or careless blasphemy, sad or smiling (Byron, Beranger). Our earnest
poets and deepest thinkers are doubtful and indignant (Tennyson,
Carlyle); one or two, anchored, indeed, but anxious or weeping
(Wordsworth, Mrs. Browning); and of these two, the first is not so
sure of his anchor, but that now and then it drags with him, even to
make him cry out,--

Great God, I had rather be
A Pagan suckled in some creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn.[114]

In politics, religion is now a name; in art, a hypocrisy or affectation.
Over German religious pictures the inscription, "See how Pious I am,"
can be read at a glance by any clear-sighted person. Over French and
English religious pictures the inscription, "See how Impious I am," is
equally legible. All sincere and modest art is, among us, profane.[115]

This faithlessness operates among us according to our tempers,
producing either sadness or levity, and being the ultimate root alike
of our discontents and of our wantonnesses. It is marvellous how full
of contradiction it makes us: we are first dull, and seek for wild and
lonely places because we have no heart for the garden; presently we
recover our spirits, and build an assembly room among the mountains,
because we have no reverence for the desert. I do not know if there be
game on Sinai, but I am always expecting to hear of some one's shooting
over it.

There is, however, another, and a more innocent root of our delight in
wild scenery.

All the Renaissance principles of art tended, as I have before often
explained, to the setting Beauty above Truth, and seeking for it
always at the expense of truth. And the proper punishment of such
pursuit--the punishment which all the laws of the universe rendered
inevitable--was, that those who thus pursued beauty should wholly lose
sight of beauty. All the thinkers of the age, as we saw previously,
declared that it did not exist. The age seconded their efforts, and
banished beauty, so far as human effort could succeed in doing so,
from the face of the earth, and the form of man. To powder the hair,
to patch the cheek, to hoop the body, to buckle the foot, were all
part and parcel of the same system which reduced streets to brick
walls, and pictures to brown stains. One desert of Ugliness was extended
before the eyes of mankind; and their pursuit of the beautiful, so
recklessly contin