arly as we see the manner and reason of the movements of the fighting
Centaurs and Lapithae, or the Amazons; nay, even the minute mood of
comparatively unimportant figures, as Helen, Brisei's, and Nausicaa, is
indicated in its moral anatomy and attitude as distinctly as is the
manner in which the maidens of the Parthenon frieze slowly restrain
their steps, the boys curb their steeds, or the old men balance their
oil jars. Nothing of this in mediaeval literature, except perhaps in
"Flamenca" and "Tristan," where the motive of action, mere imaginative
desire, is all-permeating and explains everything. These people clearly
had no interest, no perception, connected with character: a valorous
woman, a chivalrous knight, an insolent steward, a jealous husband, a
faithful retainer; things recognized only in outline, made to speak and
act only according to a fixed tradition, without knowledge of the
internal mechanism of motive; these sufficed. Hence it is that mediaeval
poetry is always like mediaeval painting (for painting continued to be
mediaeval with Giotto's pupils long after poetry had ceased to be
mediaeval with Dante and his school), where the Virgin sits and holds the
child without body wherewith to sit or arms wherewith to hold; where
angels flutter forward and kneel in conventional greeting, with
obviously no bended knees beneath their robes, nay, with knees, waist,
armpits, all anywhere; where men ride upon horses without flat to their
back; where processions of the blessed come forth, guided by fiddling
seraphs, vague, faint faces, sweet or grand, heads which might wave like
pieces of cut-out paper upon their necks, arms and legs here and there,
not clearly belonging to any one; creatures marching, soaring, flying,
singing, fiddling, without a bone or a muscle wherewith to do it all.
And meanwhile, in this mediaeval poetry, as in this mediaeval painting,
there are yards and yards of elaborate preciousness: all the embossed
velvets, all the white-and-gold-shot brocades, all the silks and satins,
and jewel-embroidered stuffs of the universe cast stiffly about these
phantom men and women, these phantom horses and horsemen. It is not
until we turn to Italy, and to the Northern man, Chaucer, entirely under
Italian influence, that we obtain an approach to the antique clearness
of perception and comprehension; that we obtain not only in Dante
something akin to the muscularities of Signorelli and Michael Angelo;
but in Bocc