nly possible inspiration of Art. The extreme of this direction
we see in the Iconoclasm of the eighth century, but it has never
completely died out. Gibbon tells us of a Greek priest who refused to
receive some pictures that Titian had painted for him, because they were
too real:--"Your scandalous figures," said he, "stand quite out from the
canvas; they are as bad as a group of statues." It is a tenderness
towards the idea, lest it should be dishonored by actuality. Matter is
gross, obscure, evil, an obstacle to spirit,--and material existence
tolerable only as momentary, vanishing, and, as it were, under constant
protest, and with the suspicion that the Devil has a hand in it. It
belongs especially to the Oriental mind, and its logical result is the
Buddhist heaven of annihilation.

The defect of this view is not that it is too ideal, but that it is not
ideal enough. It is an incomplete idealism that through weakness of
faith does not hold fast its own point of view, and so does not dispose
of matter, but leaves it outside, as negation, obstacle. The body is
allowed to exist, but remains in disgrace and reduced to the barest
indication. But it is honoring matter far too much to allow that it can
be an obstacle. It is no obstacle, for it is _nothing_ of itself.
Rightly understood, this contempt of the body is directed only against
the false emphasis placed upon single aspects or manifestations. It is a
feeling that the true ideal is not thus shut up in a forced exception,
as if it were the subtilized product of a distillation whereby the
earthly is to be purged of its dross; but that it is the all-pervading
reality, which the finite can neither hinder nor help, but only obey,
which death and corruption praise, which establishes itself through
imperfection and transience.

Gibbon, speaking of the Iconoclasts, says,--"The Olympian Jove, created
by the muse of Homer and the chisel of Phidias, might inspire a
philosophic mind with momentary devotion; but these Catholic images were
faintly and flatly delineated by monkish artists in the last degeneracy
of taste and genius." Such comparisons mistake the point. These are not
parallel attempts, but opposed from the outset. The "Catholic image" was
a declaration that the problem cannot be solved in that way. An early
legend relates, that a painter, undertaking to copy his Christ from a
statue of Jove, had his hand suddenly withered. The attempt is accused
because of the preten