Then the power of
beauty was so felt by the Italians that their art revived, as we know,
the almost lost idea of beauty, and the serious and successful pursuit
of it. Cardinal Antonelli,[461] speaking to me about the education of
the common people in Rome, said that they were illiterate, indeed, but
whoever mingled with them at any public show, and heard them pass
judgment on the beauty or ugliness of what came before them,--"_e
brutto_," "_e bello_,"--would find that their judgment agreed admirably,
in general, with just what the most cultivated people would say. Even at
the present time, then, the Italians are preeminent in feeling the power
of beauty. The power of knowledge, in the same way, is eminently an
influence with the Germans. This by no means implies, as is sometimes
supposed, a high and fine general culture. What it implies is a strong
sense of the necessity of knowing _scientifically_, as the expression
is, the things which have to be known by us; of knowing them
systematically, by the regular and right process, and in the only real
way.
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