patches: at one point we can read, at
another the ink has not taken; we know as distinctly as the sensation
and impressions of this very morning this or that sensation or
impression of so many, many years ago; and we ask ourselves at the same
time--"how did such another thing affect our mind?"--with the utter
hopelessness of answer with which we should try to look into the soul
of a dog or a cat. Thus it is with our small barbarian child in the
Vatican: how did it feel? Alas, we should, in order to know, first
have to find that little obscure, puzzled soul again; and where is
it gone? this thing which may once have been ourselves, whither has it
disappeared, when has it been extinguished? So we can only speculate and
reconstruct on a general basis. Certain it is that to this child, to
any child, this Vatican must have been the most desolate, the most
unintelligible of places. For, strange as it may seem, this clear and
simple art of sculpture, born when the world was young and had not yet
learned to think and talk in symbolical riddles, this apparently so
outspoken art is, to the childish soul of our days, the most silent art
of any. To the child, the modern child, it is speechless; it knows not
a word of the language understood by the child's fancy. For this fancy
language of our modern child is the language of colour, of movement, of
sound, of suggestion, of all the broken words of modern thought and
feeling: and the statue has none of these. The child does not recognise
in it anything familiar: these naked, or half-naked, limbs are things
which the child has never seen, at least, never observed; they do not,
in their unfamiliarity, their vagueness, constitute an individual
character; the dress, the furrowed face, the coloured hair, the beard,
these are the things which the child knows, and by which it recognises;
but in these vague, white things, with their rounded white cheek, and
clotted white hair, with their fold of white drapery about them, the
child recognises nothing: men? women? it does not ask: for it, they are
mere things, figures cut out of stone. And thus, in their vagueness,
their unfamiliarity, they seem also to be all alike, even as, on first
acquaintance, we sometimes ask ourselves whether those sisters or
brothers we know are four or only three; for in the unknown there is no
diversity. Mysterious things, therefore, these statues for the child;
but theirs is a mystery of mere vacuity, one which does no