e been, in all ages, in a hurry to call people
Manicheans, all the more fiercely because their own consciences must
have hinted to them that they were somewhat Manichean themselves.
When a man suspects his own honesty, he is, of course, inclined to
prove himself blameless by shouting the loudest against the
dishonesty of others. Now M. Rio sees clearly and philosophically
enough what is the root of Manicheanism--the denial that that which
is natural, beautiful, human, belongs to God. He imputes it justly
to those Byzantine artists who fancied it carnal to attribute beauty
to the Saviour or to the Virgin Mary, and tried to prove their own
spirituality by representing their sacred personages in the extreme
of ugliness and emaciation, though some of the specimens of their
painting which Mrs. Jameson gives proves that this abhorrence of
beauty was not so universal as M. Rio would have us believe. We
agree with him that this absurdity was learned from them by earlier
and semi-barbarous Italian artists, that these latter rapidly escaped
from it, and began rightly to embody their conceptions in beautiful
forms; and yet we must urge against them, too, the charge of
Manicheanism, and of a spiritual eclecticism also, far deeper and
more pernicious than the mere outward eclecticism of manner which has
drawn down hard names on the school of the Caracci.

For an eclectic, if it mean, anything, means this--one who, in any
branch of art or science, refuses to acknowledge Bacon's great law,
"that nature is only conquered by obeying her;" who will not take a
full and reverent view of the whole mass of facts with which he has
to deal, and from them deducing the fundamental laws of his subject,
obey them whithersoever they may lead; but who picks and chooses out
of them just so many as may be pleasant to his private taste, and
then constructs a partial system which differs from the essential
ideas of nature, in proportion to the number of facts which he has
determined to discard. And such a course was pursued in the art by
the ascetic painters between the time of Giotto and Raphael. Their
idea of beauty was a partial and a Manichean one; in their adoration
for a fictitious "angelic nature," made up from all which is negative
in humanity, they were prone to despise all by which man is brought
in contact with this earth--the beauties of sex, of strength, of
activity, of grandeur of form; all, that is, in which Greek art
excels: thei