thus to
bring the inferior on to the level of the superior? Nay, is it not
rather wrong to teach us to endure so much meanness and ugliness in
creatures, on account of the nobility with which they are represented?
Is this not vitiating our feelings, blunting our desire for the better,
our repugnance for the worse?

A great and charitable art, this realistic art of the seventeenth
century, and to be respected for its very tenderness towards the scorned
and castaway things of reality; but accustoming us, perhaps too much,
like all charitable and reclaiming impulses, to certain unworthy
contacts: in strange contrast herein with that narrow but ascetic and
aristocratic art of idealism, which, isolated and impoverished though it
may be, has always the dignity of its immaculate purity, of its
unswerving judgment, of its obstinate determination to deal only with
the best. A hard task to judge between them. But be this as it may, it
is one of the singular richnesses of the Italian Renaissance that it
knew of both tendencies; that while in painting it gave the equivalent
of that rigid idealism of the Greeks which can make no compromise with
ugliness; in sculpture it possessed the equivalent of the realism of
Velasquez, which can make beauty out of ugly things, even as the chemist
can make sugar out of vitriol.

* * * * *

THE SCHOOL OF BOIARDO.

"Le donne, i cavalieri, l' armi, gli amori."

I.

Throughout the tales of Charlemagne and his warriors, overtopping by far
the crowd of paladins and knights, move two colossal mailed and vizored
figures--Roland, whom the Italians call Orlando and the Spaniards
Roldan, the son of Milon d'Angers and of Charlemagne's sister; and
Renaud or Rinaldo, the lord of Montauban, and eldest of the famous four
sons of Aymon. These are the two representative heroes, equal but
opposed, the Achilles and Odysseus, the Siegfried and Dietrich, of the
Carolingian epic; and in each is personified, by the unconscious genius
of the early Middle Ages, one of the great political movements, of the
heroic struggles, of feudalism. For there existed in feudalism two
forces, a centripetal and a centrifugal--a force which made for the
supremacy of the kingly overlordship, and a force which made for the
independence of the great vassals. Hence, in the poetry which is the
poetry of feudalism, two distinct currents of feeling, two distinct
epics---the epic of the devoted loy