"PICTOR IGNOTUS" (Florence, 15--), is the answer of an unknown painter
to the praise which he hears lavished on another man. He admits its
justice, but declares that he too could have deserved it; and his words
have all the bitterness of a suppressed longing which an unexpected
touch has set free. He, too, has dreamed of fame; and felt no limits to
his power of attaining it. But he saw, by some flash of intuition, that
it must be bought by the dishonour of his works; that, in order to bring
him fame, they must descend into the market, they must pass from hand to
hand; they must endure the shallowness of their purchasers' comments,
share in the pettiness of their lives. He has remained obscure, that his
creations might be guarded against this sacrilege. "He paints Madonnas
and saints in the twilight stillness of the cloister and the aisle; and
if his heart saddens at the endless repetition of the one heavenward
gaze, at least no merchant traffics in what he loves. There, where his
pictures have been born, mouldering in the dampness of the wall,
blackening in the smoke of the altar, amidst a silence broken only by
prayer, they may 'gently' and 'surely' die." He asks himself, as he
again subsides into mournful resignation, whether the applause of men
may not be neutralized at its best by the ignoble circumstances which it
entails.


"THE BISHOP ORDERS HIS TOMB AT SAINT PRAXED'S CHURCH" (Rome, 15--)
displays the artistic emotion in its least moral form: the love of the
merely beautiful as such; and it shows also how this may be degraded: by
connecting it in the mind of the given person, with the passion for
luxury, and the pride and jealousies of possession. The Bishop is at the
point of death. His sons (nominally nephews) are about him; and he is
urging on them anxious and minute directions for the tomb they are to
place for him in St. Praxed's church.