moderns may get from
occasional journeys into the Past, there is a fine example in our
imaginary and emotional commerce with St. Francis and his joyous
theology. For while other times, our own among them, have given us
loftier morality and severer good sense, no period save that of St.
Francis could have given us a blitheness of soul so vivifying and so
cleansing. For the essence of his teaching, or rather the essence of
his personality, was the trust that serenity and joyfulness must be
incompatible with evil; that simple, spontaneous happiness is, even like
the air and the sunshine in which his beloved brethren the birds flew
about and sang, the most infallible antidote to evil, and the most
sovereign disinfectant. And because we require such doctrine, such
personal conviction, for the better living of our lives, we must, even
as to better climates, journey forth occasionally into that distant Past
of mediaeval Italy; and as to the Ezzelinos, Borgias, and Riarios, and
the foul-mouthed humanists, good heavens! why should we sicken ourselves
with the thought of this long dead and done for abomination?

So much for the history of the Renaissance and the good it can be to
us. Now as to the art. That more organic mode of feeling and thinking
which results in active maturity, from the ever-increasing connections
between our individual soul and the surrounding world; that same
intuition which told us that historic evil was no subject for
contemplation, does also admonish us never to be suspicious of true
beauty, of thoroughly delightful art. Nay, beauty and art in any case;
for though beauty may be adulterated, and art enslaved to something not
itself, be sure that the element of beauty, the activity of art, so far
as they are themselves specific, are far above suspicion even in the
most suspicious company. For even if beauty is united to perverse
fashions, and art (as with Baudelaire and the decadents) employed to
adorn the sentiments of maniacs and gaol-birds, the beauty and the art
remain sound; and if we must needs put them behind us, on account of too
inextricable a fusion, we should remember it is as we sometimes throw
away noble ore, for lack of skill to separate it from a base alloy. As
regards the nightmare anomaly of perfect art arisen in times of moral
corruption, those unconscious analogies I have spoken of, and which
perhaps are our most cogent reasons, have taught us that such anomalies
are but nightmares and h