Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/85

Rh presence of a convulsive energy in it, becoming in lower hands merely monstrous or forbidding, but felt even in its most graceful products as a subdued quaintness or grotesque. Yet those who feel this grace or sweetness in Michelangelo might at the first moment be puzzled if they were asked wherein precisely the quality resided. Men of inventive temperament (Victor Hugo, for instance, in whom, as in Michelangelo, people have for the most part been attracted or repelled by the strength, while few have understood his sweetness) have sometimes relieved conceptions of merely moral or spiritual greatness, but with little æsthetic charm of their own, by lovely accidents or accessories, like the butterfly which alights on the blood-stained barricade in 'Les Miserablés' or those sea-birds for whom the monstrous Gilliatt comes to be as some wild natural thing, so that they are no longer afraid of him, in 'Les Travailleurs de la Mer.' But the austere genius of Michelangelo will not depend for its sweetness on any mere accessories like these. The world of natural things has almost no existence for him, 'When one speaks of him,' says Grimm, 'woods, clouds, seas, and mountains disappear, and only what is formed by the spirit of man remains behind;' and he quotes a few slight words from a letter of his to Vasari as the single expression in all he has left of