I take the Tuscan nature to be so constituted that it will play with any
given subject of speculation in much the same way. With one or two mighty
exceptions to be sure--Dante, of course, Buonarroti, of course, and, for
all his secularities. Boccace--it is not imagination you find in Tuscany.
Rather, it is a sweet and delicate, a wholesome, home-grown fancy,
wantoning with thought which may be unpleasant, unhealthy, grave,
frivolous--what you will; yet playing in such a way, and with such
intuitive taste and breeding that no harm ensues nor any nausea. They
realise for me a fairy country; I can think no evil of a Tuscan. So I can
read Boccace the infidel, Poggio the gross, where Voltaire makes me a
bigot and Catulle Mendes ashamed. The fresh breeze blowing through the
_Decameron_ keeps the air sweet. Even Lorenzo is a child for me, and
Macchiavel, "the man without a soul," I decline to take seriously.
Consider, then, all Tuscan art from this point of view, the weaving of
innocent fancies round some chance-caught theme, Christianity may have
been the _point d'appui_. No doubt it generally was. What then? Have
you never heard two children dreaming aloud of the ways of God, or the
troubles of Christ? How they humanise, how they realise the Mystery! Just
such a pretty babble I find in the Spanish Chapel, which to take in any
other spirit would work a madness in the brain. You remember the North
wall, apotheosis of Saint Thomas and what-not, for all the world like a
paradigm of the irregular verb "Aquinizo." What are we to suppose Lippo
Memmi (or whoever else it was) to have been about when he hung in mid-air
on his swinging bridge and stained the wet square red and green? To read
Ruskin you would think he was fulminating _urbi et orbi_ with the
_Summa_ or _Cur Deus homo_ at his fingers' ends. Depend upon it
he was doing quite other, or the artistic temper (phrase rendered
loathsome by the halfpenny newspapers) suffered a relapse between the days
of King David and the days of his brother Lippo Lippi. Are we to suppose