Our modern sculptors are strongly bound by the traditional rules, yet they are struggling, weakly, but surely, with a spiritual ideal not seen in ancient statuary. They can often safely clothe their forms, even in the distorting drapery of the present day, for it is more the expression of face than of form which they seek to exhibit. The difference between the two schools is that between the display of body and soul. We admire man as the perfect animal, as the artists of old embodied him in marble. We are beginning to recognize him as the developing angel in the productions of modern art.

In the art of painting the ancient world has left us no example of its perfected style to compare with the wonders of the modern brush. It is better so; the modern painter is bound by no authority older than the medieval, and must train his soul to no Hellenic rules. Had Grecce left us paintings we should have found them as charming in outward effect and as little soul-stirring as are her Apollos and her Aphrodites. We have in the Pompeian relics some imperfect specimens of the labors of the classic brush, which fully bear out the above idea. They are all form, action, pose; nowhere soul or sentiment.

The modern painter has developed not alone the perspective of nature, but the perspective of the human spirit. It is not masks but faces, with souls behind them, that our painters seek to display, and often with remarkable success. The life of the ancient Greeks was spent in cultivating their ideal of physical beauty. Living in a mild climate, with an atmosphere of remarkable serenity, clear-cut mountains and a bright sea, the main features of their country, there was nothing to give rise to the sense of awe and mystery, but everything to produce in them admiration for the beauty of form and motion.

Their standard of human perfection was that learned in the gymnasium. There were ever before the eyes of the Greek youth nude forms of the most striking beauty, displayed in all the graceful movements of their athletic games, and the cultivation of the physical form became to them at once a passion and a science. From the excessive cultivation of this

taste, their cities were filled with statuary of which all the expression lay in limb and posture, with temples whose type was that of the sturdy and graceful human limb, and probably with paintings whose excellence lay in their faithful reproduction of the same type of physical beauty.

To the man of the Middle Ages the world had ceased to be a mere exterior shell. He had gained a habit of insight, of introspection, had learned to see in Nature a spiritual depth beneath her physical aspect; in man, less a well-shaped animal than an immortal soul clothed with flesh. The whole of Nature appealed to him with a spiritual significance that rendered its outward frame singularly unimportant, and the race of mystical and deep-revolving minds that arose was in extreme contrast with the hilarious and form-loving Grecian spirit.*

In Italy the battle-ground between the past and the present was established. In this land in which Art first awoke from her long slumber, the influence of the remains of the masterpieces of Roman and Grecian art, with the living force of the Byzantine civilization, was placed in competition with the mystically inclined and highly imaginative German mind. The competing action of these two widely differentiated types of thought is plainly seen in the works of Italian art, and most plainly at that culminating period which is marked by her two greatest names, Michael Angelo and Raphael. The former was essentially the last of the Greeks. His great merit lay in his truth of delineation of the human form. His statues are simply splendid animals, with all the unexpressive calm of the Grecian type of statuary. It was in attitude, form, muscular expression, the truthful reproduction of the physical hero that his power resided.

Raphael, on the contrary, saw the soul under its covering of flesh, and placed upon his works that speaking eloquence of imaginative thought to which his great contemporary never

* "On accordoit, dans l'heroisme antique, une grande estime à la force du corps, la valeur se composoit beaucoup moins de vertu morale que de puissance physique; la delicatesse du point d'honneur, la respect pour la foiblesse, sont les idées plus nobles des siecles suivans."—De Stael's Littérature,

p. 80.

attained. He truly delineated the new spirit that was spreading throughout civilized Europe, and overflowing the few strongholds of ancient thought that lifted their walls against the torrent. The few pioneers of the modern school who preceded him were extinguished in the light of his merit, and the labors of his brush gave an impetus to the art of painting equal to that which Phidias gave to sculpture. Raphael was, like Shakespeare, the exponent of a new, wide phase of human thought, and truly painted "wiser than he knew." *

Between these two great souls, who each stand, like Homer, at the beginning of an epoch, a strong phase of similarity exists. The imagination of the father of the modern drama is of the same type of thought as the sensibility of the father of the new-born art of painting, and in them both we see displayed, in forms of beauty destined to be "joys forever," that spirit which animated the Middle Age nations, and which, in a purified and advanced form, is the moving force of modern civilization.+

This comparison between ancient and modern thought could readily be extended so as to include every branch of the higher mental development of the human race, with the same result. Of course such a comparison only applies to men of superior intellect and culture, for it is only these who represent Greece to us, and these only shall represent us to the future. In every epoch there is a superabundance of men existing on the lowest grades of thought. The type of the savage, and that of the "man without a soul," exist plentifully in our highest centres of enlightenment. But it is the uplifted minds that give character to an age, as it is the sparkling crests that form the aspect of the ocean.

And in every age there, are souls that reach forward and grasp the spirit of a yet unborn future. We see them in Greece, stretching far onward in thought, and feeling in their souls the impelling spirit of the modern world. We have such souls in our age, reaching forward beyond our ken, and

"The forms of Michael Angelo are objects to admire in themselves, those of Raffaelle are merely a language pointing to something beyond and full of this ultimate import."-Hazlitt on ▲rt, p. 176. Hazlitt, p. 319.

forced to drink the hemlock of popular neglect or persecution. The thoughts of such men are the curved lines of a new vortex whose centre lies far forward, unseen by their contemporaries, but to which the whole world shall surely move forward in its unceasing cycle of development. The mental impulses of such" men beyond their age" are the true connecting links between the different eras of human progress.

The institution of chivalry, with all its concomitants, was the true flower of the Middle Ages, and was only possible to the modern world. It is beyond the stretch of our fancy to conceive of Greece or Rome as indulging in the spiritual frenzy of the Crusades. The whole animating spirit of chivalry was alien to their phase of mentality, and would have appeared to them arrant madness. Animal passion, not spiritual sentiment, possessed and impelled the past. All its enterprises had a strictly logical and defined origin and object. Its wars originated in ambition, cupidity, revenge, or pure blood-thirstiness-always in some phase of animality. Even its grand ideal war, the siege of Troy, was strictly personal in all its objects. Nowhere in its movement enters the sentiment of the impersonal.

During the reign of chivalry, on the contrary, the Christian world became stricken with a madness of the spirit, and Europe surged towards Palestine, why, she knew not, except that the ground made sacred by the Divine presence was desecrated by infidel feet. Jerusalem gained, the impelling sentiment died out, and human greed recovered its footing.

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new departure" of the human race was not confined to Europe. Previously, in Southwestern Asia, had arisen the great Saracen movement, which, in an incredibly short time, built an empire reaching from India to the Atlantic. Impelled by the same sentiment, a feeling without counterpart in the ancient world, these enthusiastic barbarians rushed from their desert like an avalanche, the first proselyting aggression known in history. It was not earthly but heavenly possessions they fought for, and, like the Crusaders, to the daring of the soldier they added the irresistible force of a grand moral enthusiasm.

This Middle Age spirit that blossomed into chivalry manifested itself otherwise than by producing armies of religious enthusiasts. The sentiment of love and of human fraternity now first rose in its pure, unselfish form. The love songs of the troubadours breathe a new spirit not to be found in the lyric poetry of Greece. The most impassioned utterance of Sappho is simply the appeal of a lover to his mistress. The feeling of personality tinges all their odes. Love was to them a warm-breathed woman, the passion-hearted Paphian goddess; not, as to us, an infinite impersonal attribute of Deity. But in this new song love appears as a pure sentiment, an all-embracing abstraction, an unselfish devotion to an ideal in which is symbolized the whole institution of chivalry.

Love, like art, has its three phases of development. First, the animal, in which only individual desire is considered. To this the word lust more truly applies. It is the feeling that principally animates the brute races, and, to a great extent, the savage races. Mankind had made a great advance in civilization before the second, or mental phase of love fully declared itself. In this, love seeks a mental, not an animal return. It demands the response of a kindred soul, and from it arises the true family relation, in which two souls are united by the links of a mutual regard. Yet, although the sensual basis of savage affection is in great measure replaced by a mental affinity, love is still a narrow personal sentiment-but the first outgrowth from the utter selfishness of the preceding relation. This phase grew up with the growth of the ancient civilizations, which never passed beyond it. The highly sensual and personal basis of their love sentiment is shown in the widespread worship of Venus and the related deities, who, under various names, possessed similar attributes.

At length, in the ripeness of time, love assumed a third phase, which we may call the spiritual, and became an impersonal sentiment, embracing not one person or one tribe, but all mankind. This phase was not of rapid growth. It yet exists in but an imperfect state, reaching a high grade of development only in the minds of the most highly cultured. We may class it as the ultimate outgrowth of the love principle, the grand