A WOMAN AND THE RENAISSANCE.*
"DUBIOUSLY and gorgeously, around the year 1485, life, as it is understood by modern minds and senses, begins again." By
this clean start Mrs. Taylor gets away from the usual historian who would flop off with some such jargon as : " Impossible as it may be to accurately fix upon any date at which the influences which have gone to make up the problems of the modern world, yet we may, for the purposes of this work, and as a workable approximation, consider them as having taken their rise from the year 1485." Not more than one in a thousand histories holds any pleasure but that of instruction; Mrs. Taylor's book is with that happy few. She has scholar- ship, but for her it is not the last resort of a barren mind ; it is the material of her imagination and of her artistry. To the Renaissance scholar, she writes, words were " signs of the articulate souls of lovers, children, fighters, people with hun- gering eyes and ears and nostrils and hands, delicate, gallant and glittering persons ; they were the counters in deadly games of love and hate, sudden flowers of immortal moments, triumphal medals for the history of the soul." That is not great prose ; it is nearly bombast, entirely rhetoric ; but it is so much better than the arid verbiage in which the common historian hides the beauty of his facts. We do not praise Mrs. Taylor because she has tried at fine writing, but because she has tried at writing at all, because she has the passion for words. They are vicious horses, and she is an indif- ferent whip, not wise enough to hold their individual pride and make them run together. Too often she lets the reins loose and upsets her coach. It is the credit of her scholarship, her imagination and her intellectual capacity that it is a coach, and no mere apple cart. The live occupants may be jumbled about, but they remain inside patiently while she rights her coach, mounts her box and thunders off again to the next glorious tumble. She is a very Jack Mytton of words. Tight. ness and precision may be more admirable qualities of style than a disordered richness, but they are the rarest of all qualities. Better her exaggerated fertility than the barren poverty that so often makes History a dull dog. 4nd if any subject will stand her exuberance it is the Italian Renaissance. In a series of elaborately learned essays she presents, almost visually, the practical exaltation of the artists, the exalted astuteness and immoral bravery of the men of action and the sober drunkenness of the scholars, in that age that can only be inadequately summed up in feeble paradox. She has made no show of correcting old mistakes, of flourishing forth newly discovered entries in parish registers or brothers to a great man's parents. It is not in adding to the material of history that she has found her expression, but in considering the old matter with sympathy, and presenting it imaginatively. If there is original research in her work, she has hidden it from our uncyclopaedic eyes.
Her judgment is always interesting, often exasperating, but never dull. We shudder at the inadequacy of a valuation which brackets " the capable Masaccio " with the Pollajuoli, as painters in whom the imaginative tradition begun by Cimabue " is dulled a little." Had not Mrs. Taylor in her wealth of adjectives anything better than " capable " for Masaccio, or " curious " or Carlo Crivelli ? And in what are the Bellini mundane ? Is Charles V. on page 256 to be blamed on the printer, or is Mrs. Taylor's mind too imperial to remember a tragic IX. ?
Here and there in her book crop up philosophic speculations of such quality as : " Perhaps it is an obscure necessity that the roots of the Tree of Life should be steeped in blood and filth before it blossom into the Rosa Mystica " : " Races and periods, like people, commit their most outrageous crimes in lapsing from their besetting virtue." Here and there occurs a certainly good phrase such as : " And the Turks break open Constantinople like a box of spices, of which the odours escape
• Aspects of the Italian Renaissance. By Rachel Annand Taylor. With sa Introduction by Gilbert Murray. London : Grant Iticharda. Ells. 6d. net,)
throughout Europe," or a doubtfully clever one like " the Press, banal mother of illusion."
On the whole, Mrs. Taylor's book is stimulating rather than sound, disturbing rather than instructive; its supreme merit, the expression of a vigorous personality considering vigorous days. It is a book to enjoy tolerantly.
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