Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/731

Rh or angles in hands or drapery—which instantly mark the subjects as being one man's work; there is moreover as in the work of any disciplined mind, an absence of stentorian insistence on the work's right to attention—the scorn of self-extenuation as in the case of Dante, Socrates, and Christ. Remembering C. H. Herford's comment upon Sir Thomas Browne's contemporary, Alexander Ross, one hesitates to appraise work—even to praise it—the inspiration of which is spiritual. Herford says: "The formidable Alexander Ross in his Medicus Medicatus, drove his heavy bludgeon this way and that through the tenuous fabric of the Religio without damaging a whit its spiritual substance 'for it was as the air invulnerable. Corrupted by the conventions of the banal and the bizarre, under contract to compass every novelty, there are many critics or so-called artists qualified to judge of such work only in so far as they are able to discriminate between Hepplewhite and Sheraton. The most hasty, however, the most errant, will feel in Mr Faggi's Ka as in all his work, the controlled emotion, the mental poise which suggests the Absolute—a superiority to fetishism and triviality, a transcendence, an inscrutable dignity—a swordlike mastery in the lips, which suggests the martyr secure in having found the key to mystery, a reserve which recalls Dante as pictured by Croce, "absorbed and consumed by his secret, unwilling that vulgar and gossiping folk should cast their eyes upon it: 'and he smiling looked at them and said nothing. Face to face with such sincere expressions, one suspects that in the vulgarity and peremptoriness of one's passions, either in praise or blame, one may be as St Augustine says he was prior to his conversion, "like a dog snapping at flies." A reverence for mystery is not a vague, invertebrate thing. The realm of the spirit is the only realm in which experience is able to corroborate the fact that the real can be also the actual. Such work as Mr Faggi's is a refutation of the petulant patronage which for instance assigns Plato to adolescents—which remarks: "How Plato hated a fact!"

To grasp the nature of the phenomenon which Dante represents, is perhaps impossible to many of us since one cannot discern forces by which one is not oneself unconsciously animated. As Symons has remarked, "We find the greatest difficulty in believing that Socrates was sincere, that Dante was sincere." One feels that even