It is the quality, the spirit, of a performance that matters.  If a performance is the best of which a man is capable, and better than what he has hitherto done, he has achieved all that is possible.  If he begins to reflect that it is better than what others have done, then his satisfaction is purely poisonous.  But to estimate human possibilities high and human performances low, and to class one’s own performances with the latter rather than the former, this is temperate and manly and strong.

XX

There is a picture of Rossetti’s, very badly painted, I think, from the technical point of view, of Lucrezia Borgia.  There are apologists who say that the wickedness of the Borgia family is grossly exaggerated, and that they were in reality very harmless and respectable people.  But Rossetti thought of them, in painting this picture, as people stained with infamous and unspeakable crime, and he has contrived to invest the scene with a horror of darkness.  Lucrezia sits in what is meant to be an attitude of stately beauty, and the figure contrives somehow to symbolise that; though she appears to be both stout and even blowsy in appearance.  Her evil father, the Pope Alexander, sits leering beside her, while her brother Caesar leans over her and blows rose-leaves from her hair.  There certainly hangs a hideous suggestiveness of evil over the group.  In the foreground, a page of ten or twelve is dancing, together with a little girl of perhaps nine or ten.  The page is slim and delicate, and watches his small companion with a tender and brotherly sort of air; both children are entirely absorbed in their performance, which they seem to have been bidden to enact for the pleasure of the three watchers.  The children look innocent enough, though they too are rather dimly and clumsily painted; but one feels that they are somehow in the net, that they are growing up in a pestilential and corrupting atmosphere, and that the flowers of evil will soon burst into premature bloom in their tender souls.  The whole scene is overhung with a close and enervating gloom; one apprehends somehow that the air swims with a heavy fragrance; and though one feels that the artist’s hand failed to represent his thought, he was painting with a desperate intentness, and the dark quality of the conception contrives to struggle out.  The art of it is great rather than good; it is the art of a man who realises the scene with a terrible insight, and in spite of a clumsy and smudgy handling, manages to bring it home perhaps even more impressively than if he had been fully master of his medium.  There is a mingling of horror and pathos over it all, and the pretty, innocent gaiety of the children seems obscured as by a gathering thunder-cloud; as when the air grows close and still over some scene of rustic merriment, and the blitheness of the revellers sinks into torpor and faintness, not knowing what ails them.  One feels that the performers of the dance will be rewarded with kisses and sweetmeats, and that they will draw the poison into their souls.