Category: Essays, Letters & Speeches
Real and Ideal--these are the handy terms, admiring or disapproving, which criticism claps with random facility on to every imaginable school. This artist or group of artists goes in for the real--the upright, noble, trumpery, filthy real; that other artist or group of artists...
Such spots there are--and many--in the winter of the Middle Ages; though it is not in them, but where the rain beats, and the snow and the wind tugs, that grow, struggling with...
8. Part 8The heroes of Boiardo and of Ariosto are always bold and gallant and glittering, the spirit of romance is in them; a giant Sancho Panza like Morgante, redolent of sausage and ch...
15. Part 15As the love of him who has read and felt the "Vita Nuova" cannot but strive towards a purer nature, so also the love of which poets sang became also nobler as the influence of t...
5. Part 5As it is with peoples, so also is it with ideas; scarcely has a scheme of life or of philosophy or of art taken shape and consistence before, from out of the inexhaustible chaos...
9. Part 9No more doth florish after first decay, That earst was sought to deck both bed and bowre Of many a lady, and many a Paramowre. Gather therefore the Rose whilest yet is prime, Fo...
13. Part 13Such were the manners and morals of the Italian commonwealths when, about the middle of the thirteenth century, the men of Tuscany, now free and prosperous, suddenly awoke to th...
10. Part 10Such is the moment when we first hear the almost universal song of mediæval love. This song comes from the triumphantly reorganized portion of society, not from the part which i...
3. Part 3Thus does the sculptor of the Renaissance get beauty, visible beauty, not psychologic interest, out of a plain human being; but the beauty (and this is the distinguishing point...
7. Part 7But, as if in compensation of the usurpation of which they had been the victims, the Carolingian tales, pushed out of the way by the Arthurian cycle, were not destined to perish...
14. Part 14Together with the knowledge of public life and of scholastic theories, together with the love of occult and cabalistic science, and the craft of Provençal poetry, Dante received...
4. Part 4The idealistic painter, accustomed to rely upon the intrinsic beauty which he has hitherto been able to select or create; accustomed also to think of form as something quite ind...
12. Part 12For, consciously or unconsciously, Gottfried had conceived this story as a thing wholly unknown in his time, and no longer subject to any of those necessities of constant rearra...
6. Part 6There was, throughout feudal society, a sort of enervated languor, a morbid longing for something new, now that the old had ceased to be possible or had proved futile; after the...
1. Part 1Real and Ideal--these are the handy terms, admiring or disapproving, which criticism claps with random facility on to every imaginable school. This artist or group of artists go...
2. Part 2The vicissitudes of Renaissance sculpture are strange: its life, its power, depend upon death; it is an art developed in the burying vault and cloister cemetery. During the Midd...
16. Part 16I have spoken of the lesson which may be derived from studies even as humble as these studies of mine; since, in my opinion, we cannot treat history as a mere art--though histor...