ct, intense reality. Yes, they are reality. They are no
far-fetched fancies of the artist. They are souls and soul-saturated,
soul-moulded bodies which he saw around him. For in that Umbria of the
dying fifteenth century--where the old cities, their old freedom and
industry and commerce well-nigh dwindled to nothing, had shrunk each
on its mountain-side into mere huge barracks of mercenary troopers or
strongholds of military bandit nobles, continually besieged and sacked
and heaped with massacre by rival families and rival factions; where
in the open country, the villagers, pent-up in fortified farms and
barns, were burnt, women and children, with the stored-up fodder, or
slaughtered and cast in heaps into the Tiber, and every year the tangled
brushwood of ilex and oak and briars encroached further upon the
devastated cornfields and oliveyards, and the wolves and foxes roamed
nearer and nearer to the cities--in this terrible barbarous Umbria of
the days of Caesar Borgia, the soul developed to strange unearthly
perfection. It developed by the force of antagonism and isolation.
This city of Perugia, which was governed by the most ferocious and
treacherous little mercenary captains; whose dark precipitous streets
were full of broil and bloodshed, and whose palaces full of evil,
forbidden lust and family conspiracy, was one of the most pious in all
Italy. Wondrous miraculous preachers, inspired and wild, were for ever
preaching in the midst of the iniquity; holy monks and nuns were for
ever seeing visions and curing the incurable; churches and hospitals
were being erected throughout town and country; novices crowded
the ever-increasing convents. Sensitive souls were sickened by the
surrounding wickedness, and terrified lest it should triumph over them;
resist it, bravely expose themselves to it, prevent or mitigate the evil
of others they dared not: a moral plague was thick in the air, and
those who would escape infection must needs fly, take refuge in strange
spiritual solitude, in isolated heights where the moral air was rarefied
and icy. Of the perfectly human, sociable devotion of the days of St.
Francis, of the active benevolence and righteousness, there was now no
question: the wolves had become too frightfully numerous and ravenous to
be preached to like that Brother Wolf of the _Flowerets of St. Francis_.
Active good there could now no longer be: the pure soul became inactive,
passive, powerless over the evil around,