loved him, lingered on to be of immense, patriarchal age, till the
sweetness it had taken so long to secrete in him was found at last. Out
of the strong came forth sweetness, ex forti dulcedo. The world had
changed around him. The New-catholicism had taken the place of the
Renaissance. The spirit of the Roman Church had changed: in the vast
world's cathedral which his skill had helped to raise for it, it looked
stronger than ever. Some of the first members of the Oratory were among
his intimate associates. They were of a spirit as unlike as possible
from that of Lorenzo, or Savonarola even. The opposition of the
Reformation to art has been often enlarged upon; far greater was that of
the Catholic revival. But in thus fixing itself in a frozen orthodoxy,
the Roman Catholic Church has passed beyond him, and he was a stranger
to it. In earlier days, when its beliefs had been in a fluid state, he
too might have been drawn into the controversy; he might have been for
spiritualising the papal sovereignty, like Savonarola; or for adjusting
the dreams of Plato and Homer with the words of Christ, like Pico of
Mirandola. But things had moved onward, and such adjustments were no
longer possible. For himself, he had long since fallen back on that
divine ideal, which above the wear and tear of creeds has been forming
itself for ages as the possession of nobler souls. And now he began to
feel the soothing influence which since that time the Roman Church has
often exerted over spirits too independent to be its subjects, yet
brought within the neighbourhood of its action; consoled and
tranquillised, as a traveller might be, resting for one evening in a
strange city, by its stately aspect, and the sentiment of its many
fortunes, just because with those fortunes he has nothing to do. So he
lingers on; a revenant, as the French say, a ghost out of another age,
in a world too coarse to touch his faint sensibilities too closely;
dreaming, in a worn-out society, theatrical in its life, theatrical in
its art, theatrical even in its devotion, on the morning of the world's
history, on the primitive form of man, on the images under which that
primitive world had conceived of spiritual forces.

I have dwelt on the thought of Michelangelo as thus lingering beyond his
time in a world not his own, because, if one is to distinguish the
peculiar savour of his work, he must be approached, not through his
followers, but through his predecessors; not thr