during painting times, in the happy Venetian
country. These we all know of; but by the grace of Nature, which creates
men occasionally so fortunately balanced that their work, learned or
unlearned, must needs be fortunately balanced also, they arise sometimes
in the midst of mere artistic worry and vexation of spirit, or of artist
bleakness, perfect like the almond and peach trees, which blossom, white
and pink, on the frost-bitten green among the sapless vines of wintry
Tuscan hills; and to some natures, doubtless, these are more pleasant
and health-giving than more mature or mellow summer or autumnal
loveliness. But, as I have said, each must find his own closest
affinities in art and history as in friendship.

III

There are some more things, and more important, still to be said, from
the reader's standpoint rather than the writer's, about the influence on
our lives of the Past and of its art, and more particularly of the vague
period called the Renaissance.

When the Renaissance began to attract attention, some twenty or
twenty-five years ago, there happened among English historians and
writers on art, and among their readers, something very similar to what
had happened, apparently, when the Englishmen of the sixteenth century
first came in contact with the Italian Renaissance itself, or whatever
remained of it. Their conscience was sickened, their imagination
hag-ridden, by the discovery of so much beauty united to so much
corruption; and, among our latter-day students of the Renaissance, there
became manifest the same morbid pre-occupation, the same exaggerated
repulsion, which is but inverted attraction, which were rife among
the playwrights who wrote of _Avengers_ and _Atheists_, Giovannis and
Annabellas, Brachianos and Corombonas, and other _White Devils_, as old
Webster picturesquely put it, _of Italy_. Indeed, the second discovery
of the Renaissance by Englishmen had spiritual consequences so similar
to those of the first, that in an essay written fifteen years ago I
analysed the feelings of the Elizabethan playwrights towards Italian
things in order to vent the intense discomfort of spirit which I shared
assuredly with students older and more competent than myself.

This kind of feeling has passed away among writers, together with much
of the fascination of the Renaissance itself. But it has left, I see,
vague traces in the mind of readers, rendering the Renaissance a little
distasteful (and no wonder)