The New is ever becoming old; the old ever changing into New. And if we ask why each waxes or wanes just when it does and as it does, there is, in the last analysis, no better answer than Aurora's explanation for chancing on the poets—
Because the time was ripe.
And the Holbein century is one of stupendous Transitions because the time was ripe; and not simply because printing was invented, or Greek scholars were driven from Constantinople to scatter abroad in Europe, or Ferdinand and Isabella wanted a direct route to Cathay, or Friar Martin nailed ninety-five Theses to the door of Wittenberg's church, and built himself thereby an everlasting name as Luther.
And because the time was ripe for a new Art, even more than because this or that great painter entrained it, it also had its transition period, and Holbein is set down in manuals as a transitional painter. Teutonic, too; because all Christian art is either Byzantine or Italian or Teutonic in its type.
When it first crept from the catacombs under the protection of the Constantinople Court it could but be Byzantine; that strange composite obtained by stripping the Greek "beast" of every pagan beauty and then decking it out with crude Oriental ornament. But who that prizes the peculiar product of that fanaticism would have had its cradle without this sleepless terror, lest for the whole world of classic heathendom it should lose the dear-bought soul of purely Christian ideals? Or who, remembering that in thus relentlessly sacrificing its entire heritage of pagan accumulation it put back the clock of Art to the Stone Age, and had to begin all over again in the helpless bewilderment of untaught childish effort,—could find twice ten centuries too long for the astounding feat it achieved? Ten centuries, after all, make but a marvellous short course betwixt the archaic compositions of the third century and the compositions of Giotto or Wilhelm Meister.
A great deal of nonsense is talked about the "tyrannies" which the Monastic Age inflicted on Art. Of course, monasticism fostered fanaticism. It does not need the luminous genius that said it, to teach us that "whatever is necessary to what we make our sole object is sure, in some way or in some time or other, to become our master." And with the monk, the true monk in his day of usefulness, every knowledge and every art was good or bad according as it served monastic ideals. But it is absurd to say that the monk—qua monk—"put the intellect in chains." The whole body of his oppression was not so paralysing as the iron little finger of Malherbe and his school of "classic" despots. To charge upon the monk the limitations of his crude thought and cruder methods is about as intelligent as it would be to fall foul of Shakespeare because boys played his women's parts.
The springs of Helicon were the monk's also, as witness Tuotilo and Bernard of Clairvaux; but it was by the waters of Jordan that his miracles were wrought. As Johnson somewhere says of Watts, "every kind of knowledge was by the piety of his mind converted into theology." And for the rest,—by the labour of his hands, by his fasting from the things of the flesh, by his lofty faith—however erring or forgotten or betrayed, in individual cases,—by every impressive lesson of a hard life lived unto others and a hard death died unto himself, century after century it was the monk who taught and helped the barbarian of every land to turn the desolate freedom of the wild ass into a smiling homestead and the savage Africa of his own heart into at least a better place. The marvel is that he could at the same time find room or energy to make his monastery also a laboratory, a library, and a studio. And yet he did.
To say that he abhorred Greek ideals is to say that the shepherd abhors the wolf. His life was one long fight with the insidious poison of the Greek. He did not,—at any rate in his best days—believe at all in Art for Art's sake; and had far too intimate an acquaintance with the "natural man" to do him even justice. What he wanted was to do away with him.
Yet with all its repellent features, it is to this unflinching exclusiveness of the monkish ideal that we owe one of the most exquisite blossoms on the stock of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,—their innocent and appealing art; an art as original and as worthy of reverence, within its own peculiar province, as the masterpieces of Greece or Italy. You must turn from the beauty of Antinous to the beauty of, say, the Saint Veronica, among the works of the Cologne school at Munich, before you can estimate the Gulf of many things besides time which for ever divides the world of the one from the world of the other. And then you must essay to embody the visions of Patmos with a child's colour-box and brushes, before you can compare the achievements—the amazing achievements—of the monkish ideal with the achievements of classic paganism.
With the school of Wilhelm Meister this tremendous revolution had accomplished itself; and solely through the indomitable will of the monk. The ideal of Greece had been to show how gods walk the earth. This Christian ideal was to show how devout men and women walk with God. Their ineffable heavenly faces look out from their golden world—