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482 PRÆTERITA-III
the Lombard plains being mere waste and wreck of them; and the great Certosa of Pavia one of the worst shames of Italy,1 associated with the accursed reign of Galeazzo Visconti. But in their strength, from the foundation of the order, at the close of the eleventh century, to the beginning of the fourteenth, they reared in their mountain fastnesses, and sent out to minister to the world, a succession of men of immense mental grasp, and serenely authoritative innocence; among whom our own Hugo of Lincoln, in his relations with Henry II. and Cœur de Lion, is to my mind the most beautiful sacerdotal figure known to me in history.2 The great Pontiffs have a power which in its strength can scarcely be used without cruelty, nor in its scope without error; the great Saints are always in some degree incredible or unintelligible; but Hugo’s power is in his own personal courage and justice only; and his sanctity as clear, frank, and playful as the waves of his own Chartreuse well.*
9. I must not let myself be led aside from my own memories into any attempt to trace the effect on Turner’s mind of his visit to the Chartreuse, rendered as it is in the three subjects of the Liber Studiorum,-from the Chartreuse itself, from Holy Island, and Dunblane Abbey. The strength of it was checked by his love and awe of the sea, and sailor heroism, and confused by his classical thought and passion; but in my own life, the fading away of the nobler feelings in which I had worked in the Campo Santo of Pisa, however much my own fault, was yet complicated with the inevitable discovery of the falseness of the religious doctrines in which I had been educated.
* The original building was grouped round a spring in the rock, from which a runlet was directed through every cell.
1 [For references to the Certosa of Pavia (founded in 1396 by Galeazzo Visconti, first Duke of Milan, as an atonement for the murder of his uncle and father-in-law), see Vol. VIII. p. 50, and the other passages there noted.]
2 [See Froude’s paper “A Bishop of the Twelfth Century” in Short Studies, vol. ii.; often referred to by Ruskin (Vol. XXVIII. p. 118, Vol. XXIX. p. 387, Vol. XXXIII. p. 518).]
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
