to remember that Schiller was for a time enrolled. Others vowed their devotions to the purely poetic element in primitive Christianity, making it the mistress to whom their lances were pledged. Others sighed, like Rosseau, at the feet of a sentimental philanthropy, whose real children were sent to the poor-house, while its imaginary brotherhood was idealized into an Arcadia. And others, conspicuous among whom were Friedrich Schlegel, Müller, and Werner, dedicated themselves to the chivalric service of the saints of the mediaeval church.

It is said that there are Spanish convents in which the nuns, compelled to live in idleness, take to the dressing and fondling of dolls. We certainly all of us know how surely a divorce from active and real life engenders extravagant and capricious humors and enthusiasms. And the Romanticists had divorced themselves most effectually from all that was real and present; and, by long association, their particular extravagancies were so imbedded in them that when the public mind was restored to a healthy condition these extravagancies had become a second nature, and could not be got rid of. So it was with Schlegel and his romanticism about mediaeval heroes, princes, and saints. Wherever he went to lecture, and for lecturing his natural gifts were great, this romanticism stuck to him; and to some parts of young Germany it was inexpressibly heavy; to others, inexpressibly grotesque. He went to Cologne, under the shadow of whose dome, and in the centre of whose feudal memories, he could at least expect deference; but at Cologne he was unnoticed by all that savored of active, present life. Only ancient "Catholics" attended his lectures; only Jesuits uttered his praise. So he himself writes, and so writes his wife, in letters since published, in which with the greatest bitterness they denounce the realism of an age that shut its ears to the Romanticists, and refused to listen to their songs. He was wretchedly poor; and when we recollect the gallant extravagance with which he originally pranced forth on his early tournaments, and the popular applause which then

greeted him, we cannot but be saddened on viewing the desolation and want into which he fell. And yet there is truth, as well as point, in Gervinus's remarks, when, after narrating the dissolution of the Romanticists, and after mentioning the retreats in which these superannuated enthusiasts found shelter, he says: "Some who, like F. Schlegel, Müller, and Werner, removed to Vienna, made their new creed [the Romish] remunerative, and derived from it not merely repose, but income." To each of these forlorn fugitives comfortable offices were assigned. They found, what elsewhere they could not have found, sympathizers and cogroaners and supporters; they were rescued not merely from the ridicule which the veteran and inveterate Romanticists encountered in the practical circles of the living present, they were rescued, also, from starvation. That they should thus have been comforted and entertained was but right. The amazing feature is, that the Propaganda should now put forward the Romish absorption of the literary Romanticists as a proof of the Romeward-tendency of modern thought. It is as if we should point to the owl creeping into a dark hole, as a proof that birds shun the light. The Romanticists of this school crept into Rome, because in the open world they were shunned as obsolete by the practical, and tittered at as ridiculous by the unthinking. They crept into Rome, because their sight had been so long adjusted to the phantoms of an unreal life that the daylight of the real and the practical was to them a blur and distress.

3. Disgust with the Present in Art.

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So far as architecture is concerned, the question is easily solved. The dispute is an old one; it is that between the eye and the ear as the avenues of instruction which is to be the subordinate? Are buildings for public worship to be constructed in the way which will best enable thought to pass through the ear by way of language, or in the way that will best enable it to be displayed to the eye by means of pictures? Now, between the two systems, the first is the

Protestant in the construction of churches, and the second, the Romish. The first says: "Give me a building in which the preacher's voice can be best heard by the largest number of persons." The second says: "Give me a building which will itself, through the eye, most deeply impress the religious sensibilities, and which will afford the most effective and imposing stage for the spectacles of the altar and the processions of the nave, and for the numerous statues and pictures by which religious truths may be symbolized." Now, while fully admitting the claims of architecture as an art, while fully admitting the powerful influence on the imagination of noble and richly-adorned buildings, there can be no doubt that between the two ways of communicating thought, that by picture or figure and that by word, the former is the mark of a more barbaric and ignorant, the latter of a more cultured and mature, age. The teaching of picture or spectacle is limited to but a few combinations of expression; is stiff and inflexible, and cannot be varied, as can the preacher's speech, from day to day and from moment to moment, to meet the worshipper's wants; is expensive and almost unattainable in its better phases, and approaches to the ridiculous in the lower; and is liable to draw forth, instead of the worship of heart and soul, sometimes a sensuous worship, sometimes worship that is merely sentimental, sometimes gross idolatry. Feel as tenderly as we may the charms of art, we cannot but see that to subordinate, in this respect, the ear to the eye, is to push worship, if not the worshipper, back into a grosser and more barbarous age. That an architect, filled with enthusiasm for his art, should revolt at the Protestant demands in this respect, should not surprise us. Plainness, if not ugliness, seems inseparable from all buildings whose object is the easiest transmission of the voice. Nor is it by any means clear that when the end is to impart unbroken the current of thought, columns imbedded with statues, niches rich with pictures, do not tend almost as much to distract the attention as they do to break the sound. Westminster Abbey can only be made fit for public

worship by letting down heavy sheets of canvass, which cover up the historic walls, while they shut in the speaker's utterances; and, though we may reproduce Westminster Abbey for other purposes, as a national monument, or as a great and sublime work of art, yet when an audiencechamber is to be effectively constructed, something like these canvass-sheets must be invoked. Protestantism, therefore, affords but little field for ecclesiastical architecture, while Romanism opens a sphere in which it can lavish its richest treasures, can exercise its sublimest genius, can win its most glorious reward. We need not wonder, therefore, at the tendency of ecclesiastical architects towards Rome, or towards those high ecclesiastical theories by which the Romish idea of worship is adopted. But with all personal deference to such men, with the highest appreciation of architecture as a means for elevating the public taste, and of making almost perpetual certain grand rudimental ideas in patriotism, and even in religion, we have to say that the disgust of ecclesiastical architecture in this respect with Protestantism is a disgust with the nineteenth century; is a disgust with printing and common-school education, which have made nine tenths of our population more approachable through language than by picture; is a disgust with the necessary conditions of this age and country, as distinguished from the obsolete conditions of four centuries ago.

And so with painting. The objections of the Reformers to pictures as incidents of public worship arose not merely from what might be considered an overstrained interpretation of the second commandment, not merely from the shock which men of severe taste and high religious tone must receive from the hideous or absurd representations of things sacred by which three fourths of the continental churches are disgraced, but from an intuitive sense that the era which was opening was to be an era, as has just been stated, in which men, by the force of living words, and not through the unplastic and often false picture, were to be brought to know God. We cannot, indeed, blame those great

painters, who, absorbed with enthusiasm for their art, de sirous of making that art the minister not of sensual life, not of inanimate nature, but of religious thought, have revolted at this stern decree, accepted, as it has been, as one of the fundamental maxims of Protestantism. There is no law, no matter how wise, but has its dark side; and undoubtedly there is this dark side to the law of which we speak, that it silences, as it were, in the sanctuary, the ministry of painting, so far as painting undertakes to exhibit dogma. But in view of the great principle we have just stated, in view of the fact that where there exists one picture capable of giving a true conception of the gospel, or of Him from whom the gospel springs, there are countless myriads which pervert that gospel, and exhibit our blessed Lord and Master in false or grotesque or even odious lights, -in view of the fact that the worship thus directed is thus often erroneous and almost always gross, we feel that the decree is right, and must be rigorously maintained. We look, it is true, with sadness on Overbeck, on Schadow, on Vogel, on Veit, on the long train of their scholars, as they leave the Evangelical German church, and join that of Rome. They were not frivolous men, nor men superannuated and fantastic, as were the patrician reactionists, whose perversion has already been recorded. Overbeck, the leader of the artistic Romanticists, was a compound, as Mr. Hilliard well says, of painter, gentleman, and monk. He was severe and pure as a man, and as an artist mighty and sublime, standing in the noblest contrast to the dissolute race of painters whom he succeeded. His quarrel with them was a right one. He was right in saying that Raphaelism and Titianism had been pushed into a sensualism of subject and of coloring which both enervated art and demoralized

1 Archdeacon Hare, in his charge of 1843, speaks of similar migrations from the church of England: "One man became a Romanist (in Germany), because he admired the knights of the Middle Ages; another, because he admired the pictures of Perugino and the earlier works of Raphael; others, because they admired the architecture of our ancient churches and cathedrals. How strong this latter temptation is we have seen of late in England."