the evil kind of cynicism, and becomes purely
contemptuous and derisive. But there is a fruitful kind of cynicism,
which faithfully contrasts the aspirations and possibilities of
humanity with its actual performances and its failures, which makes the
poet and the philosopher humble in the presence of infinite beauty and
infinite knowledge.

It is the quality, the spirit, of a performance that matters. If a
performance is the best of which a man is capable, and better than what
he has hitherto done, he has achieved all that is possible. If he
begins to reflect that it is better than what others have done, then
his satisfaction is purely poisonous. But to estimate human
possibilities high and human performances low, and to class one's own
performances with the latter rather than the former, this is temperate
and manly and strong.

XX

There is a picture of Rossetti's, very badly painted, I think, from the
technical point of view, of Lucrezia Borgia. There are apologists who
say that the wickedness of the Borgia family is grossly exaggerated,
and that they were in reality very harmless and respectable people. But
Rossetti thought of them, in painting this picture, as people stained
with infamous and unspeakable crime, and he has contrived to invest the
scene with a horror of darkness. Lucrezia sits in what is meant to be
an attitude of stately beauty, and the figure contrives somehow to
symbolise that; though she appears to be both stout and even blowsy in
appearance. Her evil father, the Pope Alexander, sits leering beside
her, while her brother Caesar leans over her and blows rose-leaves from
her hair. There certainly hangs a hideous suggestiveness of evil over
the group. In the foreground, a page of ten or twelve is dancing,
together with a little girl of perhaps nine or ten. The page is slim
and delicate, and watches his small companion with a tender and
brotherly sort of air; both children are entirely absorbed in their
performance, which they seem to have been bidden to enact for the
pleasure of the three watchers. The children look innocent enough,
though they too are rather dimly and clumsily painted; but one feels
that they are somehow in the net, that they are growing up in a
pestilential and corrupting atmosphere, and that the flowers of evil
will soon burst into premature bloom in their tender souls. The whole
scene is overhung with a close and enervating gloom; one apprehends
somehow that the air