paring the passion of S.
Bernard's Hymn to our Lord upon the Cross with all that Winckelmann and
Hegel have so truly said about the restrained expression, dignified
generality, and harmonious beauty essential to sculpture. It is the
negation of tranquillity, the excess of feeling, the absence of
comeliness, the contrast between visible weakness and invisible
omnipotence, the physical humiliation voluntarily suffered by Him that
"ruled over all the angels, that walked on the pavements of heaven, whose
feet were clothed with stars"--it is all this that gives their force and
pathos to these stanzas:

Omnis vigor atque viror
Hinc recessit; non admiror:
Mors apparet in inspectu,
Totus pendens in defectu,
Attritus aegra macie.

Sic affectus, sic despectus,
Propter me sic interfectus,
Peccatori tam indigno
Cum amoris in te signo
Appare clara facie[3].

We have never heard that Pheidias or Praxiteles chose Prometheus upon
Caucasus for the supreme display of his artistic skill; and even the
anguish expressed in the group of the Laocoon is justly thought to violate
the laws of antique sculpture. Yet here was a greater than Prometheus--one
who had suffered more, and on whose suffering the salvation of the human
race depended, to exclude whom from the sphere of representation in art
was the same as confessing the utter impotence of art to grasp the vital
thought of modern faith. It is clear that the muses of the new age had to
haunt Calvary instead of Helicon, slaking their thirst at no Castalian
spring, but at the fount of tears outpoured by all creation for a stricken
God. What Hellas had achieved supplied no norm or method for the arts in
this new service.

From what has hitherto been advanced, we may assert with confidence that,
if the arts were to play an important part in Christian culture, an art
was imperatively demanded that should be at home in the sphere of intense
feeling, that should treat the body as the interpreter and symbol of the
soul, and should not shrink from pain and passion. How far the fine arts
were at all qualified to express the essential thoughts of Christianity--a
doubt suggested in the foregoing paragraphs--and how far, through their
proved inadequacy to perform this task completely, they weakened the hold
of mediaeval faiths upon the modern mind, are questions to be raised
hereafter. For the present it is enough to affirm that, least of all the