only by the length of
his life. Great genius means before all things great and constant
creative power; it means wealth of resource and invention; it means
quantity as well as quality. No truly great genius, unless cut short by
early death, has left little of itself. Besides a man's one great
masterpiece, there are always a hundred works of the same hand, far
beyond the powers of ordinary men; and the men of Michelangelo's day
worked harder than we work. Perhaps they thought harder, too, being more
occupied with creation, at a time when there was little, than we are
with the difficult task of avoiding the unintentional reinvention of
things already invented, now that there is so much. The latter is a real
difficulty in our century, when almost every mine of thought has been
worked to a normal depth by minds of normal power, and it needs all the
ruthless strength of original genius to go deeper, and hew and blast a
way through the bedrock of men's limitations to new veins of treasure
below.

It has been said of Titian by a great French critic that 'he absorbed
his predecessors and ruined his successors.' Michelangelo absorbed no
one and ruined no one; for no painter, sculptor or architect ever
attempted what he accomplished, either before him or after him. No sane
person ever tried to produce anything like the 'Last Judgment,' the
marble 'Moses,' or the dome of Saint Peter's. Michelangelo stood alone
as a creator, as he lived a lonely man throughout the eighty-nine years
of his life. He had envy but not competition to deal with. There is no
rivalry between his paintings in the Sixtine Chapel and those of the
many great artists who have left their work beside his on the same
walls.

The chapel is a beautiful place in itself, by its simple and noble
proportions, as well as by the wonderful architectural decorations of
the ceiling, conceived by Michelangelo as a series of frames for his
paintings. Beautiful beyond description, too, is the exquisite marble
screen. No one can say certainly who made it; it was perhaps designed by
the architect of the chapel himself, Baccio Pintelli. There are a few
such marvels of unknown hands in the world, and a sort of romance clings
to them, with an element of mystery that stirs the imagination, in a
dreamy way, far more than the gilded oak tree in the arms of Sixtus the
Fourth, by which the name of Rovere is symbolized. Sixtus commanded,
and the chapel was built. But who knows where Ba