The total result of this singular attitude toward human life, which cannot be rightly described as either ascetic or mystical, but seems rather to have been based upon some self-preservative instinct, bidding him sacrifice lower and keener impulses to what he regarded as the higher and finer purpose of his being, is a certain clash and conflict of emotions, a certain sense of failure to attain the end proposed, which excuses, though I do not think it justifies, the psychologists, when they classify him among morbid subjects.  Had he yielded at any period of his career to the ordinary customs of his easy-going age, he would have presented no problem to the scientific mind.  After consuming the fuel of the passions, he might have subsided into common calm, or have blunted the edge of inspiration, or have finished in some phase of madness or ascetical repentance.  Such are the common categories of extinct volcanic temperaments.  But the essential point about Michelangelo is that he never burned out, and never lost his manly independence, in spite of numerous nervous disadvantages.  That makes him the unparalleled personality he is, as now revealed to us by the impartial study of the documents at our disposal.

IX

It is the plain duty of criticism in this age to search and probe the characters of world-important individuals under as many aspects as possible, neglecting no analytical methods, shrinking from no tests, omitting no slight details or faint shadows that may help to round a picture.  Yet, after all our labour, we are bound to confess that the man himself eludes our insight.  “The abysmal deeps of personality” have never yet been sounded by mere human plummets.  The most that microscope and scalpel can perform is to lay bare tissue and direct attention to peculiarities of structure.  In the long-run we find that the current opinion formed by successive generations remains true in its grand outlines.  That large collective portrait of the hero, slowly emerging from sympathies and censures, from judgments and panegyrics, seems dim indeed and visionary, when compared with some sharply indented description by a brilliant literary craftsman.  It has the vagueness of a photograph produced by superimposing many negatives of the same face one upon the other.  It lacks the pungent piquancy of an etching.  Yet this is what we must abide by; for this is spiritually and generically veracious.

At the end, then, a sound critic returns to think of Michelangelo, not as Parlagreco and Lombroso show him, nor even as the minute examination of letters and of poems proves him to have been, but as tradition and the total tenor of his life display him to our admiration.  Incalculable, incomprehensible, incommensurable:  yes, all souls, the least and greatest, attack them as we will, are that.  But definite in solitary sublimity, like a supreme mountain seen from a vast distance, soaring over shadowy hills and misty plains into the clear ether of immortal fame.