I. PRIDE OF SCIENCE II. ROMAN RENAISSANCE 51

better. No; not even so. It is indeed true that, here and there, a piece of knowledge will enable the eye to detect a truth which might otherwise have escaped it; as, for instance, in watching a sunrise, the knowledge of the true nature of the orb may lead the painter to feel more profoundly, and express more fully, the distance between the bars of cloud that cross it, and the sphere of flame that lifts itself slowly beyond them into the infinite heaven. But for one visible truth to which knowledge thus opens the eyes, it seals them to a thousand: that is to say, if the knowledge occur to the mind so as to occupy its powers of contemplation at the moment when the sight-work is to be done, the mind retires inward, fixes itself upon the known fact, and forgets the passing visible ones; and a moment of such forgetfulness loses more to the painter than a day’s thought can gain. This is no new or strange assertion. Every person accustomed to careful reflection of any kind knows that its natural operation is to close his eyes to the external world. While he is thinking deeply, he neither sees nor feels, even though naturally he may possess strong powers of sight and emotion. He who, having journeyed all day beside the Leman Lake, asked of his companions, at evening, where it was,* probably was not wanting in sensibility; but he was generally a thinker, not a perceiver. And this instance is only an extreme one of the effect which, in all cases, knowledge, becoming a subject of reflection, produces upon the sensitive faculties.¹ It must be but poor and lifeless knowledge, if it has no tendency to force itself

* St. Bernard.²

¹ [Literature abounds in such instances, of which two may here be given. Erasmus amused himself in the passage of the Alps with composing a poem on old age (see Froude’s Erasmus, p. 90), and Gibbon, though he lived fifteen years in Lausanne, loved only to see nature “framed in a window” (Augustine Birrell’s Res Judicatæ, p. 41).]

² [“After having passed a whole day in riding along its shore, in the evening when his companions were asking about the Lake, he enquired, ‘What Lake?”’ (St. Bern., Op., vol. ii. col. 1118). That St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153) was not wanting in sensibility to nature is shown by one of his letters, which might have been written by Wordsworth: “Experto crede; aliquid amplius invenies in silvis quam in libris. Ligna et lapides docebunt te quod a magistris audire non possis” (see Life and Times of St. Bernard, by J. C. Morison, p. 23).]

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