TO SCIENCE AND MORALITY 105 



Posterity has already consigned to oblivion the rhetorical 

 compositions of the Humanists, the odes and sonnets of 

 Academical craftsmen. We note with curiosity and wonder 

 that, after Petrarch, few tolerable lyrics were composed by 

 Italians ; that the nation proved itself incapable of tragedy ; 

 that it could not, in spite of all its efforts, produce an 

 epic. It has been my duty to read thousands of Renaissance 

 compositions, in all kinds of verse ; but I would barter the 

 myriad polished lines of Bembo, Molza, Sannazzarro, and the 

 rest of that sort, for a few rough stanzas of Michel Angelo 

 and Campanella, Why is this ? Not because the former 

 are vicious and the latter virtuous ; it would indeed be 

 difficult to prove that indictment ; but because Michel 

 Angelo and Campanella were men of forcible character, 

 and wrote what is profitable to men in all ages : and of 

 such men there was a lamentable lack in Italy, owing to 

 her ethical deterioration. 



So far as it goes, then, the instance of the Italian Renais- 

 sance tends to establish the position that noble art is only 

 compatible with sound morality. But there is another point 

 of view from which the seeming paradox of that epoch has to 

 be regarded. Its eminent art was mainly plastic not literary, 

 but pictorial, sculpturesque, with multiform expansion into 

 minor channels of utility and service, as in house-building, 

 furniture, plate, armour, weapons, woodwork, decorative 

 embroideries, medals, glass, mosaic, enamel, pottery, and so 

 forth. This kind of art, unlike poetry, is only remotely 

 connected with ideas ; and the refinement it implies is not 

 inconsistent with barbarity, with profligacy, with political 

 decadence. Granting, then, that the Italians were cruel, 

 cunning, licentious, incapable of warfare, rotten in their public 

 and private morality ignoring, for the sake of argument, 

 their profound diplomatical ability, their formation of a new 

 intellectual ideal for Europe, their ecclesiastical predominance 

 in the councils of Catholic Christendom, their inauguration of 

 the modern scientific method riveting our eyes solely on the 

 fact that art flourished among them at a time when social 

 morality, religion, and patriotism had been weakened we 



