Now it does give me real pain to speak in this almost unappreciative way of the old masters and their martyrs, because good friends of mine in the ship—­friends who do thoroughly and conscientiously appreciate them and are in every way competent to discriminate between good pictures and inferior ones—­have urged me for my own sake not to make public the fact that I lack this appreciation and this critical discrimination myself.  I believe that what I have written and may still write about pictures will give them pain, and I am honestly sorry for it.  I even promised that I would hide my uncouth sentiments in my own breast.  But alas!  I never could keep a promise.  I do not blame myself for this weakness, because the fault must lie in my physical organization.  It is likely that such a very liberal amount of space was given to the organ which enables me to make promises, that the organ which should enable me to keep them was crowded out.  But I grieve not.  I like no half-way things.  I had rather have one faculty nobly developed than two faculties of mere ordinary capacity.  I certainly meant to keep that promise, but I find I can not do it.  It is impossible to travel through Italy without speaking of pictures, and can I see them through others’ eyes?

If I did not so delight in the grand pictures that are spread before me every day of my life by that monarch of all the old masters, Nature, I should come to believe, sometimes, that I had in me no appreciation of the beautiful, whatsoever.

It seems to me that whenever I glory to think that for once I have discovered an ancient painting that is beautiful and worthy of all praise, the pleasure it gives me is an infallible proof that it is not a beautiful picture and not in any wise worthy of commendation.  This very thing has occurred more times than I can mention, in Venice.  In every single instance the guide has crushed out my swelling enthusiasm with the remark: 

“It is nothing—­it is of the Renaissance.”

I did not know what in the mischief the Renaissance was, and so always I had to simply say,

“Ah! so it is—­I had not observed it before.”

I could not bear to be ignorant before a cultivated negro, the offspring of a South Carolina slave.  But it occurred too often for even my self-complacency, did that exasperating “It is nothing—­it is of the Renaissance.”  I said at last: 

“Who is this Renaissance?  Where did he come from?  Who gave him permission to cram the Republic with his execrable daubs?”

We learned, then, that Renaissance was not a man; that renaissance was a term used to signify what was at best but an imperfect rejuvenation of art.  The guide said that after Titian’s time and the time of the other great names we had grown so familiar with, high art declined; then it partially rose again—­an inferior sort of painters sprang up, and these shabby pictures were the work of their hands.  Then I said, in my heat, that I “wished to goodness high art had declined five hundred years sooner.”  The Renaissance pictures suit me very well, though sooth to say its school were too much given to painting real men and did not indulge enough in martyrs.