e, said enough to make it clear that there was a real and
living intellectual movement in the Middle Ages, and that even in those
days men had resumed the great adventure of the pursuit of truth.

* * * * *

We can only for a moment consider the significance and the character of
mediaeval civilization as it expresses itself in Art, and we must begin
by noticing a distinction between mediaeval art and mediaeval learning,
which is of the first importance.

The intellectual movement of the Middle Ages was related to the ancient
world, both in virtue of that continuity which was mediated by the
Christian Fathers, whose education was that of the later Empire, and
also in virtue of the intense and eager care with which mediaeval
scholars studied all that they possessed of ancient literature. The
relation of the art of the Middle Ages to the ancient world was quite
different. There was no continuity between the vernacular poetry of the
Middle Ages and that of the ancient world, and while there was a certain
continuity in architecture and in mosaic painting, this amounted to
little more than that the mediaeval artists took the formal structure or
method as the starting-point of their own independent and original work.
For the western art of the third and fourth centuries was conventional
and decadent, and had apparently lost its power of recovery, while the
art of the centuries which followed was at first rude and imperfect, but
was full of new life, determined in its reality and dominated by some
intimate sense of beauty; it was in no sense imitative of ancient art,
but grew and changed under the terms of its own inherent life and power.

Mediaeval art, whatever else is to be said about it, was new and
independent, and it had all the variety, the audacious experiments,
characteristic of a living art. Nothing is so foolish as to imagine that
it was uniform and unchanging. Indeed, from the historical point of
view, the interest of the study of it is curiously contrasted with that
of the art of the ancient world. There we have only an imperfect and
fragmentary knowledge of the earlier and ruder form; its history, as we
know it, might almost be said to begin with the perfection of the sixth
and fifth centuries, and what we know after that is the history of a
long decadence, not indeed without new developments of importance, as
for instance in the architectural structure of Roman building, and
perh