shame of Italy. Opposite lies
Night, so sorrowful, so utterly absorbed in darkness and the shade of
death, that to shake off that everlasting lethargy seems impossible. Yet
she is not dead. If we raise our voices, she too will stretch her limbs
and, like her sister, shudder into sensibility with sighs. Only we must
not wake her; for he who fashioned her, has told us that her sleep of
stone is great good fortune. Both of these women are large and brawny,
unlike the Fates of Pheidias in their muscular maturity. The burden of
Michael Angelo's thought was too tremendous to be borne by virginal or
graceful beings. He had to make women no less capable of suffering, no
less world-wearied, than his country.

Standing before these statues, we do not cry. How beautiful! We murmur,
How terrible, how grand! Yet, after long gazing, we find them gifted with
beauty beyond grace. In each of them there is a palpitating thought, torn
from the artist's soul and crystallised in marble. It has been said that
architecture is petrified music. In the sacristy of S. Lorenzo we feel
impelled to remember phrases of Beethoven. Each of these statues becomes
for us a passion, fit for musical expression, but turned like Niobe to
stone. They have the intellectual vagueness, the emotional certainty, that
belong to the motives of a symphony. In their allegories, left without a
key, sculpture has passed beyond her old domain of placid concrete form.
The anguish of intolerable emotion, the quickening of the consciousness to
a sense of suffering, the acceptance of the inevitable, the strife of the
soul with destiny, the burden and the passion of mankind:--that is what
they contain in their cold chisel-tortured marble. It is open to critics
of the school of Lessing to object that here is the suicide of sculpture.
It is easy to remark that those strained postures and writhen limbs may
have perverted the taste of lesser craftsmen. Yet if Michael Angelo was
called to carve Medicean statues after the sack of Rome and the fall of
Florence--if he was obliged in sober sadness to make sculpture a fit
language for his sorrow-laden heart--how could he have wrought more
truthfully than thus? To imitate him without sharing his emotions or
comprehending his thoughts, as the soulless artist of the decadence
attempted, was without any doubt a grievous error. Surely also we may
regret, not without reason, that in the evil days upon which he had
fallen, the fair antique "He