I

the ceremony of the kissing of his feet lest he should betray his syphilitic condition. His successor, Leo X., continued Julius's practice of selling indulgences all over Europe (a practice now confined to Catholic Spain), and raised 3,000,000 ducats by the sale of offices. On these tainted and shameful funds was reared the glory of St. Peter's at Rome. One is prepared to hear that "the example of Rome was in some sense the justification of the fraud, violence, lust, filthy living, and ungodliness of the whole nation." But this was the period during which the art which we are asked to call Christian reached its highest and most glorious development. It was after half a century of this kind of Christianity, and during its greatest moral degradation, that, in the words of Woltmann and Woermann, "the highest beauty which the gods themselves had, 2,000 years before, revealed to the Greeks, now revisited earth among the Italians." Let us conclude soberly with Mr. Symonds. Raphael and Michel Angelo were neither pagans nor Christians. They were artists and men.

The humanitarian conclusion forces itself on us at every point in the history of painting. We find that there was a great school founded in the Netherlands by the Van Eycks at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and turn to study it. We are told that its rise must be connected with the new J. A. Symonds, loc. cit., i., 383.

prosperity of the country, and the birth of a jovial, free-living generation that had the taste and the means for luxury; and that "the feeling for Nature in Flanders was stronger even than in Italy." Of later Rembrandt and Rubens, with their known inspiration in the living human face and human body, we need not speak. We are reminded that the civic institution of Florence, the Palazzo Vecchio, was the centre and focus of Florentine art. We are taught that the great Venetian painters-Titian, Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese-are "the interpreters of the worldly splendour" of Venice, that their piety is superficial and conventional, and that what they really express is "the free enjoyment and living energy" of a humanist age. But I will close with a few words on the development of painting in Spain.

"The artists of Spain," says one of the chief living authorities on them, "were cramped and stultified in their finest expression by the strict and often childish surveillance of king and priest. Indeed, it is not overstating the truth to say that the patronage which called the Spanish school into its fullest, fairest existence likewise caused its destruction." The story of the Spanish school begins after the fall of Granada (1492), and is retarded by the prevalence of war and the "childish subordination" of the Spanish painter. Besides

I C. G. Hartley, A Record of Spanish Painting, p. 2.

the general spirit of the Church, standing in the way of a correct interpretation of nature and of the human form, there was the special obstacle of the Inquisition, which kept a close watch on sacred work. It was not until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that Spanish painting broke away and "refused to remain solely the handmaid of the Church." The event was the culmination of a tendency towards naturalism that had been working for centuries, and was strengthened by the example of the Low Countries. Of Murillo, Miss Hartley says that "his work depends for its charm upon its execution, not upon its inspiration." He depicted the common types of Andalusia, and, in proportion as he touched them with the idealism of Catholic convention, he "lost dignity and truth." The paintings of Velasquez, the greatest of Spain's artists, she describes as "untinged with the Spanish Roman Catholic ideal." "The medieval spirit did not exist in Velasquez. He had selected truth to common nature as the load-star of his work."

Thus there is no mistaking the meaning of the great outburst of medieval art. From Giotto to Raphael the growing inspiration is humanist. Titian and Tintoretto, Murillo and Velasquez, Rembrandt and Rubens-they are all interpreters of human life, even when they are painting Mary or the saints. Every school takes its rise in a phase of human joy and prosperity, an increased refinement of taste and demand for luxury. As the

whole movement advances, piety decays, and a sceptical culture prevails. Art, even when it retains religious subjects, falls away from the Christian spirit as soon as it is free to do so, and it can secure secular patronage. In proportion as it ceases to be inspired by the old religious ardour it gains in splendour and puts on the garb of immortality. Monasteries for a time still have their Fra Angelicos, but also their Fra Lippis. The greatest masters of medieval art are "full of the breadth of humanity," and fired by its inspiration.

The evolution of sculpture is parallel to that of painting. Till the thirteenth century it was but subsidiary to architecture. When it found freedom it found its highest inspiration in the human form. The evolution of music has the same lesson. Its development was slow and restricted in the Christian period, in spite of its ample adoption. When it passed to the hands of laymen like Bach and Handel, when it was touched by the influence of profane song, it began its great modern growth. The evolution of poetry is no exception. With Chaucer the new spirit begins; in Shakespeare it reaches maturity. Since Milton every great poet has been a great humanist. In every art, in every country, we see the transition from supernaturalism to naturalism; and, as the latter inspiration gains on the former, art approaches its most lofty altitudes.

CHAPTER IX.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE ON

MORALITY

It is possible that many of my readers will have resented what they will feel to be the irrelevance of my previous chapters. They may observe that Christ gave his Church no direction to devote itself to social problems or the elevation of art and science, and that the application of such tests to its success is fallacious. In that view of the narrowness of aim of the founders of Christianity I entirely concur, but almost the whole school of the apologists do not, and I have been forced to examine their claims. Our age attaches very great importance to the cultivation of art and science, and the improvement of our social, industrial, and juridical order; and the temptation to trace these modern growths to Christian inspiration was not to be resisted. In spite of the impressive warning of men like Dean Church, in his Gifts of Civilisation, that these imprudent claims only provoke an "overwhelming reply"; in spite of the Dean's protest that "many of the characteristic phenomena of our time seem to point to great and salutary results, brought about without calling on the religious