It is only since we heard what Darwin had
to say, only since we have had to accept as improvisible what lies far
ahead, that the Book of Life has taken so strong a hold on us and
`once taken up, cannot,' as the reviewers say, `readily be laid down.'
The work doesn't strike us as a masterpiece yet, certainly; but who
knows that it isn't--that it won't be, judged as a whole?
For sheer creativeness, no human artist, I take it, has a higher
repute than Michael Angelo; none perhaps has a repute so high. But
what if Michael Angelo had been a little more persevering? All those
years he spent in the process of just a-going to begin Pope Julius'
tomb, and again, all those blank spaces for his pictures and bare
pedestals for his statues in the Baptistery of San Lorenzo--ought we
to regret them quite so passionately as we do? His patrons were apt to
think him an impossible person to deal with. But I suspect that there
may have been a certain high cunning in what appeared to be a mere
lovable fault of temperament. When Michael Angelo actually did bring a
thing off, the result was not always more than magnificent. His David
is magnificent, but it isn't David. One is duly awed, but, to see the
master at his best, back one goes from the Accademia to that
marvellous bleak Baptistery which he left that we should see, in the
mind's eye, just that very best.
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