accio and Chaucer, in Cavalca and Petrarch, the equivalent of
the well-understood movement, the well-indicated situation of the
simple, realistic or poetic, sketches of Filippino and Botticelli.

This, you will say, is a mere impression; it is no explanation, still
less such an explanation as may afford a lesson. Not so. This strange
inconclusiveness in all mediaeval things, till the moment comes when they
cease to be mediaeval; this richness in germs and poverty in mature
fruit, cannot be without its reason. And this reason, to my mind, lies
in one word, the most terrible word of any, since it means suffering and
hopelessness; a word which has haunted my mind ever since I have looked
into mediaeval things: the word Wastefulness. Wastefulness; the frightful
characteristic of times at once so rich and so poor, the explanation of
the long starvation and sickness that mankind, that all mankind's
concerns--art, poetry, science, life--endured while the very things
which would have fed and revived and nurtured, existed close at hand,
and in profusion. Wastefulness, in this great period of confusion, of
the most precious things that we possess: time, thought, and feeling
refused to the realities of the world, and lavished on the figments of
the imagination. Why this vagueness, this imperfection in all mediaeval
representations of life? Because even as men's eyes were withdrawn, by
the temporal institutions of those days, from the sight of the fields
and meadows which were left to the blind and dumb thing called serf; so
also the thoughts of mankind, its sympathy and intentions, were
withdrawn from the mere earthly souls, the mere earthly wrongs and woes
of men by the great self-organized institution of mediaeval religion.
Pity of the body of Christ held in bondage by the Infidel; love of God;
study of the unknowable things of Heaven: such are the noblest
employments of the mediaeval soul; how much of pity, of love, may remain
for man; how much of study for the knowable? To Wastefulness like
this--to misapplication of mind ending almost in palsy--must we ascribe,
I think, the strange sterility of such mediaeval art as deals not merely
with pattern, but with the reality of man's body and soul. And we might
be thankful, if, during our wanderings among mediaeval things, we had
seen the starving of only art and artistic instincts; but the soul of
man has lain starving also; starving for the knowledge which was sought
only of Divine