For I wondered where his patient Imola found her outlet,
and whether young Simone has shown her a way.
Master Peter drummed on the table and nursed one fat
leg.
Before I took leave of the urbane little painter,
in fact while I stood in the act of handshaking, I
saw her white face at an upper window, looming behind
rigid bars. On a sudden impulse I concluded my
farewells rapidly and made to go. Vannucci turned
back into the house and closed the door; but I stayed
in the cortile pretending a trouble with my spurs.
Sure enough, in a short time I heard a light footfall.
Imola stood beside me.
“Wish me a safe journey,” I said smiling,
“and no more bare-headed cavaliers on the road.”
Her lips hardly moved, so still her voice was.
“Was he bare-headed?” she asked, as if
in awe.
“Love-locks floating free,” I answered
her gaily enough. “Shall I thank him for
his courtesies to you, Madonna, if we meet?”
“You will not meet: he is gone to Spello,”
she began, and then stopped, blushing painfully.
“But I may stay in Spello this night and could
seek him out.”
She was mistress of her lips, and could now look steadily
at me. “I wish him very well,” said
Imola.
THE SOUL OF A FACT
In the days when it was verging on a question whether
a man could be at the same time a good Christian and
an artist, the chosen subjects of painting were significant
of the approaching crisis—those glaring
moral contrasts in history which, for want of a happier
term, we call dramatic. Why this was so, whether
Art took a hint from Politics, or had withdrawn her
more intimate manifestations to await likelier times,
is a question it were long to answer. The subjects,
at any rate, were such as the Greeks, with their surer
instincts and saving grace of sanity in matters of
this kind, either forbore to meddle with or treated
as decoratively as they treated acanthus-wreaths.
Today we call them “effective” subjects;
we find they produce shocks and tremors; we think
it braces us to shudder, and we think that Art is
a kind of emotional pill; we measure it quantitatively,
and say that we “know what we like.”
And doubtless there is something piquant in the quivering
produced, for example, by the sight of white innocence
fluttering helpless in a grey shadow of lust.
So long as the Bible remained a god that piquancy
was found in a Massacre of the Innocents; in
our own time we find it in a Faust and Gretchen,
in the Dore Gallery, or in the Royal Academy.
It was a like appreciation of the certain effect of
vivid contrasts as powerful didactic agents (coupled
with, or drowning, a something purer and more devout)
which had inspired those most beautiful and distinctive
of all the symbols of Catholicism, the Adoration
of the Kings, the Christ-child cycle, and which
raised the Holy Child and Maid-Mother to their place
