eyes grown dilated and bright from
straining to see the glorious visions, the celestial day-dreams which
flit across their mind; with lips grown tremulous and eager with
passionate longing for constantly expected, never-coming bliss; always
alone, inactive, with listless limbs and workless hands, in the bare,
unadorned cell or oratory; or if, coming forth, walking through the
streets, passing through the crowd (giving way with awe), erect,
self-engrossed, seeing and hearing nothing around, like one entranced.
Let us imagine this organism, thus perfect for perceiving and
reproducing all that it sees, for ever in the presence of such lines and
colours, such faces and figures as these; and then let us ask ourselves
what this quite abstract, unhuman power will produce, what this artist,
who is completely divested of all that which belongs merely to the man,
would paint. What would that be, that work thus produced? What save
those delicate, wan angels and saints and apostles, standing in solitary
contemplation and ecstasy, those scarcely embodied souls, raised beyond
the bounds of time and space, concentrated, absorbed in longing for
heavenly perfection? And if this subtle visual organism, nurtured among
these sights, should happen to be lodged in the same body with a sordid,
base, cynical temper, can it be altered thereby? Surely not. The eye has
seen, the hand has reproduced--seen and reproduced that which surrounds
them--and inevitably, fatally, although eye and hand belonged to the
man "who placed all his hopes in the good things of fortune, into whose
porphyry brain no idea of good could enter, who for money would have
concluded any evil bargain," the work thus produced by this commonplace,
grasping atheist, Peter Perugino, must be the ideal of all purely
devotional art. He was an atheist and a cynic, but he was a great
painter, and lived in Umbria, in the country of sweet and austere hills
and valleys, in the country whose moral air was still scented by the
"flowerets of St. Francis."

This is the end of our long wandering up and down, round and round, the
question of artistic personality, even as we must wander up and down,
round and round, before we can reach any of these strange Umbrian towns.
And, as after long journeying, when we enter the city, and find that
that which seemed a castle, a grand, princely town, all walled and
towered and battlemented, is in reality only a large, rough village,
with blackened houses