sitting, clad
in mystical white raiment, half shroud, half priestly linen. Our Lord,
with rosy nimbus and the long pale hair--tanquam lana alba et tanquam
nix--of the figure in the Apocalypse, sets with slender finger-tips a
crown of pearl on the head of his mother, who, corpse-like in her
refinement, is bending forward to receive it, the light lying like snow
upon her forehead. Certainly, it cannot be said of Angelico's fresco that
it throws into a sensible form our highest thoughts about man and his
relation to the world; but it did not do this adequately even for
Angelico. For him, all that is outward or sensible in his work--the hair
like wool, the rosy nimbus, the crown of pearl--is only the symbol or
type of an inexpressible world, to which he wishes to direct the
thoughts; he would have shrunk from the notion that what the eye
apprehended was all. Such forms of art, then, are inadequate to the
matter they clothe; they remain ever below its level. Something of this
kind is true also of oriental art. As in the middle age from an
exaggerated inwardness, so in the East from a vagueness, a want of
definition, in thought, the matter presented to art is unmanageable:
forms of sense struggle vainly with it. The many-headed gods of the East,
the orientalised Diana of Ephesus, with its numerous breasts, like
Angelico's fresco, are at best overcharged symbols, a means of hinting at
an idea which art cannot adequately express, which still remains in the
world of shadows.

But take a work of Greek art,--the Venus of Melos. That is in no sense a
symbol, a suggestion of anything beyond its own victorious fairness. The
mind begins and ends with the finite image, yet loses no part of the
spiritual motive. That motive is not lightly and loosely attached to the
sensuous form, as the meaning to the allegory, but saturates and is
identical with it. The Greek mind had advanced to a particular stage of
self-reflexion, but was careful not to pass beyond it. In oriental
thought there is a vague conception of life everywhere, but no true
appreciation of itself by the mind, no knowledge of the distinction of
man's nature: in its consciousness of itself, humanity is still confused
with the fantastic, indeterminate life of the animal and vegetable world.
In Greek thought the "lordship of the soul" is recognised; that lordship
gives authority and divinity to human eyes and hands and feet; inanimate
nature is thrown into the background. But t