contemporaries themselves recognized in it Christ among the Pharisees. Yet we should see in it still another thing: the passion of the Virgin, the martyrdom of purity.

There have been many martyrs; history cites innumerable ones, more or less pure, more or less glorious. Pride has had its own, and hatred, and the spirit of dispute. No century has lacked fighting martyrs, who no doubt died with good grace when they could not kill. These fanatics have nothing to see here. The holy maid is not of them; she had a different sign,-goodness, charity, sweetness of soul. She had the gentleness of the ancient martyrs, but with a difference. The early Christians only remained sweet and pure by fleeing from action, by sparing themselves the struggle and trial of the world. This one remained. sweet in the bitterest struggle of good amid the bad; peaceful even in war,—that triumph of the Devil,—she carried into it the spirit of God. She took arms when she knew "the pity there was in the kingdom of France." She could not see French blood flow. This tenderness of heart she had for all men; she wept after victories, and nursed the wounded English. Purity, sweetness, heroic goodness-that these supreme beauties of soul should be met in a girl of France may astonish strangers, who only like to judge our nation by the lightness of its manners. Let us say

to them (and without self-partiality, since to-day all this is so far from us) that beneath this lightness of manner, amid her follies and her vices, old France was none the less the people of love and of grace.

The savior of France was to be a woman. France was a woman herself. She had the nobility of one; but also the amiable sweetness, the facile and charming pity, the excellence at least of impulse. Even when she delighted in vain elegances and exterior refinements, she still remained at the bottom nearer to nature. The Frenchman, even when vicious, kept more than any one else his good sense and good heart. May new France not forget the word of old France: "Only great hearts know how much glory there is in being good." To be and remain such, amid the injustices of men and the severities of Providence, is not only the gift of a fortunate nature, but it is strength and heroism. To keep sweetness and benevolence amid so many bitter disputes, to traverse experience without permitting it to touch this interior treasure,- this is divine. Those who persist and go thus to the end are the true elect. And even if they

eaters of the Old Testament. His one glory and his crown nothing like it before, nothing afterwards is his having put into art that eminently novel thing, the thirst for and aspiration. towards the good. Ah, how well he deserves to be called the defender of Italy! Not for having fortified the walls of Florence in his last days; but for having, in the infinite number of days that followed and will follow, showed in the Italian soul, martyred like a soul without right, the triumphant idea of a right that the world did not yet see.

To recall his origin is to tell why he alone could do these things. Born in the city of judges, Arezzo, to which all others came to get podestàs, he had a judge for a father. He descended from the counts of Canossa, relatives of the Emperor who founded at Bologna, against the popes, the school of Roman law. We must not be astonished that his family at his birth gave him the name of the angel of justice, Michael, just as the father of Raphael gave him the name of the angel of grace. It was a choleric race. Arezzo, an old Etruscan city, petty fallen republic, was despised by the great banking city; Dante gave it a knock in passing. One of the most ordinary subjects of Italian farces was the podestà, representing the powerlessness of the law in stranger cities that called him, paid him, and drove him out. Again everybody in Italy made mockery of his justice. There was needed a heroic effort, like that of Brancaleone's, to make the sword of justice respected. It needed a lion-hearted man, stranger and isolated as he was, to execute his own judgments disputed by all. Michel Angelo would have been one of these warrior judges of the thirteenth century. By heart and stature he belonged to the great Ghibellines of that time; to the one whom Dante honored on his couch of fire; to the other with the tragic face: "Lombard soul, why the slow moving of thine eyes? one would say a lion in his repose." Not wearing the sword, under the reign of men of money, in its place he took the chisel. He was the Brancaleone, the judge and podestà, of Italian art. He exercised in marble and stone the high censure of his time. For nearly a century his life was a combat, a continual contradiction. Noble and poor, he was reared in the house of the Medici, where we have seen him sculpturing statues of snow. Republican, all his life he served princes and popes. Envy disfigures him, a rival has deformed him forever. Made to love and be loved, always he will remain alone.

What was of great assistance to Michel Angelo was the fact that the Sixtine Chapel, the work of Sixtus IV., uncle of Julius. IV., was only a second thought of the latter, who attached the glory of his pontificate to the construction of St. Peter's. He obtained the favor of alone having the key of the chapel, and of not having any visitors. The visits of the Pope, which he dared not refuse, he rendered difficult by leaving no access to his scaffolding save by a steep step-ladder, upon which the old Pope had to risk himself. This obscure and solitary vault, in which he passed five years, was for him the cave of Mount Carmel; and he lived in it like Elias. He had a bed suspended from the arch, upon which he painted with his head stretched back. No company but the prophets and the sermons of Savonarola. It was thus, in the absolute solitude of the years 1507, 1508, 1509, 1510,

it was during the war of the League of Cambray, when the Pope gave a last blow to Italy in killing Venice,—that the great Italian made his prophets and his sibyls, realized that work of sorrow, of sublime liberty, of obscure presentments, of interpenetrating lights.

He put four years into it. And I-I have put thirty years into interrogating it. Not a year at longest has passed without my taking up again this Bible, this Testament, which is never old nor new, but of an age still unknown. Born out of the Jewish Bible, it passes and goes far beyond it. One must take care not to go into the chapel, as is done during the solemnities of Holy Week and with the crowd. One must go there alone, slip in as the Pope sometimes did (only Michel Angelo would frighten him by throwing down a plank); one must confront it, tête-à-tête, alone. Reassure yourself: that painting, extinguished and obscured by the smoke of incense and of candles, has no longer its old trait of inspiring terror; it has lost something of its frightening power, gained in harmony and sweetness; it partakes of the long patience and equanimity of time. It appears blackened from the depths of ages; but all the more victorious, not surpassed, not contradicted. Dante did not see these things. in his last circle. But Michel Angelo saw them, foresaw them, dared to paint them in the Vatican, writing the three words of Belshazzar's feast upon the walls, soiled by the Borgias, the murderers of Robera. Happily he was not understood. They would have had it all effaced. We know how for years he defended the door of the Sixtine Chapel, and how Julius II. told him: “If

you are slow, I will throw you down from the top of your scaffold." On the perilous day when the door was at last opened, and when the Pope entered in processional pomp, Michel Angelo could see that his work remained a dead letter; that in looking at it they saw nothing. Stunned by the enormous enigma, malicious but not daring to malign those giants whose eyes shot thunderbolts, they all kept silence. The Pope, to put a good countenance upon it, and not let himself be subdued by the terrifying vision, grumbled out these words: "There is no gold in it. at all." Michel Angelo, reassured now and certain of not being understood, replied to this futile censure, his bitter tragic mouth laughing: "Holy Father, the people up there, they were not rich, but holy personages, who did not wear gold, and made little of the goods of this world."

Translated for A Library of the World's Best Literature,' by Grace King.

SUMMARY OF THE INTRODUCTION TO THE RENAISSANCE ›

WHY

HY did the Renaissance arrive three hundred years too late? Why did the Middle Age live three hundred years after its death? Its terrorism, its police, its stakes and fagots, Iwould not have sufficed. The human mind would have shattered everything. Salvation came from the School, from the creation of a great people of reasoners against Reason. The void became fecund, created. Out of the proscribed philosophy was born the infinite legion of wranglers: the serious, violent disputation of emptiness, nothingness. Out of the smothered religion was born the sanctimonious world of reasoning mystics; the art of raving sagely. Out of the proscription of nature and the sciences was brought forth a throng of impostors and dupes, who read the stars and made gold. Immense army of the sons of Eolus, born of wind and puffed out with words. They blew. At their breath, a babel of lies and humbugs, a solid fog, thickened by magic in which reason would not take hold, arose in the air. Humanity sat at the foot, mournful, silent, renouncing truth. If at least, in default of truth, one could attain justice? The king opposes it against the pope. Great tumult, great combat by our gods! And all for nothing. The two incarnations come to an agreement, and all liberty is despaired of. People fall lower than before. The communes have perished; the burgher class is born,