y-nine, and is more
Mistress of Arts than any of us are Masters of them.

150. You have then, in the one case, a beautiful simplicity, and a
blameless ignorance; in the other, a beautiful artfulness, and a wisdom
which you do not dread,--or, at least, even though dreading, love. But
you know also that we may remain in a hateful and culpable ignorance;
and, as I fear too many of us in competitive effort feel, become
possessed of a hateful knowledge.

Ignorance, therefore, is not evil absolutely; but, innocent, may be
lovable.

Knowledge also is not good absolutely; but, guilty, may be hateful.

So, therefore, when I now repeat my former statement, that the first
main opposition between the Northern and Southern schools is in the
simplicity of the one, and the scholarship of the other, that statement
may imply sometimes the superiority of the North, and sometimes of the
South. You may have a heavenly simplicity opposed to a hellish (that is
to say, a lustful and arrogant) scholarship; or you may have a barbarous
and presumptuous ignorance opposed to a divine and disciplined wisdom.
Ignorance opposed to learning in both cases; but evil to good, as the
case may be.

151. For instance: the last time I was standing before Raphael's
arabesques in the Loggias of the Vatican, I wrote down in my pocket-book
the description, or, more modestly speaking, the inventory, of the small
portion of that infinite wilderness of sensual fantasy which happened to
be opposite me. It consisted of a woman's face, with serpents for hair,
and a virgin's breasts, with stumps for arms, ending in blue
butterflies' wings, the whole changing at the waist into a goat's body,
which ended below in an obelisk upside-down, to the apex at the bottom
of which were appended, by graceful chains, an altar, and two bunches of
grapes.

Now you know in a moment, by a glance at this 'design'--beautifully
struck with free hand, and richly gradated in color,--that the master
was familiar with a vast range of art and literature: that he knew all
about Egyptian sphinxes, and Greek Gorgons; about Egyptian obelisks, and
Hebrew altars; about Hermes, and Venus, and Bacchus, and satyrs, and
goats, and grapes.

You know also--or ought to know, in an instant,--that all this learning
has done him no good; that he had better have known nothing than any of
these things, since they were to be used by him only to such purpose;
and that his delight in armless breasts, legle