and Satan." The artists of the early Renaissance, with many mis- givings, began once more to study the human body, and the remains of the antique in Italy helped them to ennoble and humanise their art. Vernon Lee ventures to differ from the great English critic, who is "irrefutable when he is a poet, and irrational when he becomes a philosopher," and rejoices that the artists of the fifteenth century turned to that art which was the one pure and stainless thing which antiquity had be- queathed to the modern world. The remarks on the change which took place in the character of the statues erected in churches are worthy of special notice. In the Middle Ages the sculptor made a low relief on the church flags, which seemed best to suit the lowliness of man. The sculptor of the Renaissance, full of the idea of human dignity, lifted up the image of the illustrious dead, placed them upon beds of state, and endeavoured to represent them in all their living graciousness and beauty.

The following passage from the "Portrait Art" may be taken as a specimen of the style of the descriptions of works of art in Euphorion :—

"There is Rrossellino's Cardinal of Portugal at S. Miniato and Monte ; the slight body, draped in episcopal robes, lying with delicate folded hands, in gracious decorum of youthful sanctity ; the strong delicate bead, of clear feature and gentle furrow of suffering and thought, a face of infinite purity and strength, of strength still nngnarled by action ; a young priest who in his virginal dignity is almost a noble w oman. . . . . . There is, above all, the Carlo Marsoppini of Desiderio da Settignano, the humanist Secretary of the Common- wealth, lying on the sarcophagus, superb with shell fretwork and curling acanthus, in Santa Croce of Florence. For the youthful beauty of the Cardinal of Portugal and of the Lady Ilaria are common-place compared with the refinement of this worn old face, with scant, wavy hair and thin, gently furrowed, but by no means ploughed-up features. The slight figure looks as if in life it must have seemed almost transparent ; and the hands are very pathetic : noble, firm hands, subtle of vein and wrist, crossed simply, neither in prayer nor in agony, bnt in gentle weariness over the book on his breast. That book is certainly no prayer-book ; rather a volume of Plato or Cicero : in his last moments the noble old man has longed for a glance over its familiar pages ; they have placed the book on his breast, but it has been too late ; the drowsiness of death has over- taken him, and with his last sigh he has gently folded his hands over the volume, with the faint last clinging to the things beloved in this world."

Of the feudal North, the author of Euphorion writes not less powerfully, but with less sympathy than of Italy. She is attracted by the reasonableness, the modern humaneness of the merchant princes of Italy, who spent their working days in ware- houses and offices, in familiar intercourse with the people, and when they sought for recreation betook themselves to pleasant palaces on green hill-sides, amid an independent and happy peasantry. She draws a very different picture of the feudal castle, with dark, irregular rooms, and yards filled with stinking hounds and noisy retainers. Outside stretched tracts of dreary woodland carefully preserved from all useful purposes, that the barbarians in the castle might have always "something to kill." The peasant of Vernon Lee is the same whom the genius of Michelet has made familiar—an oppressed outcast and devil- worshipper, the dethroned man worshipping the dethroned God.

It was not only with blows and exactions that the peasant was oppressed. Whatever literary power stood at the service of the lords was employed to blacken the character of the serf.

Instead of pleasing pictures of the peasantry and their useful labours, such as we find in the poets of antiquity, there comes "a many-throated yell of mediaeval poets, noble and plebeian, French, Provencal, and German, against the brutishness, the cunning, the cruelty, the hideousness, the heresy of the serf, whose name becomes synonymous with every kind of baseness ; which, in mock grammatical style, is declined into every epithet of wickedness !" This hatred of noble to serf which the medimval poets fostered, proved an evil legacy to after-times. Vernon Lee is not silent on the brighter aspects of medimval life. Within the feudal castles those habits were formed of deference towards superiors, of courtesy to equals, and of rever- ence for high-born women, which taught grace of manner and self-restraint to the descendants of the rough Gothic and Frankish chieftains, and which have descended to modern times as a tradition of good-breeding. The " Lady-service " was the chief cause in producing this new dignity and gentleness in manners. A way of regarding woman, unknown to classical as well as to Germanic antiquity, sprang up in the Middle Ages.. The devotion of the knight to the lady of his love was a romantic, idealistic sentiment, which often became a species of worship. It ruled his whole life. In a long chapter on " Medimval Love," which appears to us the least pleasant in the book, this senti- ment is illustrated by examples from the medimval poets. It is admitted that it had in it the germ of a higher sentiment towards woman than the world had known, and that it was the root from which sprang the flower of the " white fire " of Dante's, devotion to Beatrice. But in the Middle Ages, according to the author of .Euphorion, the "lady-service" was simply adul- terous passion. She speaks very slightingly of the lyric poetry of the Middle Ages, in which she finds only rhyme and rhythm —form without meaning. She turns with weariness from its "eternal spring," everlasting forests, and unholy passion. Her remarks are much too sweeping, if they are meant to char- acterise the whole lyric poetry of the Middle Ages. The poems of Walter von der Vogelweide, which made, as he says, "many a man and woman joyful," not only contain love-songs which are sweet and pure, but also poems full of solemn meditation,—the work of a poet who could sing of the world's deepest mysteries and sorrows. If they have a fault, it is because as, German critics say, they are over-burdened with serious thoughts.

To the courtly epics of the Middle Ages, Vernon Lee does scant justice. She fully appreciates the solemnity and splendour of Chanson, de Roland, and of that other great tale of the earlier Middle Ages, the Quatre Fels Ayrnon, which celebrates the fate of the great Baron who resisted an unrighteous despot. But she speaks with impatient contempt of those courtly epics founded upon Celtic tales, which delighted the sentimental knightly society in the times of the later Crusades. She admits the luscious charm of the Tristan, of Gottfried von Strassburg, but finds the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach almost ridiculous, "all muddled, monotonous, and droning ; events and persons ill-defined, without any sense of the relative importance of anything, without clear perception of what it is all about, or at least without the power of keeping the matter straight before the reader." We can only marvel at this criticism of a poem which contains such scenes as the first meeting of Parzival with knights in the forest, the instruction of Parzival in knighthood by Gurnemanz, and the noble scene in which reckless Parzival meets the pious knight in the forest on Good Friday. Parzival deserves more respectful handling as a poem in which we can mark the dawning of a new and nobler ethical spirit,—such a change in moral feeling as the author of Euphorion would have been quick to praise had she been writing of a poet who lived south of the Alps. This new spirit appears in the kindlier view of the infidel, in the recogni- tion of doubt and spiritual struggle in the mind of a Christian knight, and in the conception of the knighthood of the Grail,— a society which embraced men and women, was religious without being ecclesiastical, and whose all but unpardonable sin was the neglect of compassionate sympathy—a neglect due to a too strict adherence to the rules of worldly knighthood.

In the Epilogue, the author sums up her indictment against the Middle Ages in the word "Wastefulness." Thought was wasted in the attempt to get a knowledge of the unknowable ; and feeling was wasted upon imaginary and fantastic objects; while the things and duties of the present world, which were nigh to men, were neglected. It was the merit, according to this author, of the men of the Renaissance to have recalled men from heaven to earth, and to have opened their eyes to the marvellous new things which antiquity had not known, and which lay neglected during the Middle Ages. If this is a com- plete account of the matter, why do men return to the Middle Ages with the same wistful feelings with which men look back upon the thoughts of their childhood, with the same doubts as to whether their change of feeling has been altogether for the better? The eighteenth century turned with scorn from the barbarous Middle Age. The nineteenth century has studied it afresh, and has sought to revive some of its features in almost every department of thought and life. A civilisation seems to require those spiritual and ideal forces which the Middle Ages gave an exaggerated place, as well the light of the clear-judging reason.

In the Epilogue, Vernon Lee has anticipated some of our criti- cisms by making the admission that certain of her judgments will

appear one-sided, but she pleads that the plan of her book com- pelled her to state the rule in describing the features of a civilisa- tion, and to allow the exceptions to take care of themselves. This tendency to a one-sided judgment is the only fault we have to find with the book, which deserves a most cordial welcome as a fresh and original contribution to the history of civilisation and art, written in graceful and often eloquent English.