d themselves
of some of the accumulated stores; but we have no record of such
adaptations, unless the splendid curtains and the silver hangings of
Pope Stephen IV. were taken out of some imperial treasure-house.

The contrast between early ecclesiastical art and that which
immediately preceded it in the palaces of the Caesars (at Rome, Tivoli,
and wherever we find their ruined glories) is most remarkable.

The lovely and the lively had been suddenly abandoned for the heavy
earnest solemnity and inartistic drawing of the frescoes of the
underground church of St. Clemente in Rome, and that of the early
Christian mosaics.

It is as if the arts which had lent, nay, given themselves to the
glorification of idols, had suddenly died out, leaving behind them
neither an artist, nor a skilled artisan, scarcely a tradition.

The new Christian ideas had to be painfully recorded on sacred
buildings and their furnishings for more than a thousand years; with
all the patient acquiescence of untaught ignorance, and the struggling
uncertainty of genius pursuing a distant glimmering light, apparently
unconscious of all that had preceded it in Egyptian and classic art.
The great political and religious revolutions in Europe had crushed
and buried the arts under the ruins of the Empire over which Time
himself seemed to have broken his hour-glass, so little was there to
show any memory of their past, or hope for their future. The alternate
progress and destruction of the arts in European civilization strike
the student, in vivid contrast with the immutability of those of the
East, especially in India and China, where the old forms were still
being maintained by the swaddling bands of codified custom[497] that
had restricted their development, but prolonged their existence, and
so they had survived, while Greece conquered and robbed the East and
Egypt, and Rome crushed Greece and was in her turn despoiled by the
Goths and Huns.[498]

Christian art had to begin at the very beginning, and collect its own
traditions, and organize its own forms. These gradually accumulated,
availing themselves of accepted symbols, and adding to them hidden
meanings. The Reformation checked this development in the north of
Europe, but after 300 years we are now witnessing its revival, which
is not merely owing to a religious impulse, but also to the
archaeological tendency of our day and to the historical interest we
attach to the ceremonials of the East.