The Madonna of the Future | Page 7

of fierce, fastidious
longing--solemn church feasts of the intellect-- when all vulgar effort
and all petty success is a weariness, and everything but the best--the
best of the best--disgusts. In these hours we are relentless aristocrats of
taste. We will not take Michael Angelo for granted, we will not
swallow Raphael whole!"
The gallery of the Uffizi is not only rich in its possessions, but
peculiarly fortunate in that fine architectural accident, as one may call it,
which unites it--with the breadth of river and city between them--to
those princely chambers of the Pitti Palace. The Louvre and the Vatican
hardly give you such a sense of sustained inclosure as those long

passages projected over street and stream to establish a sort of inviolate
transition between the two palaces of art. We passed along the gallery
in which those precious drawings by eminent hands hang chaste and
gray above the swirl and murmur of the yellow Arno, and reached the
ducal saloons of the Pitti. Ducal as they are, it must be confessed that
they are imperfect as show-rooms, and that, with their deep-set
windows and their massive mouldings, it is rather a broken light that
reaches the pictured walls. But here the masterpieces hang thick, and
you seem to see them in a luminous atmosphere of their own. And the
great saloons, with their superb dim ceilings, their outer wall in
splendid shadow, and the sombre opposite glow of mellow canvas and
dusky gilding, make, themselves, almost as fine a picture as the Titians
and Raphaels they imperfectly reveal. We lingered briefly before many
a Raphael and Titian; but I saw my friend was impatient, and I suffered
him at last to lead me directly to the goal of our journey--the most
tenderly fair of Raphael's virgins, the Madonna in the Chair. Of all the
fine pictures of the world, it seemed to me this is the one with which
criticism has least to do. None betrays less effort, less of the
mechanism of success and of the irrepressible discord between
conception and result, which shows dimly in so many consummate
works. Graceful, human, near to our sympathies as it is, it has nothing
of manner, of method, nothing, almost, of style; it blooms there in
rounded softness, as instinct with harmony as if it were an immediate
exhalation of genius. The figure melts away the spectator's mind into a
sort of passionate tenderness which he knows not whether he has given
to heavenly purity or to earthly charm. He is intoxicated with the
fragrance of the tenderest blossom of maternity that ever bloomed on
earth.
"That's what I call a fine picture," said my companion, after we had
gazed a while in silence. "I have a right to say so, for I have copied it so
often and so carefully that I could repeat it now with my eyes shut.
Other works are of Raphael: this IS Raphael himself. Others you can
praise, you can qualify, you can measure, explain, account for: this you
can only love and admire. I don't know in what seeming he walked
among men while this divine mood was upon him; but after it, surely,
he could do nothing but die; this world had nothing more to teach him.
Think of it a while, my friend, and you will admit that I am not raving.

Think of his seeing that spotless image, not for a moment, for a day, in
a happy dream, or a restless fever-fit; not as a poet in a five minutes'
frenzy--time to snatch his phrase and scribble his immortal stanza; but
for days together, while the slow labour of the brush went on, while the
foul vapours of life interposed, and the fancy ached with tension, fixed,
radiant, distinct, as we see it now! What a master, certainly! But ah!
what a seer!"
"Don't you imagine," I answered, "that he had a model, and that some
pretty young woman--"
"As pretty a young woman as you please! It doesn't diminish the
miracle! He took his hint, of course, and the young woman, possibly,
sat smiling before his canvas. But, meanwhile, the painter's idea had
taken wings. No lovely human outline could charm it to vulgar fact. He
saw the fair form made perfect; he rose to the vision without tremor,
without effort of wing; he communed with it face to face, and resolved
into finer and lovelier truth the purity which completes it as the
fragrance completes the rose. That's what they call idealism; the word's
vastly abused, but the thing is good. It's my own creed, at any rate.
Lovely Madonna, model at once and muse, I call you to witness that I
too am an idealist!"
"An idealist, then," I said, half jocosely, wishing to provoke him to