order and authority; and it was rather a federalising than a centralising influence. But after the reign of Charles V., when the Empire was no longer Holy, or Roman, or, in any true sense, an empire at all, Rome became a merely ecclesiastical expression; it represented a purely sacerdotal and centralising power. The source of this power, as far as Italy was concerned, was the rule of Spain; that is the rule and supremacy of the House of Austria: a supremacy and rule from which Italy only freed itself in our own days. It would be more true, therefore, if Mr. Symonds had styled his volumes The Catholic Transformation, rather than The Catholic Reaction. For the repression of Italy was caused, not by a return to Mediæval Latin Christianity, but by the evolution of our modern, or Roman, Catholicism. This evolution, if we may so describe it, was due, principally, to three causes. The violence of the so-called Reformers was undoubtedly one cause of it; this, both narrowed the borders of the Church and embittered its policy. The second cause was the growth of the secular spirit, and the transfer of civil administration. from clerical persons to laymen; this tended to foster the growth of that exclusively sacerdotal activity which M. Gambetta has defined as Clericalism. The third cause we find paralleled in the history of the secular monarchies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The development of the Papal supremacy, of Papal absolutism, is coincident in time with the rise of the belief in the Right Divine of Kings, and with the growth of those un-Medieval notions of monarchy, which were destroyed by the French Revolution. In Mediæval times the Bishops were state officials, they were palatines or peers with definite civil duties and responsibilities; neither Popes nor Kings were absolute; and national Churches had, both in spirit and in fact, a strong feeling of individuality. With the decline of Feudalism,

with the decay of Imperialism, and with the growth of centralising theories, all this passed away; instead of the federalised Churches of Latin Christianity, we find the centralising Papal Church; the episcopate had no scope for its activity except in clerical affairs; and an ever-widening gulf was fixed between sacerdotalism and science. These were the causes of the Catholic Transformation. Its effects culminated in the Syllabus, and in the assumption of personal infallibility by Pius IX. From the restoration of Clement VII., from the days of the Spanish despotism, and from those days only, we may date the preponderance of clericalism in Italy, and the permanence of the Papal rule in Rome. The heroes of this religious evolution, the instruments of the Catholic Transformation, the emissaries and supporters of the Papal rule were the Jesuits. I leave to the advocates of that rule the task of apologising for its results.

But passing from the main subject of Mr. Symonds' newest volumes, we can proceed to notice his work as a whole. He has conferred an inestimable boon on English lovers of art, by collecting for them such a mass of information about the Italian Renaissance. It is not for us, whose interest in his work is artistic rather than historical, to discuss Mr. Symonds as an historian; nor is it to our purpose to criticise him as a theologian or as a philosopher. As artists, indeed, we are tempted to criticise both the style of his writing, and the subordination and arrangement of his material. In style his work leaves very much to be desired. Mr. Symonds' style is far removed from the conciseness, the simplicity, the severe restraint which even an English prose classic should possess. And, as an historian, he is still farther removed from the minute accuracy, the calm impartiality of a Stubbs or a Gardiner; and from the due, and admirable, subordination of multitudinous details which is the

characteristic excellence of a Gibbon. Mr. Symonds' book is rather a storehouse of materials and authorities for some historian of the

future, than a history which may be considered as classical or final; but the future historian of the Renaissance will owe Mr. Symonds an immense, an incalculable debt.

The history of the Renaissance is a long one, and it embraces so many subjects that we can only consider a few of them. I propose, therefore, to touch on those which, from an artistic point of view, are applicable to the circumstances of our own time.

The Renaissance is a perpetual witness to man's need for beauty, and of his unquenchable desire to possess it. "So immortal, so indestructible is the power of true beauty, of consummate form: it may be submerged, but the tradition of it survives: nations arise which know it not, which hardly believe in the report of it; but they, too, are haunted with an indefinable interest in its name, with an inexplicable curiosity as to its nature." The Renaissance is a witness to this yearning for beauty and perfection, which haunts and torments the finest human spirits; in its progress, in its triumphs, and in its failures, too, it bears witness, no less clearly, to the source from which true beauty, immortal and indestructible, is derived. As if to expose the fallacy of Mr. Bright's latest dictum, the Renaissance proves convincingly that civilized man has an instinct for form; it shows that our modern world, through its own unaided efforts, could not satisfy this instinct; and it proclaims that only through the Greek world, which Mr. Bright disdains, could man's craving for perfection be fully satisfied. Thus the Renaissance testifies to the inherent shortcomings of the modern world, and to the superiority, in all matters of artistic form, of the elder civilization.

In the next place the Renaissance shows how the models of that

more perfect civilization should be applied to our modern requirements. As the Renaissance was, in its beginning, a literary movement, the illustration of this may be taken most conveniently from literature. In the correspondence, which we all remember, about the Hundred Greatest Books, there was a letter and a list by Mr. William Morris. In his letter, Mr. Morris said that, of all things, he most disliked “a cold classicism." By a cold classicism I suppose he meant a frigid and pedantical adherence to Greek or Roman idioms, and forms of expression. In this, Mr. Morris was supremely right, nothing in literature is more offensive than these freezing artificialities. But so many people fail to distinguish between an artificial use of the classics, and a healthy use of them. An artificial use of them, I take to be the attempt to confine modern thought to the narrower sphere of ancient thought; and the endeavour to bind modern language, whether in verse or in prose, to the forms and idioms of Greek or Latin. These endeavours are always predestined to failure, they do not rival the true classics, and they ruin the modern writing in which such experiments are made.

By a healthy use of the classical writers, I mean an understanding of their abiding sense for style, of their clearness, simplicity, and directness, of their freedom from whims and crotchets; and, above all, an appreciation of their supremacy in the choice, the composition, and the arrangement of their materials. In this matter of “composition," English art, whether it be writing, painting, or sculpture, signally fails. In other words, the classics imperiously remind us of the necessity of form, if our work is to be, in the true sense of the term, artistic. If language is the material of our work, we should try to express our thought, not in a Greek or in a Roman mould, but as clearly as a Roman or a Greek would have expressed his; we should

E

aim at choosing and arranging our matter as they would have arranged and chosen theirs. This, I suppose, is a healthy use of the classics, and does not fall under Mr. Morris' condemnation. In the Renaissance we see that good work was done, as long as the classics were used healthily; but that very bad work was done, pedantic, artificial, frigid work, when the classics were used unnaturally: as they were used by the later Humanists.

The history of the Renaissance tells us many things which, in our present artistic and academical condition, we should think about seriously. It proves decisively that, in every sphere of art, good work must be individual and spontaneous work. The Renaissance was an individual movement; a scholar here, a painter or a builder there, felt the passion for perfection, and he groped his way towards the older world by which, his instinct told him, his longing would be satisfied. But he never let his models overpower his individuality, he was their scholar and not their slave.

In Painting, the Renaissance shows us that Academies are the ruin of art, but it does not thereby prove that annual exhibitions will be its salvation, or that absolute chaos and the absence of all teaching are desirable. It shows that the teaching we want is not the mechanical, impersonal teaching of an Academy, but the personal influence of masters. It proves that art is developed more healthily in many local centres than in one all-devouring, over-centralised metropolis. And it tells us, most distinctly of all, that Painting must not stand aloof, that it must not be haughtily disdainful of the other branches of art.

In Poetry, the Renaissance shows us, first, that an absolute deference to critics and a childish dependence on authorities are fatal; and, secondly, it proves that the limits of true art may very