Various

“ Far, far away from everything human!... Nothing there to nourish the feelings of friendship and love; nothing but the sympathy created by the knowledge that, to the right and to the left, there are fellow-sufferers passing their wretched days in the same way.... Thus it was that, in the depth of her solitude, there arose, in Vjera Sassulitch, such warm-hearted sympathy for every State prisoner that every political convict sufferer became for her a spiritual comrade in her recollections, to whom she assigned a place in the experience and the impressions of her past life. ”

“ Only one man boldly said Yes. Mantegna abjured his faith, abjured the Middle Ages, abjured all that belonged to his time, and in so doing cast away from him the living art and became the lover, the worshipper of shadows. And only one man turned completely aside from the antique as from the demon, and that man was a saint, Fra Angelico da Fiesoli. And with the antique, Fra Angelico rejected all the other artistic influences and aims of his time, the time not of Giotto or of Orcagna, but of Masaccio, of Uccello, of Poliaiolo and Donatitis. ”

“ From the first moment of intellectual life the world is to us a unity; subjectively a unity, as all its varied phenomena are gathered up in the consciousness of one self, and objectively a unity, as every object and event is definitely placed in relation to the other objects and events in one space and one time. The development of knowledge is, no doubt, the continual detection of new differences and distinctions in things, but the phenomena which are distinguished from other phenomena are at the same time put in relation to them. ”

“ And when we have examined into this purified art of the Renaissance, when we have compared coolly and equitably, we may perhaps confess that, while the Renaissance added immense wealth of beauty in colour, perspective, and grouping, it took away something of the perfection of simple lines and modest light and shade of the antique; we may admit to ourselves that the grandest saint by Raphael is meagre and stunted, and the noblest Virgin by Titian is overblown and sensual by the side of the demi-gods and amazons of antique sculpture. ”

“ No; they have drunk, but not of any mortal drink; the grapes are grown in Persephone's garden, the vat contains no fruits that have ripened beneath our sun. These strange, mute, solemn revellers have drunk of Lethe, and they are growing cold with the cold of death and of marble; they are the ghosts of the dead ones of antiquity, revisiting the artist of the Renaissance, who paints them, thinking he is painting life, while that which he paints is in reality death. ”

“ To some, mediæval art has appeared being led, Dante-like, by a magician Virgil through the mysteries of Nature up to a Christian Beatrice, who alone can guide it to the kingdom of heaven; others have seen mediæval art, like some strong, chaste knight turning away resolutely from the treacherous sorceress of antiquity, and pursuing solitarily the road to the true and the good; for some the antique has been an impure goddess Venus, seducing and corrupting the Christian artist ”

“ However, if in a military point of view Greece cannot to-day be the chief actor, she yet remains the most important factor of civilization in the East in intellectual, political, and ethnological respects. It is the indomitable genius of this nation which in the darkest moments of its historical life has been able to throw some brilliant flashes over the history of the human race. It is Greek industry which to-day plays par excellence the most active part in the propagation of culture in the East. ”

“ The character of the intellectual movement in Greece is didactic rather than scientific, in the widest acceptation of the term. We have not yet here those strifes and debates which at the present time agitate and enliven the modern mind in Europe. We teach, and teach. This is our mission for the present. Debate, which, if I may so express myself, is the luxury of science,—strife, which betokens a vigorous body trained by labour for the combat, have not yet disturbed the peace of our intellectual arena. ”

“ But this is no more the fault of antiquity than it is the fault of the Middle Ages; it is the fault of that great principle of life and of change which makes all things organic, be they physical or intellectual, germinate, grow, attain maturity, and then fade, wither, and rot. The dead art of antiquity could never have brought the art of the Renaissance to an untimely end; the art of the Renaissance decayed because it was mature, and died because it had lived. ”

“ In the seventeenth century, at the very dawn of the Hellenic revival, Jannina was already a centre of light which illumined the dark sky of Hellenism; for a long time this part of Epirus was the mother-country of the greatest patriots, and the most earnest propagators of national education. Athens was but a village, known only through history, when this town was already the central point of the national consciousness; the capital of the learning of the dispersed nation, which was without a political official centre. ”

“ But if our political life cannot call forth the admiration and enthusiasm, nor win the applause of an impartial judge, the individual and social progress of the nation, on the contrary, in many points of view, compensates us to some extent for our political inexperience and incapacity in these latter times. If the Hellenic State, wearing a dress which is burdensome and strange to its customs and its free individuality, cannot advance as it should do, on the other hand society has in other respects made immense progress. ”

“ In the life of Italian painting generations of men who flourished at the beginning of the sixteenth century are the mature artists; the men of the fifteenth century are the inexperienced youths; the Giottesques are the children—children Titanic and seraph-like, but children nevertheless, and, like all children, learning more perhaps in their few years than can the youth of the man learn in a lifetime.
Like the child, the Giottesque painter wished to show a situation or express a story, and for this purpose the absolute realization of objects was unnecessary. ”

“ No doubt we may console ourselves with the thought that we are neither the first nor the last for whom the fruit of the political wisdom of old Albion has proved so bitter and so indigestible, and that other nations of the Continent, more advanced than ourselves in civilization, have committed the same fault of not taking into account that the Government of a nation is not a mere question of forms, but that it ought to be the expression of its moral and social life, that it ought to represent its historical traditions and political aspirations. ”

“ Yes, Signorelli's fresco in Orvieto Cathedral is indeed a resurrection, the resurrection of human beauty after the long death-slumber of the Middle Ages. And the artist would seem to have been dimly conscious of the great allegory he was painting. Here and there are strewn skulls; skeletons stand leering by, as if in remembrance of the ghastly past, and as a token of former death; but magnificent youths are breaking through the crust of the earth, emerging, taking shape and flesh ”

“ O people walking in darkness, behold a great light: ye that dwell in the region and shadow of death, a light shall shine upon you. The multitude of the people which thou hast brought down in thy joy, they shall even rejoice before thee as they that rejoice in harvest, and as they that divide the spoil. ”

“ Impossibilities were asked of a new State, without means, without resources, scarcely risen from the tomb of oblivion and ruin. If clear-sighted men of this period had been listened to—Leopold of Belgium, Palmerston, Metternich even—Greece would have had limits more natural in order that she might breathe and act more freely. This youngest child of the European States would to-day be a strong Power, capable of struggling against the Panslavist spectre in the East, and of realizing the projects of the West in this country of the Balkans which appears to be menaced by Muscovite conquest. ”

“ But here all is different, in this so-called Bacchanal of Mantegna. This heavy Silenus is supine like a mass of marble; these fauns are shy and mute; these youths are grave and sombre; there is no wine in the cups, there are no lees in the vat, there is no life in these magnificent colossal forms; there is no blood in their grandly bent lips, no light in their wide-opened eyes; it is not the drowsiness of intoxication which is weighing down the youth sustained by the faun ”

“ The object of the Hellenic idea is not the absorption of the races with which it is called to live; it is neither fusion nor conquest, as has been more than once proved in history. It is only in the Greeks that the Albanians will find their natural friends and allies; it is only with them that they will not lose their national individuality, because they are their brothers, retarded in the history of humanity and of civilization. ”

“ Where an absolutist monarch rules in arbitrary manner, without any limits to his power, the jury becomes the only representative organ of a people utterly bereft of all political rights. In such a case, a jury is indeed entitled to speak, before all, the language of the people, the language of its aspirations towards freedom, which must be heard before everything else, if the nation is to acquire its true rights. ”

“ Itself a subordinate art, without real vitality, without deep roots in the civilization, sculpture was destined to remain the unsuccessful pupil of the antique, and the unsuccessful rival of painting; but sculpture had for its mission to prepare the road for painting and to prepare painting for antique influence, and the noblest work of Ghiberti and Donatello was Masaccio, as the most lasting glory to the Pisani had been Giotto. ”

“ The freedom of man is that his obedience to the State, to the Church, even to God, is the obedience of his natural to his spiritual self. The essential truth of the Reformation lay in its republication of the doctrine that the voice of God speaks within and not only without us, and indeed that "it is only by the God within that we can comprehend the God without." And the nations, which had learned that lesson in religion, soon hastened to apply it to the social and political order of life. ”

“ In the Middle Ages the conflict of two despotisms was necessary to the growth of freedom; but, when government ceases to be despotic, the need for such division of power passes away. The relative separation between the speculative and the practical classes—between the scientific and moral teachers of mankind, on the one hand, and the statesmen or administrators who have to discover what immediate changes in the organization of life have become necessary, on the other—is a division of labour which can surely be attained without breaking up the unity of the social body. ”

“ A divided life is a life of weakness and misery, nor can life be divided intellectually, without being, or ultimately becoming, divided morally. Such unity, indeed, does not exclude—and in a being like man who is in course of development cannot altogether exclude—difference and even conflict. In the most steadily growing intellectual life there are pauses of difficulty and doubt; in the most continuous moral progress there are conflicts with self and others. ”

“ It is the living; but opposite it arises the dead. Let us turn aside from the crowd of the mediæval city, and look at what the workmen have just laid bare, or what the merchant has just brought from Rome or from Greece. Look at this: it is corroded by oxides, battered by ill-usage, stained with earth: it is not a group, not even a whole statue, it has neither head nor arms remaining; it is a mere broken fragment of antique sculpture,—a naked body with a fold or two of drapery; it is not by Phidias nor by Praxiteles, it may not even be Greek ”

“ This is the most brilliant star, which directs the nation in the ways of civilization and progress. It exercises a great and salutary influence as well in the free country as in the neighbouring provinces. Pupils of the University of Athens become zealous apostles, who propagate in all corners of the East devotion to the national sentiment, and reawaken the ancient traditions and hopes of the future. At the doors of the University young men from all the Hellenic countries, who will form the generations of the future, meet and mingle, more and more. ”

“ In its social development Greece does not encounter any obstacle which hinders the march of its civilization. The ancient class-divisions of Europe, which are now exciting terrible passions that threaten the overthrow of the social edifice, have no cause of existence under the calm and happy sky of regenerate Greece. The social work of the progress and development of the national forces goes on here without obstacles, in a perfect accord of all classes of society. We have not here classes having opposite aspirations, suspected one by the other, and ready to engage in a deadly struggle. ”

“ Sweet, simple artist saint, reducing art to something akin to the delicate pearl and silk embroidery of pious nuns, to the exquisite sweetmeat cookery of pious monks; a something too delicately gorgeous, too deliciously insipid for human wear or human food; no, the Renaissance does not exist for thee, either in its study of the truly existing, or in its study of antique beauty. ”