me--the whole tragedy is distilled into the right words, the whole man
raised up and reclothed with flesh. One point only is but lightly
touched upon--missed it could not be by an eye so sharp and skilful--the
effect upon his art of the poisonous solvent of love. How his life was
corroded by it and his soul burnt into dead ashes, we are shown in full;
but we are not shown in full what as a painter he was before, what as a
painter he might have been without it. This is what I think the works of
his youth and age, seen near together as at Florence, make manifest to
any loving and studious eye. In those later works, the inevitable and
fatal figure of the woman recurs with little diversity or change. She
has grown into his art, and made it even as herself; rich, monotonous in
beauty, calm, complete, without heart or spirit. But his has not been
always "the low-pulsed forthright craftsman's hand" it was then. He had
started on his way towards another goal than that. Nothing now is left
him to live for but his faultless hand and her faultless face--still and
full, suggestive of no change in the steady deep-lidded eyes and heavy
lovely lips without love or pudency or pity. Here among his sketches we
find it again and ever the same, crowned and clothed only with the
glory and the joy and the majesty of the flesh. When the luxurious and
subtle sense which serves the woman for a soul looks forth and speaks
plainest from those eyes and lips, she is sovereign and stately still;
there is in her beauty nothing common or unclean. We cannot but see her
for what she is; but her majestic face makes no appeal for homage or
forgiveness.

_Essays and Studies_ (London, 1875).

[Illustration: THE DANCE OF THE DAUGHTER OF HERODIAS.
_Andrea del Sarto._]