Would that all men were as
ready as yourself to dispark their little selfish enclosures, and
burn out all their hedges of prickly briers and brambles--turning the
evil into the good--the seed-catching into the seed-nourishing. Of
the too consumptions let us prefer the active, benevolent, and
purifying one of fire, to the passive, self-eating, and corrupting
one of rust: one half minute's clear shining may touch some watching
and waiting soul, and through him kindle whole ages of light.
_Christian._ Men do not stumble over what they know; and the day
fades so imperceptibly into night that were it not for experience,
darkness would surprise us long before we believed the day done: and,
in relation to art, its revolutions are still more imperceptible in
their gradations; and, in fulfilling themselves, they spread over
such an extent of time, that in their knowledge the experience of one
artist is next to nothing; and its twilight is so lengthy, that those
who never saw other, believe its gloom to be day; nor are their
successors more aware that the deepening darkness is the contrary,
until night drops big like a great clap of thunder, and awakes them
staringly to a pitiable sense of their condition. But, if we cannot
have this experience through ourselves, we can through others; and
that will show us that Pagan art has once--nay twice--already brought
over Christian art a "darkness which might be felt;" from a little
handful cloud out of the studio of Squarcione, it gathered density
and volume through his scholar Mantegna--made itself a nucleus in the
Academy of the Medici, and thence it issued in such a flood of
"heathenesse" that Italy finally became covered with one vast deep
and thick night of Pagandom.
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