bout it other images of
some beauty which have long lain by in each individual mind, so also no
thought of great injustice of man or of accident, of signal whitewashing
of evil or befouling of good, but must, in striking into our soul, put
in motion there the salutary thought of some injustice or lying
legitimation or insidious pollution, smaller indeed perhaps, but perhaps
also nearer to ourselves.

Be not therefore too hard upon me if in what I have written of the
Renaissance, there is too little attempt to make matters scientifically
complete, and too much giving way to personal and perhaps sometimes
irrelevant impressions of pleasure and of pain; if I have followed up
those pleasurable and painful impressions rather more than sought to
discover the exact geography of the historical tract which gave them.
Consider, moreover, that this very cause of deficiency may have been
also the cause of my having succeeded in achieving anything at all.
Personal impression has led me, perhaps, sometimes away from the direct
road; but had it not beckoned me to follow, I should most likely have
simply not stirred. Pleasant impression and painful, as I have said; and
sometimes the painful has been more efficacious than the other. I do not
know whether the interest which I have always taken in the old squabble
of real and ideal has enabled me to make at all clearer the different
characteristics of painting and sculpture in Renaissance portraiture,
the relation of the art of Raphael to the art of Velasquez and the art
of Whistler. I can scarcely judge whether the pleasure which I owe to
the crowding together, the moving about in my fancy, of the heroes and
wizards and hippogriffs of the old tales of Oberon and Ogier; the
association with the knights and ladies of Boiardo and Ariosto, of this
or that figure out of a fresco of Pinturicchio, or a picture by Dosso,
has made it easier or more difficult for me to sum up the history of
mediaeval romance in Renaissance Italy; nor whether the recollection of
certain Tuscan farms, the well-known scent of the sun-dried fennel and
mint under the vine-trellis, the droning song of the contadino ploughing
or pruning unseen in the valley, the snatches of peasants' rhymes, the
outlines of peasants' faces--things all these of this our own time, of
yesterday or to-day; whether all this, running in my mind like so many
scribbly illustrations and annotations along the margin of Lorenzo dei
Medici's poems,