This, be sure, is true; and I have its English parallel
ready to hand. For I once heard a father and
his child talking of the goodness of God. “God,”
says the father, “gives thee the milk to thy
porridge”; and the child thought it a good saying,
yet puzzled over it, doubting, as it afterwards appeared,
the part to be assigned to a friend of his, the daily
milkman. And so he solved it. “God
makes the milk and the milkman brings it,” he
said. The Fioretti, if you must needs break
a butterfly on your dissecting-board, was written,
as I judge, by a bare-foot Minorite of forty; compiled,
that is, from the wonderings, the pretty adjustments
and naive disquisitions of any such weatherworn brown
men as you may see to-day toiling up the Calvary
to their Convent. And in this same story-telling
Giotto is an adept. He loves to gather his fellows
round him and speak of Saints and Archangels, where
our youngsters talk of fairy godmothers and white
rabbits. To say this is not Art, as the critics
profanely teach, is monstrous. Is not the Fioretti
literature, or the Gospel according to Saint Luke
literature? And is not Religion the highest art
of all, the large elementary poetry in the core of
the heart of man? Just so was the craft which
disposed the rings of that wonderful ornament round
about the Bardi chapel, rings of clean arabesque wrought
in line upon pale blue and pink and brown, and which
in so doing fitted the Franciscan thaumaturgy with
an exact garment tenderly adjusted to every wave of
its abandonment—even so was this a great
art indeed. For you ask of an art no more than
this, that it shall be adequately representative:
there are no comparative degrees.
So when I learn from the works of Ruskin that he can
“read a picture to you as, if Mr. Spurgeon knew
anything about art, Mr. Spurgeon would read it,—that
is to say, from the plain, common-sense Protestant
side”; or when I learn from the works of Mr.
George Moore that Sir Frederick Burton made of the
National Gallery a Museum; or when one complains of
a picture that it is not didactic, and another that
it holds a thought, I make haste to laugh lest I should
do wrong to Tuscany, that looked upon the world to
love it: for she saw that it was very good.
III
A SACRIFICE AT PRATO
(An Old-fashioned Narrative)
[Footnote: Perhaps I may be allowed to explain
that this article was written from the standpoint
of a cultivated Pagan of the Empire, who should have
journeyed in Time as well as Space.]
Copyrights
Earthwork out of Tuscany from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
