l evil, persuading us to save our bodies alive at no matter what cost of
rapine and fraud. True art is the flame of the last day, which begins for
every man, when he is first moved by beauty, and which seeks to burn all
things until they 'become infinite and holy.'

III. THE ILLUSTRATIONS OF DANTE

The late Mr. John Addington Symonds wrote--in a preface to certain Dante
illustrations by Stradanus, a sixteenth-century artist of no great
excellence, published in phototype by Mr. Unwin in 1892--that the
illustrations of Gustave Dore, 'in spite of glaring artistic defects,
must, I think, be reckoned first among numerous attempts to translate
Dante's conceptions into terms of plastic art.' One can only account for
this praise of a noisy and demagogic art by supposing that a temperament,
strong enough to explore with unfailing alertness the countless schools
and influences of the Renaissance in Italy, is of necessity a little
lacking in delicacy of judgment and in the finer substances of emotion. It
is more difficult to account for so admirable a scholar not only
preferring these illustrations to the work of what he called 'the graceful
and affected Botticelli,'--although 'Dore was fitted for his task, not by
dramatic vigour, by feeling for beauty, or by anything sternly in sympathy
with the supreme poet's soul, but by a very effective sense of luminosity
and gloom,'--but preferring them because 'he created a fanciful world,
which makes the movement of Dante's _dramatis personae_ conceivable,
introducing the ordinary intelligence into those vast regions thronged
with destinies of souls and creeds and empires.' When the ordinary student
finds this intelligence in an illustrator, he thinks, because it is his
own intelligence, that it is an accurate interpretation of the text, while
work of the extraordinary intelligences is merely an expression of their
own ideas and feelings. Dore and Stradanus, he will tell you, have given
us something of the world of Dante, but Blake and Botticelli have builded
worlds of their own and called them Dante's--as if Dante's world were more
than a mass of symbols of colour and form and sound which put on humanity,
when they arouse some mind to an intense and romantic life that is not
theirs; as if it was not one's own sorrows and angers and regrets and
terrors and hopes that awaken to condemnation or repentance while Dante
treads his eternal pilgrimage; as if any poet or painter or musician
coul