Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/439

Rh whole temper of these early painters seems to me summed up in a picture by Lorenzetti Pietro, who lived about 1350: "Gli Anacoreti nella Tebaide." A green water borders a white curving shore, and land and sea are a chaos of trees, houses, steeples, people, skiffs, sailing-boats, all of the same size and brightness. A like absence of perspective—geometrical, spiritual, or humorous—is seen in Giotto's fresco in Santa Croce, depicting the Apocalypse of St. John. Patmos is a vague turtle-shaped island, and the saint squats in the middle of it, while above hover the celestial figures.

Temporal perspective is as confounded as spatial. Hence all those anachronisms which give us pause. Cimabue's Madonna consorts with the Doctors of the Church, Fra Angelico's with Dominicans, Alvise Vivarini's with Franciscans. As Dante explains, the imagination can ignore Time, just as—though his dubious comparison weakens his explanation—it can conceive two obtuse angles in one triangle. A truer simile may perhaps be drawn from the Baptistery of Pisa, where the janitor—humble link in the "nutritive chain"—chants a note to show the wonderful echo, and after its long reverberation has been sufficiently demonstrated, he sounds the notes of a simple chord, one after another, so that the earlier notes remain alive and enter into harmony with the new ones, and one hears an enchanting quartet. Sometimes he will set a highly complex chord in vibration, and all the air is full of delicious harmony. Even so the mediæval thinkers conceived of the dead, and the quick, the pioneers, and the successors, all living in unison, vibrating simultaneously though they had started in sequeuce, all harmoniously at one in the echoing halls of Fame. And so things disparate could be pictured united—anachronism was merely man putting together what blind Time had put asunder. Everything happened in the timeless realm of ideas. And often the strictly chronological aspect of things is indeed irrelevant. Space and Time are shifting illusions that the spirit disregards. Those who are in harmony are of the same hour and of the same place.

Nor do I know where to look for a better map of the world, as it figured itself in the mediæval mind—for your atlas with its assumption that man inhabits mere mounds of earth fantastically patterned is as absurd as your school chronology—than that naïve Mappamondo which Pietro di Puccio frescoed on the walls of the Campo Santo of this same white town. The Universe is held in the literal hands of God, whose haloed head appears dominatingly above, not without a suggestion of a clerical band. In the centre of the cosmos—note the geocentric glorification—stands the earth, mapped out into continents by a couple of single straight lines. (If Asia lies north of Europe, that is a mere turn to express its hyperborean barbarism; in Fra Mauro's map in the Doge's Palace the South has got to the top, perhaps because Venice was there.) America of course is not. And yet there are compensations, even for America. For this old world is circumscribed by circle on circle. On the rim of the third are perched the mere figures of the Zodiac, but the spaces between the remoter extraterrestrial circles are aswarm with cherubs (all heads and wings), and floating robed saints, and endless haloed heads of the beatified. The dim spaces below the cosmos are garrisoned by bishop with crozier and monk with breviary, and the predella is full of suggestions of beauty and sanctity. Thus the whole world lies serenely in the palms of God, and saints and angels girdle it with circles of holiness.

This is indeed the true way to make a map—for the actual shape of the world is only one of the factors of our habitation, just as the actual features of a beloved face do not constitute its total reality for us. 'Tis not eyes or nose one sees, so much as those mental circles due to loving habit in which the face swims for us—the dear haloing circles of tender experience. Rivers and mountains have indeed an influence on life, just as the real eyes and nose, but the world we live in is always more mental than geographical, and the same rivers and mountains serve the life of successive races. The Red Man's America is not different from the White Man's on the atlas,—save by the black dots which mark the ephemeral tumuli called cities,—yet the America of the Trust and the America of the Tomahawk are two different continents. The