by its republication?  For, for whom does the artist work?  The inevitable answer is, “For his nation!” His statue, or picture, poem, or music, must be made up and out of them; they are at once his exemplars, his audience, and his worshippers; and he is their mirror in which they behold themselves as they are:  he breathes them vitally as an atmosphere, and they breathe him.  Zeus, Athene, Heracles, Prometheus, Agamemnon, Orestes, the House of Oedipus, Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, and Antigone, spoke something to the Hellenic nations; woke their piety, pity, or horror,—­thrilled, soothed, or delighted them; but they have no charm for our ears; for us, they are literally disembodied ghosts, and voiceless as shapeless.  But not so are Christ, and the holy Apostles and saints, and the Blessed Virgin; and not so is Hamlet, or Richard the Third, or Macbeth, or Shylock, or the House of Lear, Ophelia, Desdemona, Grisildis, or Una, or Genevieve.  No:  they all speak and move real and palpable before our eyes, and are felt deep down in the heart’s core of every thinking soul among us:—­they all grapple to us with holds that only life will loose.  Of all this I feel assured, because, a brief while since, we agreed together that man could only be raised through an incarnation of himself.  Tacitly, we would also seem to have limited the uses of Hellenic art to the serving as models of proportion, or as a gradus for form:  and, though I cannot deny them any merit they may have in this respect, still, I would wish to deal cautiously with them:  the artist,—­most especially the young one, and who is and would be most subject to them and open to their influence,—­should never have his soul asleep when his hand is awake; but, like voice and instrument, one should always accompany the other harmoniously.

Kosmon. But surely you will deal no less cautiously with early mediaeval art.  Archaisms are not more tolerable in pictures than they are in statues, poems, or music; and the archaisms of this kind of art are so numerous as to be at first sight the most striking feature belonging to it.  Most remarkable among these unnatural peculiarities are gilded backgrounds, gilded hair, gilded ornaments and borders to draperies and dresses, the latter’s excessive verticalism of lines and tedious involution of folds, and the childlike passivity of countenance and expression:  all of which are very prominent, and operate as serious drawbacks to their merits; which—­as I have freely admitted—­are in truth not a few, nor mean.

Christian. The artist is only a man, and living with other men in a state of being called society; and,—­though perhaps in a lesser degree—­he is as subject to its influences—­its fashions and customs—­as they are.  But in this respect his failings may be likened to the dross which the purest metal in its molten state continually throws up to its surface, but which is mere excrement, and so little essential that it can be skimmed away: