This ambiguity of every fact in Nature comes from the difficulty of detecting its true connection. There is reality there, even in blight and corruption; something is forwarded, only perhaps not the thing before us,—as the virtue of the compost-heap appears not in it, but in the rose-bed. The artist cannot forego a jot of reality, but the obvious facts are not this, any more than the canvas and the pigment are the picture. The prose of every-day life is reality in fragments,—the Alps split into paving-stones,—Achilles with a cold in the head. Seen in due connection, they make up the reality; but their prominence as they occur is casual and shifting, and the result dependent on the spectator's power of discerning, amid the endless series in which they are involved, more or less of their vital relations.
Art is not to be blamed for idealizing, for this is only completing what Nature begins. But the completion of the design is also its limitation. It is final to the artist as well as to the theme, and cannot yield to further expansion. In Nature there is no such pretence of finality, and so her work, though never complete, is never convicted of defect. Her circuits are never closed; she does not aim to cure the defect in the thing, but in something else. Each in turn she abandons, and appeals to a future success, which never is, but always about to be. The reason is, that the scope of each is wider than immediately appears. It is not simple completeness that is aimed at, but ascent to higher levels, so that the consummation it demands, if granted, would cut it off from more vital connections elsewhere. The ideal of the crystal seems to be clearness and regularity, but better things are in store for it. It must become opaque and shapeless in order to be fitted for higher transformations. The leaf must be cramped to make the flower. Homer's heroes must hoe potatoes and keep shop before the higher civilization of the race can be reached.
The Greek ideal is an endeavor to ignore the imperfections of natural existence. The ideal life is to be rich, strong, powerful, eloquent, high-born, famous. It was a glorification of the earthly, not by transcending, but by keeping its limitations out of sight. But this is only making the limitation essential and irrevocable, so that it infects the ideal also, which in this very avoidance submits to recognize it. The statue is not less, but more, a thing than the natural body. Life is not mere exclusion of decay, but organization of it, so that the fury of corruption passes into fresh vital power. It is a cycle of changes, the type and show of which are the circulation, constantly removing effete particles and building up new, and therein giving its hue to the flesh. But sculpture supposes the current checked, and one aspect fit to stand for all the rest. The statue is not only a particle, but an isolated particle, and must first of all divert attention from its fragmentariness. Mr. Garbett has remarked that plants should not be copied in sculpture, because the plant is not seen entire, but is partly hidden in the ground. But the point is not the being seen or not, but the suggestion of incompleteness. The same remark applies to animals, and even to man, unless his relations to the world, as an individual among individuals, can be kept out of sight.
But the finite thus isolated is not honored, but degraded. This stagnant perfection is atrophy,—as some poisons are said to kill by arresting the transformation of the tissues, and so to preserve them at the expense of their life. The new era is marked by the perception that these shortcomings are not accidental, but inherent and intended. The chasm is not to be bridged or avoided,—or, as Plato says, the human to become godlike by taking away here and adding there,—but remains a radical incongruity of Nature, never to be escaped from. It brings death and dissolution to the fair shapes of the earlier world,—for the worship of form is justified only so long as the mind thinks forms and not ideas.
The statue may embody an infinite meaning, but to the artist form and meaning are one. It is not a sentiment that he puts into this shape, but it is the shape itself that inspires him. The symbolism of Greek Art was the discovery of a later age. We know what is meant by Circe and Athene, but Homer did not. It was thus only that the Greek mind could grasp ideas,—this is the thoroughly artistic character of that people. Their philosophers were always outlaws. What excited the rage of the Athenians against Socrates was his endeavor to detach religion from the images of the gods. When it comes to comparisons between meaning and expression, as adequate or inadequate, it is evident their unity is gone;—the meaning is first, and the expression only adjunct or illustration. It did not impair the sacredness of the Greek deities that they were the work of the poets and sculptors. But the second Nicene Council forbade as impious any images of Christ as God, and allowed only his human nature to be represented,—a strange decree, if the Church had realized its own doctrine, that the humanity of Christ is as real as his divinity. But the meaning is, that the finite is not there to stand for the infinite, but only to indicate it negatively and indirectly,—that its glory is not to persist in its finiteness, not to hold on to its form, but to be transformed. The figure of Thersites would be very unsuitable for Achilles, but is suitable enough for a saint; it was a pardonable exaggeration to make it even more suitable.
The hero is now the saint; the ideal life a life of poverty, humility, weakness, labor,—to be long-suffering, to despise and forsake the world. The present life, the heaven of Achilles, is now Hades, the forced abode of phantoms having no reality but what is given to them by religion, and the Hades of the Greek the only true and substantial world. The new church fled the light of the sun, and sought impatiently to bury itself in the tomb. The Roman catacombs were not the mere refuge of a persecuted sect,—their use as places of worship continued long after such need had ceased. But "among the graves" they found the point nearest to the happy land beyond, and the silence and the darkness made it easier to ignore for the few miserable moments that yet remained the vain tumult of the surface. In such a mood the beauty of the outward could awaken no delight, but only suspicion and aversion. Not the earth and its glories, but the fading of these before the unseen and eternal, was the only possible inspiration of Art. The extreme of this direction we see in the Iconoclasm of the eighth century, but it has never completely died out. Gibbon tells us of a Greek priest who refused to receive some pictures that Titian had painted for him, because they were too real:—"Your scandalous figures," said he, "stand quite out from the canvas; they are as bad as a group of statues." It is a tenderness towards the idea, lest it should be dishonored by actuality. Matter is gross, obscure, evil, an obstacle to spirit,—and material existence tolerable only as momentary, vanishing, and, as it were, under constant protest, and with the suspicion that the Devil has a hand in it. It belongs especially to the Oriental mind, and its logical result is the Buddhist heaven of annihilation.
The defect of this view is not that it is too ideal, but that it is not ideal enough. It is an incomplete idealism that through weakness of faith does not hold fast its own point of view, and so does not dispose of matter, but leaves it outside, as negation, obstacle. The body is allowed to exist, but remains in disgrace and reduced to the barest indication. But it is honoring matter far too much to allow that it can be an obstacle. It is no obstacle, for it is nothing of itself. Rightly understood, this contempt of the body is directed only against the false emphasis placed upon single aspects or manifestations. It is a feeling that the true ideal is not thus shut up in a forced exception, as if it were the subtilized product of a distillation whereby the earthly is to be purged of its dross; but that it is the all-pervading reality, which the finite can neither hinder nor help, but only obey, which death and corruption praise, which establishes itself through imperfection and transience.
Gibbon, speaking of the Iconoclasts, says,—"The Olympian Jove, created by the muse of Homer and the chisel of Phidias, might inspire a philosophic mind with momentary devotion; but these Catholic images were faintly and flatly delineated by monkish artists in the last degeneracy of taste and genius." Such comparisons mistake the point. These are not parallel attempts, but opposed from the outset. The "Catholic image" was a declaration that the problem cannot be solved in that way. An early legend relates, that a painter, undertaking to copy his Christ from a statue of Jove, had his hand suddenly withered. The attempt is accused because of the pretence it makes to coordinate body and spirit, Nature and God,—as if one configuration of matter were more godlike than another. The figure of the god claims to complete what Nature has partly done. But now the world is seen to be not merely the product of Mind working upon Matter, but the Creation of God out of nothing,—thus altogether His, in one part as much as in another. The only conceivable separateness, antagonism, is that of the sinful Will, setting itself up in its vanity; this it must be that arrogates to itself the ability to represent its Creator.
The Christian image is without form or comeliness,—rejects all outward graces, seemingly glories in abasement and deformity, fearing only to attribute to Matter some value of its own.
Henceforth the connection is no longer at arm's-length, as of the workman and the material. Resistance to limitation is changed into joyful acceptance; for it is not in the limitation, but in the resistance, that the misery of earth consists. The quarrel with imperfection is over. The finite shall neither fortify itself in its finiteness, nor seek to abolish it, but only make it the willing instrument of universal ends. Thus the true self first exists, and no longer needs to be extenuated or apologised for.