16. There is, perhaps, no phenomenon connected with the history of the first half of the nineteenth century, which will become a subject of more curious investigation in after ages, than the coincident development of the Critical faculty, and extinction of the Arts of Design. Our mechanical energies, vast though they be, are not singular nor characteristic; such, and so great, have before been manifested—and it may perhaps be recorded of us with wonder rather than respect, that we pierced mountains and excavated valleys, only to emulate the activity of the gnat and the swiftness of the swallow. Our discoveries in science, however accelerated or comprehensive, are but the necessary development of the more wonderful reachings into vacancy of past centuries; and they who struck the piles of the bridge of Chaos will arrest the eyes of Futurity rather than we builders of its towers and gates—theirs the authority of Light, ours but the ordering of courses to the Sun and Moon.

17. But the Negative character of the age is distinctive. There has not before appeared a race like that of civilized Europe at this day, thoughtfully unproductive of all art—ambitious—industrious—investigative—reflective, and incapable. Disdained by the savage, or scattered by the soldier, dishonored by the voluptuary, or forbidden by the fanatic, the arts have not, till now, been extinguished by analysis and paralyzed by protection. Our lecturers, learned in history, exhibit the descents of excellence from school to school, and clear from doubt the pedigrees of powers which they cannot re-establish, and of virtues no more to be revived: the scholar is early acquainted with every department of the Impossible, and expresses in proper terms his sense of the deficiencies of Titian and the errors of Michael Angelo: the metaphysician weaves from field to field his analogies of gossamer, which shake and glitter fairly in the sun, but must be torn asunder by the first plow that passes: geometry measures out, by line and rule, the light which is to illustrate heroism, and the shadow which should veil distress; and anatomy counts muscles, and systematizes motion, in the wrestling of Genius with its angel. Nor is ingenuity wanting—nor patience; apprehension was never more ready, nor execution more exact—yet nothing is of us, or in us, accomplished;—the treasures of our wealth and will are spent in vain—our cares are as clouds without water—our creations fruitless and perishable; the succeeding Age will trample "sopra lor vanita che par persona," and point wonderingly back to the strange colorless tessera in the mosaic of human mind.

18. No previous example can be shown, in the career of nations not altogether nomad or barbarous, of so total an absence of invention,—of any material representation of the mind's inward yearning and desire, seen, as soon as shaped, to be, though imperfect, in its essence good, and worthy to be rested in with contentment, and consisting self-approval—the Sabbath of contemplation which confesses and confirms the majesty of a style. All but ourselves have had this in measure; the Imagination has stirred herself in proportion to the requirements, capacity, and energy of each race: reckless or pensive, soaring or frivolous, still she has had life and influence; sometimes aiming at Heaven with brick for stone and slime for mortar—anon bound down to painting of porcelain, and carving of ivory, but always with an inward consciousness of power which might indeed be palsied or imprisoned, but not in operation vain. Altars have been rent, many—ashes poured out,—hands withered—but we alone have worshiped, and received no answer—the pieces left in order upon the wood, and our names writ in the water that runs roundabout the trench.

19. It is easier to conceive than to enumerate the many circumstances which are herein against us, necessarily, and exclusive of all that wisdom might avoid, or resolution vanquish. First, the weight of mere numbers, among whom ease of communication rather renders opposition of judgment fatal, than agreement probable; looking from England to Attica, or from Germany to Tuscany, we may remember to what good purpose it was said that the magnetism of iron was found not in bars, but in needles. Together with this adversity of number comes the likelihood of many among the more available intellects being held back and belated in the crowd, or else prematurely outwearied; for it now needs both curious fortune and vigorous effort to give to any, even the greatest, such early positions of eminence and audience as may feed their force with advantage; so that men spend their strength in opening circles, and crying for place, and only come to speech of us with broken voices and shortened time. Then follows the diminution of importance in peculiar places and public edifices, as they engage national affection or vanity; no single city can now take such queenly lead as that the pride of the whole body of the people shall be involved in adorning her; the buildings of London or Munich are not charged with the fullness of the national heart as were the domes of Pisa and Florence:—their credit or shame is metropolitan, not acropolitan; central at the best, not dominant; and this is one of the chief modes in which the cessation of superstition, so far as it has taken place, has been of evil consequence to art, that the observance of local sanctities being abolished, meanness and mistake are anywhere allowed of, and the thoughts and wealth which were devoted and expended to good purpose in one place, are now distracted and scattered to utter unavailableness.

20. In proportion to the increasing spirituality of religion, the conception of worthiness in material offering ceases, and with it the sense of beauty in the evidence of votive labor; machine-work is substituted for handwork, as if the value of ornament consisted in the mere multiplication of agreeable forms, instead of in the evidence of human care and thought and love about the separate stones; and—machine-work once tolerated—the eye itself soon loses its sense of this very evidence, and no more perceives the difference between the blind accuracy of the engine, and the bright, strange play of the living stroke—a difference as great as between the form of a stone pillar and a springing fountain. And on this blindness follow all errors and abuses—hollowness and slightness of framework, speciousness of surface ornament, concealed structure, imitated materials, and types of form borrowed from things noble for things base; and all these abuses must be resisted with the more caution, and less success, because in many ways they are signs or consequences of improvement, and are associated both with purer forms of religious feeling and with more general diffusion of refinements and comforts; and especially because we are critically aware of all our deficiencies, too cognizant of all that is greatest to pass willingly and humbly through the stages that rise to it, and oppressed in every honest effort by the bitter sense of inferiority. In every previous development the power has been in advance of the consciousness, the resources more abundant than the knowledge—the energy irresistible, the discipline imperfect. The light that led was narrow and dim—streakings of dawn—but it fell with kindly gentleness on eyes newly awakened out of sleep. But we are now aroused suddenly in the light of an intolerable day—our limbs fail under the sunstroke—we are walled in by the great buildings of elder times, and their fierce reverberation falls upon us without pause, in our feverish and oppressive consciousness of captivity; we are laid bedridden at the Beautiful Gate, and all our hope must rest in acceptance of the "such as I have," of the passers by.

21. The frequent and firm, yet modest expression of this hope, gives peculiar value to Lord Lindsay's book on Christian Art; for it is seldom that a grasp of antiquity so comprehensive, and a regard for it so affectionate, have consisted with aught but gloomy foreboding with respect to our own times. As a contribution to the History of Art, his work is unquestionably the most valuable which has yet appeared in England. His research has been unwearied; he has availed himself of the best results of German investigation—his own acuteness of discernment in cases of approximating or derivative style is considerable—and he has set before the English reader an outline of the relations of the primitive schools of Sacred art which we think so thoroughly verified in all its more important ramifications, that, with whatever richness of detail the labor of succeeding writers may illustrate them, the leading lines of Lord Lindsay's chart will always henceforth be followed. The feeling which pervades the whole book is chastened, serious, and full of reverence for the strength ordained out of the lips of infant Art—accepting on its own terms its simplest teaching, sympathizing with all kindness in its unreasoning faith; the writer evidently looking back with most joy and thankfulness to hours passed in gazing upon the faded and faint touches of feeble hands, and listening through the stillness of uninvaded cloisters for fall of voices now almost spent; yet he is never contracted into the bigot, nor inflamed into the enthusiast; he never loses his memory of the outside world, never quits nor compromises his severe and reflective Protestantism, never gives ground of offense by despite or forgetfulness of any order of merit or period of effort. And the tone of his address to our present schools is therefore neither scornful nor peremptory; his hope, consisting with full apprehension of all that we have lost, is based on a strict and stern estimate of our power, position, and resource, compelling the assent even of the least sanguine to his expectancy of the revelation of a new world of Spiritual Beauty, of which whosoever

"will dedicate his talents, as the bondsman of love, to his Redeemer's glory and the good of mankind, may become the priest and interpreter, by adopting in the first instance, and re-issuing with that outward investiture which the assiduous study of all that is beautiful, either in Grecian sculpture, or the later but less spiritual schools of painting, has enabled him to supply, such of its bright ideas as he finds imprisoned in the early and imperfect efforts of art—and secondly, by exploring further on his own account in the untrodden realms of feeling that lie before him, and calling into palpable existence visions as bright, as pure, and as immortal as those that have already, in the golden days of Raphael and Perugino, obeyed their creative mandate, Live!" (Vol. iii., p. 422).[5]

22. But while we thus defer to the discrimination, respect the feeling, and join in the hope of the author, we earnestly deprecate the frequent assertion, as we entirely deny the accuracy or propriety, of the metaphysical analogies, in accordance with which his work has unhappily been arranged. Though these had been as carefully, as they are crudely, considered, it had still been no light error of judgment to thrust them with dogmatism so abrupt into the forefront of a work whose purpose is assuredly as much to win to the truth as to demonstrate it. The writer has apparently forgotten that of the men to whom he must primarily look for the working out of his anticipations, the most part are of limited knowledge and inveterate habit, men dexterous in practice, idle in thought; many of them compelled by ill-ordered patronage into directions of exertion at variance with their own best impulses, and regarding their art only as a means of life; all of them conscious of practical difficulties which the critic is too apt to under-estimate, and probably remembering disappointments of early effort rude enough to chill the most earnest heart. The shallow amateurship of the circle of their patrons early disgusts them with theories; they shrink back to the hard teaching of their own industry, and would rather read the book which facilitated their methods than the one that rationalized their aims. Noble exceptions there are, and more than might be deemed; but the labor spent in contest with executive difficulties renders even these better men unapt receivers of a system which looks with little respect on such achievement, and shrewd discerners of the parts of such system which have been feebly rooted, or fancifully reared. Their attention should have been attracted both by clearness and kindness of promise; their impatience prevented by close reasoning and severe proof of every statement which might seem transcendental. Altogether void of such consideration or care, Lord Lindsay never even so much as states the meaning or purpose of his appeal, but, clasping his hands desperately over his head, disappears on the instant in an abyss of curious and unsupported assertions of the philosophy of human nature: reappearing only, like a breathless diver, in the third page, to deprecate the surprise of the reader whom he has never addressed, at a conviction which he has never stated; and again vanishing ere we can well look him in the face, among the frankincensed clouds of Christian mythology: filling the greater part of his first volume with a résumé of its symbols and traditions, yet never vouchsafing the slightest hint of the objects for which they are assembled, or the amount of credence with which he would have them regarded; and so proceeds to the historical portion of the book, leaving the whole theory which is its key to be painfully gathered from scattered passages, and in great part from the mere form of enumeration adopted in the preliminary chart of the schools; and giving as yet account only of that period to which the mere artist looks with least interest—while the work, even when completed, will be nothing more than a single pinnacle of the historical edifice whose ground-plan is laid in the preceding essay, "Progression by Antagonism":—a plan, by the author's confession, "too extensive for his own, or any single hand to execute," yet without the understanding of whose main relations it is impossible to receive the intended teaching of the completed portion.