to the majority; or worse, a little too
congenial to an unsound minority; worst of all, tarnishing a little the
fair fame of Art; and as a writer now turned reader, I am anxious to
deliver, to the best of my powers, other readers from this perhaps
inevitable but false and unprofitable view of such matters.

The conscience of writers on history and art has long become quite
comfortable about the Renaissance; and the Websterian or (in some cases
John Fordian) phenomenon of twenty years ago been forgotten as a piece
of childish morbidness. Does this mean that the conscience has become
hardened, that evil has ceased to repel us, or that beauty has been
accepted calmly as a pleasant and necessary, but somewhat immoral thing?
Very far from it. Our conscience has become quieter, not because it has
grown more callous, but because it has become more healthily sensitive,
more perceptive of many sides, instead of only one side of life. For
with experience and maturity there surely comes, to every one of us
in his own walk of life, a growing, at length an intuitive sense that
evil is a thing incidentally to fight, but not to think very much
about, because if it is evil, it is in so far sporadic, deciduous, and
eminently barren; while good, that is to say, soundness, harmony of
feeling, thought, and action with themselves, with others' feeling,
thought, and action, and with the great eternities, is organic, fruitful
and useful, as well as delightful to contemplate. Hence that the evil
of past ages should not concern us, save in so far as the understanding
thereof may teach us to diminish the evil of the Present. In any case,
that evil must be handled not with terror, which enervates and subjects
to contagion, but with the busy serenity of the physician, who studies
disease for the sake of health, and eats his wholesome food after
washing his hands, confident in the ultimate wholesomeness of nature.

And in such frame of mind the corruption of the Renaissance leaves us
calm, and we know we had better turn our backs on it, and get from the
Renaissance only what was good. Only, if we are physicians, or more
correctly (since in a private capacity we all are) only _when_ we are
physicians, must we handle the unwholesome. Meanwhile, if we wish to be
sound, let us fill our soul with images and emotions of good; we shall
tackle evil, when need be, only the better. And here, by the way, let
me open a parenthesis to say that, of the good we