le to pose models, in other words, to
appeal to living men and women, for the foreshortenings of falling or
soaring shapes in that huge drift of human beings. This is true; and
the strongest testimony to the colossal powers of observation
possessed by Michelangelo is that none of all those attitudes are
wrong. We may verify them, if we take particular pains to do so, by
training the sense of seeing to play the part of a detective camera.
Michelangelo was gifted with a unique faculty for seizing momentary
movements, fixing them upon his memory, and transferring them to
fresco by means of his supreme acquaintance with the bony structure
and the muscular capacities of the human frame. Regarded from this
point of view, the Last Judgment was an unparalleled success. As such
the contemporaries of Buonarroti hailed it. Still, the breath of life
has exaled from all those bodies, and the tyranny of the schematic
ideal of form is felt in each of them. Without meaning to be
irreverent, we might fancy that two elastic lay-figures, one male, the
other female, both singularly similar in shape, supplied the materials
for the total composition. Of the dramatic intentions and suggestions
underlying these plastic and elastic shapes I am not now speaking. It
is my present business to establish the phases through which my
master's sense of form passed from its cradle to its grave.

In the frescoes of the Cappella Paolina, so ruined at this day that we
can hardly value them, the mechanic manner of the fourth stage seems
to reach its climax. Ghosts of their former selves, they still reveal
the poverty of creative and spontaneous inspiration which presided
over their nativity.

Michelangelo's fourth manner might be compared with that of Milton in
"Paradise Regained" and "Samson Agonistes." Both of these great
artists in old age exaggerate the defects of their qualities.
Michelangelo's ideal of line and proportion in the human form becomes
stereotyped and strained, as do Milton's rhythms and his Latinisms.
The generous wine of the Bacchus and of "Comus," so intoxicating in
its newness, the same wine in the Sistine and "Paradise Lost," so
overwhelming in its mature strength, has acquired an austere aridity.
Yet, strange to say, amid these autumn stubbles of declining genius we
light upon oases more sweet, more tenderly suggestive, than aught the
prime produced. It is not my business to speak of Milton here. I need
not recall his "Knights of L