Promenades of an Impressionist

as dwelt upon the same theme, declaring music the archetype of the arts. In his Essays Speculative John Addington Symonds said some pertinent things on this subject.

including that of genius and drunkard, who set off a train of ideas which buzzed in the brains of Poe, Baudelaire, and the symbolists. People who hear painting, see music, enjoy odorous poems, taste symphonies, and write perfumes are now classed by the omnipotent psychical police as decadents, though such notions are as old as literature. Suarez de Mendoza in his L'Audition Colorée has said that the sensation of colour hearing, the faculty of associating tones and colours, is often a consequence of an as

landscapes and etched sonnets are not unpleasing to the ear. What if they do not mean much? There was a time when to say a "sweet voice" would arouse a smile. What has sugar to do with sound? It may be erratic symbolism, this confusing of terminologies; yet, once in a while, it strikes sparks. There is a deeply rooted feeling in us that the arts have a common matrix, that they a

plex temperament give us exotic dissonances? All Florence was a sounding-board of the arts when Botticelli walked its narrow ways and lived its splendid coloured life. His sensitive nature absorbed as a sponge does water the impulses and motives of his contemporaries. The lurking secrets of the "new learning"-doctrines that made for damnation, such as the recrudescence of the medi?val conception of an angelic neuter host, neither for Heaven nor Hell, not on the side of Lucifer nor with the starry hosts-were said to have been mirrored in his pictures. Its note is in Città di Vita, in the heresy of the Albigenses, and it goes as far back as Origen. Those who read his paintings, and there were clairvoyant theologians abroad in Florence, could make of them what they would. Painted music is less understandable than painted heresy. Matteo Palmieri is said to have dragged Botticelli with him into dark corners of disbelief; there was in the Medicean days a cruel order of intelligence that delighted to toy with the vital faith and ideals of the young. It was more savage and cunning when Machiavelli, shrewdest of men, wrote and lived. A nature like Botticelli's, which surrendered frankly to ide

be denied Botticelli, but it is not the golden joy of Giorgione. An emaciated music emanates from the eyes of that sad, restless Venus, to whom love has become a scourge of the senses. Music? Yes, here is the "coloured hearing" of Mendoza. These canvases of Botticelli seem to give forth the opalescent over-tones of an unearthly composition. Is this Spring, this tender, tremulous virgin whose right hand, deprecatingly raised, signals as a conductor at the head of an invisible orchestra its rhythms? Hermes, supremely impassive, hand on thigh, plucks the fruit as the eternal trio of maidens with woven paces tread the measures of a dance whose music we but overhear. Garlanded with blossoms, a glorious girl keeps time with the pulsing atmospheric m

that serpentines about her foam-born face, thin shoulders that slope into delicious arms; the Japanese group, blowing tiny, gem-like buds with puffed-out cheeks; the rhythmic female on tiptoe offering her mantle to Venus; and enveloping them all vernal breez

have been predicted. Technically, as one critic has written, "he was the first to understand the charm of silhouettes, the first to linger in expressing the joining of the arm and body, the flexibility of the hips, t

uality of colour." Bernard Berenson goes further. For him the entire picture, Venus Rising From the Sea, presents us with the quintessence of all that is pleasurable to our imagination of touch and movement... The vivid appeal to our tactile sense, the life communicating movement, is always

something that holds the same relation to representation that music holds to speech-and this art exists and is called lineal decoration. In this art of arts San

t down to some mental lesion; that is how Maurice Spronck classifies the sensation in writing about the verbal sensitivity of the Goncourts and Flaubert. The latter, you may remember, said that Salammbo was purple to him, and L'Education Sentimentale gray. Carthage and Paris-a characteristic fancy! But why is it that these scientific gentlemen who account for genius by eye-strain do not reprove the poets for their sensibility to

in. I arose and wandered about Florence like one possessed." Evidently not intended by nature as a husband or father. Like Watteau, like Nietzsche, grand visionaries abiding on the other side of the dear common joys of life, these men were not tempted by the usual baits of happiness. The great Calumnia in the Uffizi might be construed as an image of Botticelli's soul. Truth, naked and scorned-again we note the matchless silhouette of his Venus-misunderstood and calumniated, stands in the hall of a great palace. She points to the heavens; she is an interrogation mark, Pilate's question. Botticelli was adored. But understood? An enigmatic malady ravaged his being. He died poor and alone, did this composer of luminous chants and pagan poems, this moulder of exotic dreams and of angels who long for other gods than those of Good

son will allow only forty-five originals to Botticelli's credit. Furthermore, Gebhart does not mention in his catalogue the two Botticellis belonging to Mrs. Gardner of Boston, a lamentable oversight for a volume brought out in 1907. Need we add that this French author by no means sees Botticelli in the musical sense? He is chiefly concerned with his historic environment. Gebhart's authorities are the Memoriale of Francesco Albertini; Anonyme Gaddiano, the manuscript of the Magliabecchiana, which precedes the Vasari editio