I. PRIDE OF SCIENCE II. ROMAN RENAISSANCE 61

and lips, and curls of hair. Whatever can be measured and handled, dissected and demonstrated,-in a word, whatever is of the body only,-that the schools of knowledge do resolutely and courageously possess themselves of, and portray. But whatever is immeasurable, intangible, indivisible, and of the spirit, that the schools of knowledge do as certainly lose, and blot out of their sight: that is to say, all that is worth art’s possessing or recording at all; for whatever can be

beautifully, so artistically as Homer did, the organic elements constituting the emblems of youth and beauty, and the waste and decay which these sustain by time and age. All these Homer understood better, and has described more truthfully, than the scientific men of forty centuries. ....

“Before I approach this question, permit me to make a few remarks on the pre-historic period of Greece; that era which seems to have produced nearly all the great men.

“On looking attentively at the statues within my observation, I cannot find the slightest foundation for the assertion that their sculptors must have dissected the human frame, and been well acquainted with human anatomy. They, like Homer, had discovered Nature’s secret, and bestowed their whole attention on the exterior. The exterior they read profoundly, and studied deeply-the living exterior and the dead. Above all, they avoided displaying the dead and dissected interior, through the exterior. They had discovered that the interior presents hideous shapes but not forms. Men during the philosophic era of Greece saw all this, each reading the antique to the best of his abilities. The man of genius rediscovered the canon of the ancient masters, and wrought on its principles. The greater number, as now, unequal to this step, merely imitated and copied those who preceded them.”-Great Artists and Great Anatomists. By R. Knox, M.D. London, Van Voorst, 1852.

Respecting the value of literary knowledge in general as regards art, the reader will also do well to meditate on the following sentences from Hallam’s Literature of Europe;¹ remembering at the same time what I have above said, that “the root of all great art in Europe is struck in the thirteenth century,” and that the great time is from 1250 to 1350:²

“In Germany, the tenth century, Leibnitz declares, was a golden age of learning compared with the thirteenth.”

“The writers of the thirteenth century display an incredible ignorance, not only of pure idiom, but of common grammatical rules.”

The fourteenth century was “not superior to the thirteenth in learning. ... We may justly praise Richard of Bury for his zeal in collecting books. But his erudition appears crude, his style indifferent, and his thoughts superficial.”

I doubt the superficialness of the thoughts: at all events, this is not a character of the time, though it may be of the writer; for this would affect art more even than literature.

¹ [Part i. ch. i. §§ 86-88.]

² [See above, p. 23.]

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