INTS 1

THE IMAGINATIVE ART OF THE RENAISSANCE 65

TUSCAN SCULPTURE 135

A SEEKER OF PAGAN PERFECTION, BEING THE LIFE
OF DOMENICO NERONI, PICTOR SACRILEGUS 163

VALEDICTORY 233

THE LOVE OF THE SAINTS

I

"Panis Angelicus fit panis hominum. O res mirabilis, manducat Dominum
Pauper, Servus et Humilis." These words of the Matins of the Most Holy
Sacrament I heard for the first time many years ago, to the beautiful
and inappropriate music of Cherubini. They struck me at that time as
foolish, barbarous, and almost gross; but since then I have learned to
think of them, and in a measure to feel of them, as of something greater
and more solemn than all the music that Cherubini ever wrote.

All the hymns of the same date are, indeed, things to think upon. They
affect one--the "Stabat Mater," for instance, and the "Ave Verum"--very
much in the same way as the figures which stare down, dingy green and
blue, from the gold of the Cosmati's mosaics: childish, dreary, all
stiff and agape, but so solemn and pathetic, and full of the greatest
future. For out of those Cosmati mosaics, and those barbarous frescoes
of the old basilicas, will come Giotto and all the Renaissance; and out
of those Church songs will come Dante; they are all signs, poor primitive
rhymes and primitive figures, that the world is teeming again, and will
bear, for centuries to come, new spiritual wonders. Hence the importance,
the venerableness of all those mediaeval hymns. But of none so much, to
my mind, as of those words I have quoted from the Matins of the Most
Holy Sacrament--

"O res mirabilis, manducat Dominum,
Pauper, Servus et Humilis."

For their crude and pathetic literality, their image of the Godhead
actually giving Himself, as they emphatically say, to be _chewed_ by the
poor and humble man and the serf, show them to have been most especially
born, abortions though they be, in the mightiest throes of mystical
feeling, after the incubation of whole nations, born of the great mediaeval
marriage, sublime, grotesque, morbid, yet health-bringing, between
abstract idealising religious thought and the earthly affections of
lovers and parents--a strange marriage, like that of St. Francis and
Poverty, of which the modern soul also had to be born anew.

Indeed, if we realise in the least what this hymn must have meant,
shou