issful certainty; he
knew no more than the dark aspect of things; the imperfection of even
the sublimest, of his art and his love.

Shakespeare's genius could breathe life into all things human, and he
found satisfaction in doing so. Michelangelo's creative, plastic power
seemed illimitable; he possessed all the gifts an artist could possibly
have, but from year to year his conviction of the futility of all
earthly things grew to a profounder certainty. He had knocked at the
iron gate of humanity with his hammer and his chisel; they had broken
into fragments and sorrow made him dumb. There is a stage in the life of
every genius when he comes to this gate, when he has to show his
credentials and reveal the inmost kernel of his being. Dante attempted
to grasp the transcendental in one gigantic vision, Goethe timidly
shrank back from it.

In examining the prophets and youths in the Sistine Chapel, or the
chained men in the Louvre, who seem unable to bear existence, and are
therefore "slaves" of the earth; or in contemplating the half-finished
slaves in the Boboli Gardens, who seem almost to burst the stone in
their wild longing for a higher life; or in reading his last sonnets, we
can conceive a vague idea of the deep melancholy darkening the life of
this man, a gloom which was not the melancholy of the individual, but of
all humanity, unable and unwilling to deceive itself further. Can there
be a greater tragedy than the tragedy of this incomparable artist,
looking back at the work of his lifetime with despair?

For art and wit and passion fade and vanish,
Countless achievements, ever new and great,
Are naught but dross within the sight of heaven.

To Vasari he sent a sonnet denouncing the artistic passion which
abandons itself completely to art:

Now know I well that that fond phantasy
Which made my soul the worshipper and thrall
Of earthly art is vain.

(_Transl. by_ J.A. SYMONDS.)

Faith, is to him "the mercy of mercies," for he has never possessed its
deepest conviction.

But the passion which burned in him remained unquelled to the last: his
soul is torn between love and the thought of death.

Flames of love
And chill of death are battling in my heart.

He longed to break away from love and find peace, and he called on death
for delivery, but in vain:

Burdened with years and full of sinfulness
With evil customs grown invetera