Page:Studies in Letters and Life (Woodberry, 1890).djvu/123

Rh of Christian art and the Catholic Church, the land is supposed to be religious; as the long-enslaved and last-freed of the nations of Europe, the race is believed to be deficient in political sagacity. Yet it requires but little reflection, hardly more than a thought of the Reformation, to prevent surprise at the fact that the Italians were at heart the most irreligious of Christian peoples, and that the Church, viewed by them always as a secular institution, is a monument of their genius applied to practical affairs. Italian art, too, as an expression of national life, must be ascribed less to piety than to the native bent of mind, the inbred race disposition, which seeks to bring all spiritual things within the perception of the senses; indeed, the course of development in Italian art lies principally in the gradual substitution of an æsthetic aim for a devout motive as the source of inspiration. No people is less dreamy, in the Northern sense; the genius of the race is positive, definite, objective, practical, circumscribed in the tangible and visible facts of experience. Between Italian intellect and Italian feeling there seems to be no border-land. Ecstasy may fall from heaven and kindle masses of