ome painter or writer for first directing his
attention to objects or effects which may have abounded around him, but
unnoticed or confused with others. The painters, as I have said, the men
who see more keenly and who study what they have seen, naturally come
first; nor does the poet usually describe what his contemporary painter
attempts not to paint. An exception might, perhaps, require to be made
for Dante, who would seem to have seen and described many things left
quite untouched by Giotto, and even by Raphael; but in estimating Dante
we must be careful to distinguish the few touches which really belong to
him, from the great mass of colour and detail which we have
unconsciously added thereto, borrowing from our own experience and from
innumerable pictures and poems which, at the moment, we may not in the
least remember; and having done so, we shall be led to believe that
those words which suggest to us so clear and coloured a vision of scenes
often complex and uncommon, presented to his own mind only a
comparatively simple and incomplete idea: the atmospheric effects,
requiring a more modern painter than Turner, which we read between the
lines of the "Inferno" and the "Purgatorio," most probably existed as
little for Dante as they did for Giotto; the poet seeing and describing
in reality only salient forms of earth and rock, monotonous in tint and
deficient in air, like those in the backgrounds of mediaeval Tuscan
frescoes and panels. Be this as it may, the fact grows daily on me that
men have not at all times seen in the same degree the nature which has
always equally surrounded them; and that during some periods they have,
for explicable reasons, seen less not only than their successors, but
also than their predecessors; and seen that little in a manner
conventional in proportion to its monotony. There are things about which
certain historic epochs are strangely silent; so much so, indeed, that
the breaking of the silence impresses us almost as the more than human
breaking of a spell; and that silence Is the result of a grievous wrong,
of a moral disease which half closes the eyes of the fancy, or of a
moral poison which presents to those sorely aching eyes only a glimmer
amid darkness. And it is as the most singular instance of such
conditions that I should wish to study, in themselves, their causes and
effects, the great differences existing between the ancients and
ourselves on the one hand, and the men of the