ich in its life-time was
goaded on only by a pious and local emulation, and wished at all costs
to be sumptuous and astonishing.

[Sidenote: The mediaeval artist.]

It was rather in another direction that groping mediaeval art reached its
most congenial triumphs. That was an age, so to speak, of epidemic
privacy; social contagion was irresistible, yet it served only to make
each man's life no less hard, narrow, and visionary than that of every
one else. Like bees in a hive, each soul worked in its separate cell by
the same impulse as every other. Each was absorbed in saving itself
only, but according to a universal prescription. This isolation in
unanimity appears in those patient and childlike artists who copied each
his leaf or flower, or imagined each his curious angels and devils,
taking what was told of them so much to heart that his rendering became
deeply individual. The lamp of sacrifice--or perhaps rather of
ignorance--burned in every workshop; much labour was wasted in
forgetfulness of the function which the work was to perform, yet a
certain pathos and expression was infused into the detail, on which all
invention and pride had to be lavished. Carvings and statues at
impossible elevations, minute symbols hidden in corners, the choice for
architectural ornament of animal and vegetable forms, copied as
attentively and quaintly as possible--all this shows how abstractedly
the artist surrendered himself to the given task. He dedicated his
genius like the widow's mite, and left the universal composition to
Providence.

Nor was this humility, on another side, wholly pious and sacrificial.
The Middle Ages were, in their way, merry, sturdy, and mischievous. A
fresh breath, as of convalescence, breathed through their misery. Never
was spring so green and lovely as when men greeted it in a cloistered
garden, with hearts quite empty and clean, only half-awakened from a
long trance of despair. It mattered little at such a moment where a work
was to figure or whether any one should ever enjoy it. The pleasure and
the function lay here, in this private revelation, in this playful
dialogue between a bit of nature and a passing mood. When a Greek
workman cut a volute or a moulding, he was not asked to be a poet; he
was merely a scribe, writing out what some master had composed before
him. The spirit of his art, if that was called forth consciously at
all, could be nothing short of intelligence. Those lines and none other,