huddled,
strangled lanes, into the ravine below; sit with the grey, berry-laden
olives, and twisted sere-leaved fig-trees with their little brown
bursting fruit, pushing their branches up from the orchard on the steep
below, where the women dawdle under the low evening sun, sickle in hand,
mowing up the long juicy grass, tearing out wreath after wreath, of vine
and clematis, spray after spray of feathery bluish fennel, till their
wheel-shaped crammed baskets look as if destined for some sylvan god's
altar, rather than to be emptied out into the sweltering darkness before
the cows mewed up in the thatched hut yonder by the straw-stack and the
lavender and rose-hedged tank.

The question which, we scarcely know how, has thus been started within
us, and which, (like all similar questions) develops itself almost
automatically in our mind, without much volition and merely a vague
feeling of discomfort, until it have finally taken shape and left our
consciousness for the limbo of decided points, this question is simply:
What are the relations between the character of the work of art and the
character of the artist who creates it? To what extent may we infer from
the peculiar nature of the one the peculiar nature of the other? Such,
if we formulate it, is the question, and the answer thereunto seems
obvious: that as the peculiarity of the fruit depends, _caeteris
paribus_, upon the peculiarity of the tree (itself due in part to soil
and temperature and similar external circumstances), so also must the
peculiarity of the spiritual product be due to the peculiarities of the
spiritual whole of which it is born. And thus, in inverted order of
ideas, the definite character of the fruit proves the character of
the tree, the result argues the origin: there must exist a necessary
relation between the product and that which has produced. If then we
find a definite quality in the works of an artist, we have a right to
suppose that corresponding qualities existed in the artist himself: if
the picture, or symphony, or poem be noble, and noble moreover with a
special sort of nobility, then noble also, and noble with that special
sort of nobility must be the artistic organism, the artist, by whom
it was painted, or composed or written. And this once granted (which
we cannot help granting), we must inevitably conclude that the man
Perugino, who painted those wonderful intense types of complete
renunciation of the world, could not in reality