study of the poetical conception of early
Renaissance painting, of that strange kind of painting in which a thing
but imperfect in itself, a mere symbol of lovely ideas, brings home to
our mind, with a rush of associations, a sense of beauty and wonder
greater perhaps than any which we receive from the sober reality of
perfect form. Again, there are the German masters--the great engravers,
Kranach, Altdorfer, Aldegrever, especially; of whom, for their absolute
pleasure in ugly women, for their filthy delight in horrors, I have said
an immense amount of ill; and of whom, for their wonderful intuition of
dramatic situation, their instinct of the poetry of common things, and
their magnificently imaginative rendering of landscape, I hope some day
to say an equal amount of good.

I 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 history alone can gives us now-a-days
tragedy which has ceased to exist on our stage, and wonder which has
ceased to exist in our poetry--we cannot seek in it mere selfish
enjoyment of imagination and emotion, without doing our soul the great
injury of cheating it of some of those great indignations, some of
those great lessons which make it stronger and more supple in the
practical affairs of life. Each of these studies of mine brings its own
lesson, artistic or ethical, important or unimportant; its lesson of
seeking certainty in our moral opinions, beauty in all and whatever our
forms of art, spirituality in our love. But besides these I seem to
perceive another deduction, an historical fact with a practical
application; to see it as the result not merely perhaps of the studies
of which this book is the fruit, but of those further studies, of the
subtler sides of Mediaeval and Renaissance life and art which at present
occupy my mind and may some day add another series of essays to this: a
lesson still vague to myself, but which, satisfactorily or
unsatisfactorily, I shall nevertheless attempt to explain; if indeed it
requires to be brought home to the reader.

Of the few forms of feeling and imagination which I have treated--things
so different from one another as the feeling for nature and the
chivalric poem, as modern art, with its idealism and realism, and modern
love--of these forms, emotional and artistic, which Antiquity did not
know, or knew but little, the reader may h