fection, sacrificing the superfluous or hindering elements
in its structure, regardless of side issues and collateral
considerations.

Michelangelo, then, as Carlyle might have put it, is the Hero as
Artist. When we have admitted this, all dregs and sediments of the
analytical alembic sink to the bottom, leaving a clear crystalline
elixir of the spirit. About the quality of his genius opinions may,
will, and ought to differ. It is so pronounced, so peculiar, so
repulsive to one man, so attractive to another, that, like his own
dread statue of Lorenzo de' Medici, "it fascinates and is
intolerable." There are few, I take it, who can feel at home with him
in all the length and breadth and dark depths of the regions that he
traversed. The world of thoughts and forms in which he lived
habitually is too arid, like an extinct planet, tenanted by mighty
elemental beings with little human left to them but visionary
Titan-shapes, too vast and void for common minds to dwell in
pleasurably. The sweetness that emerges from his strength, the beauty
which blooms rarely, strangely, in unhomely wise, upon the awful crowd
of his conceptions, are only to be apprehended by some innate sympathy
or by long incubation of the brooding intellect. It is probable,
therefore, that the deathless artist through long centuries of glory
will abide as solitary as the simple old man did in his poor house at
Rome. But no one, not the dullest, not the weakest, not the laziest
and lustfullest, not the most indifferent to ideas or the most
tolerant of platitudes and paradoxes, can pass him by without being
arrested, quickened, stung, purged, stirred to uneasy self-examination
by so strange a personality expressed in prophecies of art so pungent.

Each supreme artist whom God hath sent into the world with inspiration
and a particle of the imperishable fire, is a law to himself, an
universe, a revelation of the divine life under one of its innumerable
attributes. We cannot therefore classify Michelangelo with any of his
peers throughout the long procession of the ages. Of each and all of
them it must be said in Ariosto's words, "Nature made him, and then
broke the mould." Yet, if we seek Michelangelo's affinities, we find
them in Lucretius and Beethoven, not in Sophocles and Mozart. He
belongs to the genus of deep, violent, colossal, passionately striving
natures; not, like Raffaello, to the smooth, serene, broad,
exquisitely finished, calmly perfect tribe.