From what has hitherto been advanced, we may assert with confidence that,
if the arts were to play an important part in Christian culture, an art
was imperatively demanded that should be at home in the sphere of intense
feeling, that should treat the body as the interpreter and symbol of the
soul, and should not shrink from pain and passion. How far the fine arts
were at all qualified to express the essential thoughts of Christianity--a
doubt suggested in the foregoing paragraphs--and how far, through their
proved inadequacy to perform this task completely, they weakened the hold
of mediaeval faiths upon the modern mind, are questions to be raised
hereafter. For the present it is enough to affirm that, least of all the
arts, could sculpture, with its essential repose and its dependence on
corporeal conditions, solve the problem. Sculpture had suited the
requirements of Greek thought. It belonged by right to men who not
unwillingly accepted the life of this world as final, and who worshipped
in their deities the incarnate personality of man made perfect. But it
could not express the cycle of Christian ideas. The desire of a better
world, the fear of a worse; the sense of sin referred to physical
appetites, and the corresponding mortification of the flesh; hope,
ecstasy, and penitence and prayer; all these imply contempt or hatred for
the body, suggest notions too spiritual to be conveyed by the rounded
contours of beautiful limbs, too full of struggle for statuesque
tranquillity. The new element needed a more elastic medium of expression.
Motives more varied, gradations of sentiment more delicate, the fugitive
and transient phases of emotion, the inner depths of consciousness, had
somehow to be seized. It was here that painting asserted its supremacy.
Painting is many degrees further removed than sculpture from dependence on
the body in the fulness of its physical proportions. It touches our
sensibilities by suggestions more indirect, more mobile, and more
multiform. Colour and shadow, aërial perspective and complicated grouping,