Page:Divine Comedy (Longfellow 1867) v1.djvu/286

266 with some form of which the classic poets usually associate them.

68. Chaucer, The Monkes Tale:—

was a son of Saturn; Pholus, of Silenus; and Nessus, of Ixion and the Cloud.

71. Homer, Iliad, XI. 832, "Whom Chiron instructed, the most just of the Centaurs." Hawthorne gives a humorous turn to the fable of Chiron, in the Tanglewood Tales, p. 273:—

"I have sometimes suspected that Master Chiron was not really very different from other people, but that, being a kind-hearted and merry old fellow, he was in the habit of making believe that he was a horse, and scrambling about the school-room on all fours, and letting the little boys ride upon his back. And so, when his scholars had grown up, and grown old, and were trotting their grandchildren on their knees, they told them about the sports of their school days; and these young folks took the idea that their grandfathers had been taught their letters by a Centaur, half man and half horse.

"Be that as it may, it has always been told for a fact, (and always will be told, as long as the world lasts,) that Chiron, with the head of a schoolmaster, had the body and legs of a horse. Just imagine the grave old gentleman clattering and stamping into the schoolroom on his four hoofs, perhaps treading on some little fellow's toes, flourishing his switch tail instead of a rod, and, now and then, trotting out of doors to eat a mouthful of grass!"

77. Mr. Ruskin refers to this line in confirmation of his theory that "all great art represents something that it sees or believes in; nothing unseen or uncredited." The passage is as follows. Modern Painters, III. 83:—

"And just because it is always something that it sees or believes in, there is the peculiar character above noted, almost unmistakable, in all high and true ideals, of having been as it were studied from the life, and involving pieces of sudden familiarity, and close specific painting which never would have been admitted or even thought of, had not the painter drawn either from the bodily life or from the life of faith. For instance, Dante's Centaur, Chiron, dividing his beard with his arrow before he can speak, is a thing that no mortal would ever have thought of, if he had not actually seen the Centaur do it. They might have composed handsome bodies of men and horses in all possible ways, through a whole life of pseudo-idealism, and yet never dreamed of any such thing. But the real living Centaur actually trotted across Dante's brain, and he saw him do it."

107. and.