Euphorion (Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the Renaissance). Vernon Lee
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conceit of knowing more (when I am fully aware that I know infinitely less) than other writers about the life and character of this wonderful child of Helena and Faustus, but merely because it is more particularly as the offspring of this miraculous marriage, and with reference to the harmonies and anomalies which therefrom resulted, that Euphorion has exercised my thoughts. The Renaissance has interested and interests me, not merely for what it is, but even more for what it sprang from, and for the manner in which the many things inherited from both Middle Ages and Renaissance, the tendencies and necessities inherent in every special civilization, acted and reacted upon each other, united in concord or antagonism; forming, like the gases of the chemist, new things, sometimes like and sometimes unlike themselves and each other; producing now some unknown substance of excellence and utility, at other times some baneful element, known but too well elsewhere, but unexpected here. But not the watching of the often tragic meeting of these great fatalities of inherited spirit and habit only: for equally fascinating almost has been the watching of the elaboration by this double-natured period of things of little weight, mere trifles of artistic material bequeathed to it by one or by the other of its spiritual parents. The charm for me—a charm sometimes pleasurable, but sometimes also painful, like the imperious necessity which we sometimes feel to see again and examine, seemingly uselessly, some horrible evil—the charm, I mean the involuntary compulsion of attention, has often been as great in following the vicissitudes of a mere artistic item, like the Carolingian stories or the bucolic element, as it has been in looking on at the dissolution of moral and social elements. And in this, that I have tried to understand only where my curiosity was awakened, tried to reconstruct only where my fancy was taken; in short, studied of this Renaissance civilization only as much or as little as I cared, depends all the incompleteness and irrelevancy and unsatisfactoriness of this book, and depends also whatever addition to knowledge or pleasure it may afford; Were I desirous of giving a complete, clear notion of the very complex civilization of the Renaissance, a kind of encyclopædic atlas of that period, where (by a double power which history alone possesses) you could see at once the whole extent and shape of this historical territory, and at the same time, with all its bosses of mountain and furrows of valley, the exact composition of all its various earths and waters, the exact actual colour and shape of all its different vegetations, not to speak of its big towns and dotting villages;—were I desirous of doing this, I should not merely be attempting a work completely beyond my faculties, but a work moreover already carried out with all the perfection due to specially adapted gifts, to infinite patience and ingenuity, occasionally amounting almost to genius. Such is not at all within my wishes, as it assuredly would be totally without my powers.
But besides such marvels of historic mapping as I have described, where every one can find at a glance whatever he may be looking for, and get the whole topography, geological and botanical, of an historic tract at his fingers' ends, there are yet other kinds of work which may be done. For a period in history is like a more or less extended real landscape: it has, if you will, actual, chemically defined colours in this and that, if you consider this and that separate and unaffected by any kind of visual medium; and measurable distances also between this point and the other, if you look down upon it as from a balloon. But, like a real landscape, it may also be seen from different points of view, and under different lights; then, according as you stand, the features of the scene will group themselves—this ridge will disappear behind that, this valley will open out before you, that other will be closed. Similarly, according to the light wherein the landscape is seen, the relative scale of colours and tints of objects, due to pervading light and to distances—what painters call the values—will alter: the scene will possess one or two predominant effects, it will produce also one or, at most, two or three (in which case co-ordinated) impressions. The art which deals with impressions, which tries to seize the real relative values of colours and tints at a given moment, is what you call new-fangled: its doctrines and works are still subject to the reproach of charlatanry. Yet it is the only truly realistic art, and it only, by giving you a thing as it appears at a given moment, gives it you as it really ever is; all the rest is the result of cunning abstraction, and representing the scene as it is always, represents it (by striking an average) as it never is at all. I do not pretend that in questions of history we can proceed upon the principles of modern landscape painting: we do not know what were the elevations which made perspective, what were the effects of light which created scales of tints, in that far distant country of the past; and it is safer certainly, and doubtless much more useful, to strike an average, and represent the past as seen neither from here nor from there, neither in this light nor that, and let each man imagine his historical perspective and colour value to the best of his powers. Yet it is nevertheless certain that the past, to the people who were in it, was not a miraculous map or other marvellous diagram constructed on the principle of getting at the actual qualities of things by analysis; that it must have been, to its inhabitants, but a series of constantly varied perspectives and constantly varied schemes of colour, according to the position of each individual, and the light in which that individual viewed it. To attempt to reconstruct those various perspective-making heights, to rearrange those various value-determining lights, would be to the last degree disastrous; we should have valleys where there existed mountains, and brilliant warm schemes of colour where there may have been all harmonies of pale and neutral tints. Still the perspective and colour valuation of individual minds there must have been; and since it is not given to us to reproduce those of the near spectator in a region which we can never enter, we may yet sometimes console ourselves for the too melancholy abstractness and averageness of scientific representations, by painting that distant historic country as distant indeed, but as its far-off hill ranges and shimmering plains really appear in their combination of form and colour, from the height of an individual interest of our own, and beneath the light of our individual character. We see only very little at a time, and that little is not what it appeared to the men of the past; but we see at least, if not the same things, yet in the same manner in which they saw, as we see from the standpoints of personal interest and in the light of personal temper. Scientifically we doubtless lose; but is the past to be treated only scientifically? and can it not give us, and do we not owe it, something more than a mere understanding of why and how? Is it a thing so utterly dead as to be fit only for the scalpel and the microscope? Surely not so. The past can give us, and should give us, not merely ideas, but emotions: healthy pleasure which may make us more light of spirit, and pain which may make us more earnest of mind; the one, it seems to me, as necessary for our individual worthiness as is the other. For to each of us, as we watch the past, as we lie passive and let it slowly circulate around us, there must come sights which, in their reality or in their train of associations, and to the mind of each differently, must gladden as with a sense of beauty, or put us all into a sullen moral ache. I should hate to be misunderstood in this more, perhaps, than in anything else in the world. I speak not of any dramatic emotion, of such egotistic, half-artistic pleasure as some may get from the alternation of cheerfulness and terror, from the excitement caused by evil from which we are as safely separated as are those who look on from the enfuriate bulls in an arena. To such, history, and the history especially of the Renaissance, has been made to pander up but too much.
The pain I speak of is the pain which must come to every morally sentient creature with the contemplation of some one of the horrible tangles of evil, of the still fouler intermeshing of evil with good, which history brings up ever and anon. Evil which is past, it is true, but of which the worst evil almost of all, the fact of its having been, can never be past, must ever remain present; and our trouble and indignation at which is holy, our pain is healthy: holy and healthy, because every vibration of such pain as that makes our moral fibre more sensitive; because every immunity from such sensation deadens our higher nature: holy and healthy also because, just as no image of pleasurable things can pass before us without gathering about it other images of some beauty which have long lain by in each individual mind, so also no thought of great injustice of man or of accident, of signal whitewashing of evil or befouling of good, but must, in striking into our soul, put in motion there the salutary thought of some injustice or lying legitimation or insidious pollution, smaller indeed perhaps, but perhaps also nearer to ourselves.
Be not therefore too hard upon me if in what I have written of the Renaissance, there is too little attempt to make matters scientifically complete, and too much giving way to personal and perhaps sometimes irrelevant impressions of pleasure and of pain; if I have followed up those pleasurable and