And,
Christian, in preferring the art of the period previous to Raffaelle
to the art of his time, you set up the worse for the better, elevate
youth above manhood, and tell us that the half-formed and unripe
berry is wholesomer than the perfect and ripened fruit.
_Christian._ Kosmon, your thoughts seduce you; or rather, your nature
prefers the full and rich to the exact and simple: you do not go deep
enough--do not penetrate beneath the image's gilt overlay, and see
that it covers only worm-devoured wood. Your very comparison tells
against you. What you call ripeness, others, with as much truth, may
call over-ripeness, nay, even rottenness; when all the juices are
drunk with their lusciousness, sick with over-sweetness. And the art
which you call youthful and immature--may be, most likely is, mature
and wholesome in the same degree that it is tasteful, a perfect round
of beautiful, pure, and good. You call youth immature; but in what
does it come short of manhood. Has it not all that man can
have,--free, happy, noble, and spiritual thoughts? And are not those
thoughts newer, purer, and more unselfish in the youth than in the
man? What eye has the man, that the youth's is not as comprehensive,
keen, rapid, and penetrating? or what hand, that the youth's is not
as swift, forceful, cunning, and true? And what does the youth gain
in becoming man? Is it freshness, or deepness, or power, or wisdom?
nay rather--is it not languor--the languor of satiety--of
indifferentism? And thus soul-rusted and earth-charmed, what mate is
he for his former youth? Drunken with the world-lees, what can he do
but pourtray nature drunken as well, and consumed with the same fever
or stupor that consumes himself, making up with gilding and filigree
what he lacks in truth and sincerity? and what comparison shall exist
here and between what his youth might or could have done, with a soul
innocent and untroubled as heaven's deep calm of blue, gazing on
earth with seraph eyes--looking, but not longing--or, in the spirit
rapt away before the emerald-like rainbow-crowned throne, witnessing
"things that shall be hereafter," and drawing them down almost as
stainless as he beheld them? What an array of deep, earnest, and
noble thinkers, like angels armed with a brightness that withers,
stand between Giotto and Raffaelle; to mention only Orcagna,
Ghiberti, Masaccio, Lippi, Fra Beato Angelico, and Francia.
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