Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, and Antigone, spoke something to the
Hellenic nations; woke their piety, pity, or horror,--thrilled,
soothed, or delighted them; but they have no charm for our ears; for
us, they are literally disembodied ghosts, and voiceless as
shapeless. But not so are Christ, and the holy Apostles and saints,
and the Blessed Virgin; and not so is Hamlet, or Richard the Third,
or Macbeth, or Shylock, or the House of Lear, Ophelia, Desdemona,
Grisildis, or Una, or Genevieve. No: _they_ all speak and move real
and palpable before our eyes, and are felt deep down in the heart's
core of every thinking soul among us:--they all grapple to us with
holds that only life will loose. Of all this I feel assured, because,
a brief while since, we agreed together that man could only be raised
through an incarnation of himself. Tacitly, we would also seem to
have limited the uses of Hellenic art to the serving as models of
proportion, or as a gradus for form: and, though I cannot deny them
any merit they may have in this respect, still, I would wish to deal
cautiously with them: the artist,--most especially the young one, and
who is and would be most subject to them and open to their
influence,--should never have his soul asleep when his hand is awake;
but, like voice and instrument, one should always accompany the other
harmoniously.

_Kosmon._ But surely you will deal no less cautiously with early
mediaeval art. Archaisms are not more tolerable in pictures than they
are in statues, poems, or music; and the archaisms of this kind of
art are so numerous as to be at first sight the most striking feature
belonging to it. Most remarkable among these unnatural peculiarities
are gilded backgrounds, gilded hair, gilded ornaments and borders to
draperies and dresses, the latter's excessive verticalism of lines
and tedious involution of folds, and the childlike passivity of
countenance and expression: all of which are very prominent, and
operate as serious drawbacks to their merits; which--as I have freely
admitted--are in truth not a few, nor mean.

_Christian._ The artist is only a man, and living with other men in a
state of being called society; and,--though perhaps in a lesser
degree--he is as subject to its influences--its fashions and
customs--as they are. But in this respect his failings may be likened
to the dross which the purest metal in its molten state continually
throws up to its surface, but which is mere excrement,