executioner.

But human genius can transform and glorify even the unnatural; many
painters solved this problem of making what was revolting beautiful and
elevating--the Italians, especially, succeeding in paying tribute to
beauty at the expense of spirituality, and in rising to that ideality
which attained perfection in so many pictures of the Madonna. As regards
this subject the Catholic clergy always made some concession to the
physical. This image of immaculate beauty which is glorified by maternal
love and suffering had the privilege of being made famous by poets and
painters, and adorned with all charms of the sense, for it was a magnet
which could attract the multitude to the lap of Christianity. Madonna
Maria was the beautiful _dame du comptoir_ of the Catholic Church, who,
with her beautiful eyes, attracted and held fast its customers,
especially the barbarians of the North.

Architecture had in the Middle Ages the same character as the other
arts, as indeed all the manifestations of life then harmonized so
marvelously with one another. The tendency to parable shows itself here,
as in poetry. When we now enter a Gothic cathedral, we hardly suspect
the esoteric sense of its stone symbolism; only a general impression
pierces our soul; we realize an elevation of feeling and mortification
of the flesh. The interior is a hollow cross, and we wander among the
instruments of martyrdom itself; the variegated windows cast on us red
and green light, like blood and corruption; funeral songs wail about
us; under our feet are mortuary tablets and decay; and the soul soars
with the colossal columns to a giddy height, tearing itself with pain
from the body, which falls like a weary, worn-out garment to the ground.
But when we behold the exteriors of these Gothic cathedrals, these
enormous buildings which are wrought so aerially, so finely, delicately,
transparently, cut as it were into such open work that one might take
them for Brabant lace in marble, then we feel truly the power of that
age which could so master stone itself that it seems spectrally
transfused with spiritual life, and thus even the hardest material
declares Christian spirituality.

But arts are only the mirror of life, and, as Catholicism died away, so
its sounds grew fainter and its lights dimmer in art. During the
Reformation Catholic song gradually disappeared in Europe, and in its
place we see the long-slumbering poetry of Greece re-awakening to life.