truments; we can see, or think we see, most plainly the streets and
paths, the faces and movements of that Renaissance world; but when we
try to penetrate into it, we shall find that there is but a slip of
solid ground beneath us, that all around us is but canvas and painted
wall, perspectived and lit up by our fancy; and that when we try to
approach to touch one of those seemingly so real men and women, our eyes
find only daubs of paint, our hands meet only flat and chilly stucco.
Turn we to our books, and seek therein the spell whereby to make this
simulacrum real; and I think the plaster will still remain plaster, the
stones still remain stone. Out of the Renaissance, out of the Middle
Ages, we must never hope to evoke any spectres which can talk with us
and we with them; nothing of the kind of those dim but familiar ghosts,
often grotesque rather than heroic, who come to us from out of the
books, the daubed portraits of times nearer our own, and sit opposite
us, making us laugh, and also cry, with humdrum stories and humdrum woes
so very like our own. No; such ghosts the Renaissance has not left
behind it. From out of it there come to us no familiars. They are all
faces--those which meet us in the pages of chronicles and in the frames
of pictures: they are painted records of the past--we may understand
them by scanning well their features, but they cannot understand, they
cannot perceive us. Such, when all is said, are my impressions of the
Renaissance. The moral atmosphere of those days is as impossible for us
to breathe as would be the physical atmosphere of the moon: could we,
for a moment, penetrate into it, we should die of asphyxia. Say what we
may against both Protestant reformation and Catholic reaction, these two
began to make an atmosphere (pure or foul) different from that of the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance, an atmosphere in which lived creatures
like ourselves, into which ourselves might penetrate.

A crotchet this, perhaps, of my own; but it is my feeling, nevertheless.
The Renaissance is, I say again, no period out of which we must try and
evoke ghostly companions. Let us not waste our strength in seeking to do
so; but be satisfied if it teaches us strange truths, scientific and
practical; if its brilliant and solemn personalities, its bright and
majestic art can give us pleasure; if its evils and wrongs, its
inevitable degradation, can move us to pity and to indignation.

Siena, _September_, 1882.