The key-note of all this is contained in those verses of the "Dies Iræ,"—
"Quærens me sedisti lassus,
Redemisti crucem passus;
Tantus labor non sit cassus."
Here we have in its compactest expression the difference between this age and the classic: that I, the vilest of sinners, am the object of God's highest care,—not the failure and mistake I seem, not the slag and refuse of Nature's working, but the object of this most stupendous mystery of the Divine economy. It is no purification or idealizing that is needed,—any such attempt must be abomination,—but a new birth of the self, by devotion of it to the purpose for which it was made.
The astounding discovery is slowly realized, and the statement of it difficult, from the need to distinguish between the true self and the false, and to declare that this importance belongs to the individual in virtue of his spiritual nature alone. The sainthood of the saint is not to be confounded with his personality. What have his virtues to do with his gown and shoes? what, indeed, with his natural disposition, as courageous, irascible, avaricious? The difficulty is pervading, not to be avoided; every aspect of him reveals only what is external, dies from him daily, and, if isolated, has already lost its meaning. It is only in his work, in his connection with the world, that we see him truly. Accordingly, the statue becomes the group, and the group a member of a series, a cycle in which each is incomplete without the rest. The classic ideal is shivered into fragments, all to be taken together to make up the meaning. Of the hundreds of statues and reliefs that surround the great Northern cathedrals, (Didron counts eighteen hundred upon the outside of Chartres,—nine thousand in all, carved or painted, inside and outside,) each has its appointed place in the sacred epos in stone that unfolds about the building from left to right of the beholder the history of the world from the Creation to the Judgment, and subordinated in parallel symbolism the daily life of the community, whatever occupied and interested men,—their virtues and vices, trades and recreations, the seasons and the elements, jokes, even, and sharp hits at the great and at the clergy, scenes from popular romances, and the radicalism of Reynard the Fox,—in short, all that touched the mind of the age, an impartial reflex of the great drama of life, wherein all exists alike to the glory of God.
It is not the glory of earth that is here celebrated. M. Didron says the statues which the mob pulled down from the churches, at the first French Revolution, as the images of their kings, were the kings and heroes of the Old Testament. Had they known this, it might not have saved the statues, but it shows how wide a gulf separated these men from their fathers, that their hands were not held by some instinct that here was the first hint of the fundamental idea of Democracy,—the sovereign importance of man, not as powerful, wise, beautiful, not in virtue of any chance advantage of birth, but in virtue of his religious nature, of the infinite possibilities he infolds.
The need to indicate that the source of value is not the accident of Nature, but Nature redeemed, regenerated by spirit, that all values are moral values, led to a certain abstractness of treatment,—on one side qualities to be embodied, on the other figures to receive them, so that the character seems adventitious, detachable, not thoroughly at one with the form. For instance, the fiends in the Orvieto Inferno are not terror embodied, as the Jove of Phidias embodied dignity and command; but the terrific is accumulated on the outside of them, as tusks, claws, etc. One can easily believe that the ancient sculptors, had it been lawful, could have put more horror into the calm features of a Medusa than is contained in all this apparatus and grimace. The concreteness of the antique, the form and meaning existing only for each other, is gone; the union is occasional only, and needs to be certified and kept up afresh on every new occasion. The form must assert itself, must show itself alive and quick, not the dead sign of a meaning that has fled. It would have been a poor compliment to a Greek sculptor to say that his work was life-like; he might answer with the classically disposed visitor of the Elgin marbles in Haydon's anecdote,—"Like life! Well, what of that?" He meant it for something much better. But during the Middle Ages this is constantly the highest encomium. Amid the utmost rudeness of conception and of execution, we see the first trace of awakening Art in the unmistakable effort to indicate that the figures are alive; and in the cathedral-sculpture of the best time this is still a leading characteristic. Even the single statues have for their outlines curves of contrary flexure, expressing motion; they seem to wave in the air, and their faces to glow with passing emotion. The animals are often uncouth, but the more life-like; a turn of the head or of the eye, a restless, unbalanced attitude, brings us nearer to the actual living creature than the magnificent repose of the antique lions and eagles,—as if they did not trust to our recognizing their character, but were prepared to demonstrate it with beak and claws. Even in the plants, though strictly conventionalized, it is the freedom and spring of their lines that more than anything else characterizes them and defies copying.
The world of matter, being no longer endowed with independent reality, is no longer felt as a contamination incurred by the idea in its descent into existence. The discrepancy is not final, so that the supremacy of the spirit is not shown by resistance, but by taking it to heart, carrying it out, and thereby overcoming it. In a Crucifixion of the twelfth century, Life is figured on one side crowned and victorious, and on the other Death overcome and slain. The finiteness of the finite is not the barrier, but the liberation, of the infinite.
But the statue remains stone; this unmeaning emphasis of weight and bulk, though diminished, is not to be got rid of. The life that sculpture can give is superficial and abstract, does not penetrate and possess the work; it is still the petrifaction of an instant, that does not instantly pass away, but remains as a contradiction to the next. It is the struggle against this fixity that gives to the sculpture of the Renaissance its aspect of unrest, of disdain of the present, of endless unsatisfied search. Hence the air of conflict that we see in Giovanni Pisano, and still more in later times,—the sculptor going to the edge of what the stone will allow, and beyond it, and, still unsatisfied, seeking through all means to indicate a yet unexecuted possibility. It is this that seethes in those strange, intense, unearthly figures of Donatello's, wasted as by internal fire,—the rage for an expression that shall at the same time declare its own insufficiency.
All that is done only makes the failure more evident. The fixity continues, and is only deepened into contortion and grimace. What we see is the effort alone. Hence in modern statues the uneasy, self-distrustful appeal to the spectator, in place of the lofty indifference of the antique. In Michel Angelo the same striving to indicate something in reserve, not expended, led to the exaggerated emphasis of certain parts, (as the length of the neck, depth of the eye-sockets, etc.,) and of general muscularity,—a show of force, that gave to the Moses the build of a Titan, and to the Christ of the Last Judgment the air of a gladiator. Michel Angelo often seems immersed in mere anatomy and academic tours de force, especially in his later works. He seems to see in the subject only a fresh problem in attitude, foreshortening, muscular display,—and this not only where he invents, but also where he borrows,—sometimes most strangely overlooking the sentiment; as in the figure of Christ, which he borrows from Orcagna and the older painters, even to the position of the arms, but with the touching gesture of reproof perverted into a savage menace; or in the Expulsion, taken almost line for line from Masaccio, but with the infinite grief expressed in Adam's figure turned into melodrama by showing his face.
It was not for the delight of the eye, nor from over-reverence of the matter-of-fact. He despised the copying of models, as the makeshift of ignorance. His profound study of anatomy was not for greater accuracy of imitation, but for greater license of invention. Of grace and pleasingness he became more and more careless, until he who at twenty had carved the lovely angel of S. Domenico, came at last to make all his men prize-fighters and his women viragos. It is clear that we nowhere get his final meaning,—that he does not fairly get to his theme at all, but is stopped at the outset, and loses himself in the search for a mode of expression more adequate to that "immense beauty" ever present to his mind,—so that the matter in hand occupies him only in its superficial aspects. What he sought on all hands, in his endless questioning of the human frame, his impatience of drapery, the furious haste to reach the live surface, and the tender modulation of it when it is reached, was to make the flesh itself speak and reveal the soul present at all points alike and at once. Nothing could have satisfied him but to impart to the marble itself that omnipresence of spirit of which animal life furnishes the hint. In this Titanic attempt the means were in open and direct contradiction to the end. It was a violation of the wise moderation of Sculpture, whose rigid and colorless material pointedly declines a rivalry it could not sustain. Else why not color the stone? The hue of flesh is the most direct assertion of life, but at the same time a direct negative to that totality and emphasis of the particular shape on which Sculpture relies. The color of the flesh comes from its transparency to the circulation,—the eternal flux of matter coming to the surface in this its highest form. It is the display in matter itself of what its true nature is,—not to resist, but to embody change,—to reduce itself to mere appearance, and be taken up without residuum in the momentary manifestation, and then at once give place to fresh manifestations.