THE PATH OF VISION
weaving or dying; and that multi-minded personage, the Father of the Community, who cures the diseases of the body and the soul and administers justice,—who is a good priest, a competent physician and an upright judge, as the occasion requires,—is by no means extinct.
In Europe, though instances of men of genius practicing one or more of the crafts or the sciences, do not abound as in the Orient, Michael Angelo and Benvenuto Cellini were the archtypes of many lesser luminaries who combined two or more of the arts and could discourse entertainingly, if not intellectually, on theology or alchemy orMachiavellism. The sculptor, in other words, was not merely a worker in stone or marble, a master only of lines and curves; the poet often became a statesman; the painter could detach himself from his canvas to study mathematics. And there are instances of musicians as authors and masters, moreover, of a literary style.
People were avid of knowledge in those days; more, indeed, for the pleasure it gave
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