When the great period of Italian art attained its full splendor, it seemed as if the frozen crystals of Greek sculpture had melted before the fire of Christian inspiration. But this transformation, like the transfiguration of Hindoo deities, did not destroy the anterior in its issue.
The soul of sculpture ripened into painting, but Sculpture, the beautiful mother, still lived and smiled upon her glowing daughter. See Michael Angelo studying the torso! See the silent galleries of the Vatican, where Form holds you in one room, Color presently detaining you in another! And what are our Raphaels, Angelos, making to-day? Be sure they are in the world, for the divine spirit of Art never leaves itself without a witness. But what is their noble task? They are moulding character, embodying the divine in human culture and in human institutions. The Greek sculptures indicate and continue a fitting reverence for the dignity and beauty of the human form; but the reverence for the human soul which fills the world to-day is a holier and happier basis of Art. From it must come records in comparison with which obelisk and pyramid, triumphal arch and ghostly cathedral, shall seem the toys and school appliances of the childhood of the race.
To return to our original problem,—how shall we attain the proper human stature, how add the wanting half to the half which is given?
I answer: By labor and by faith, in which there is nothing accidental or arbitrary. The very world in which we live is but a form, whose spirit, breathing through Nature and Experience, slowly creates its own interpretation, adding a new testament to an old testament, lifting the veil between Truth and Mercy, clasping the mailed hand of Righteousness in the velvet glove of Peace.
The spirit of Religion is the immanence of the divine in the human, the image of the eternal in the transitory, of things infinite in things limited. I have heard endless discussions and vexed statements of how the world came out of chaos. From the Mosaic version to the last rationalistic theory, I have been willing to give ear to these. It is a subject upon which human ingenuity may exercise itself in its allowable leisure. One thing concerns all of us much more; viz., how to get heaven out of earth, good out of evil, instruction out of opportunity.
This is our true life work. When we have done all in this that life allows us, we have not done more than half, the other half lying beyond the pale struggle and the silent rest. Oh! when we shall reach that bound, whatever may be wanting, let not courage and hope forsake us.
Dante and Beatrice
DANTE and Beatrice—names linked together by holy affection and high art. Ary Scheffer has shown them to us as in a beatific vision,—the stern spirit which did not fear to confront the horrors of Hell held in a silken leash of meekness by the gracious one through whose intervention he passed unscathed through fire and torment, bequeathing to posterity a record unique in the annals alike of literature and of humanity.