and his moods were healthy, joyous, and serene.
He does not concern himself with the tragedy of life, with its pathos or
its disappointments. In his two renderings of "Christ bearing the
Cross"[138]--the only instances we have of his portrayal of the Man of
Sorrows--he appeals more to our sense of the dignity of humanity, and to
the nobility of the Christ, than to our tenderer sympathies. How
different from the pathetic Pietas of his master, Giambellini! This
shrinking from pain and sorrow, this dislike to the representation of
suffering is, however, as much due to the natural gaiety and elasticity
of youth as to the happy accident of his surroundings. We must never
forget that Giorgione's whole achievement was over at an age when some
men's life-work has hardly begun. The eighteen years of his activity
were what we sometimes call the years of promise, and he must not be
judged as we judge a Titian or a Michel Angelo. He is the wonderful
youth, full of joyous aspirations, gilding all he touches with the
radiance of his spirit. His pictures, suffused with a golden glow, are
the reflection of his sunny life; the vividness and intensity of his
passion are expressed in the gorgeousness of his colours.

I have elsewhere dwelt upon the precocity of Giorgione's talent, with
its accompanying qualities of versatility, inequality, and
productiveness, and I have pointed out the analogous phenomena in music
and poetry. Giorgione, Schubert, and Keats are alike in temperament and
quality of expression. They are curiously alike in the shortness of
their lives,[139] and the fever-heat of their production. But they are
strangely distinct in the manner of their lives. The disparity of
outward circumstances accounts for the healthy tone of Giorgione's art,
when contrasted with the morbid utterances of Keats. Schubert suffered
privations and poverty, and his song was wrung from him alike at moments
of inspiration and of necessity. But Giorgione is all aglow with natural
energy; he suffered no restraints, nor is his art forced or morbid.
Confine his spirit, check the play of his fancy, set him a task
prescribed by convention or hampered by conditions, and you get proof of
the fretfulness, the impatience of restraint which the artist felt. The
"Judgment of Solomon" and "The Adulteress before Christ," the only two
"set" pieces he ever attempted, eloquently show how he fell short when
struggling athwart his genius. For to register a fact was ut