ted on the outside of them, as tusks, claws, etc.
One can easily believe that the ancient sculptors, had it been lawful,
could have put more horror into the calm features of a Medusa than is
contained in all this apparatus and grimace. The concreteness of the
antique, the form and meaning existing only for each other, is gone; the
union is _occasional_ only, and needs to be certified and kept up afresh
on every new occasion. The form must assert itself, must show itself
alive and quick, not the dead sign of a meaning that has fled. It would
have been a poor compliment to a Greek sculptor to say that his work was
life-like; he might answer with the classically disposed visitor of the
Elgin marbles in Haydon's anecdote,--"Like life! Well, what of that?" He
meant it for something much better. But during the Middle Ages this is
constantly the highest encomium. Amid the utmost rudeness of conception
and of execution, we see the first trace of awakening Art in the
unmistakable effort to indicate that the figures are alive; and in the
cathedral-sculpture of the best time this is still a leading
characteristic. Even the single statues have for their outlines curves
of contrary flexure, expressing motion; they seem to wave in the air,
and their faces to glow with passing emotion. The animals are often
uncouth, but the more life-like; a turn of the head or of the eye, a
restless, unbalanced attitude, brings us nearer to the actual living
creature than the magnificent repose of the antique lions and
eagles,--as if they did not trust to our recognizing their character,
but were prepared to demonstrate it with beak and claws. Even in the
plants, though strictly conventionalized, it is the freedom and spring
of their lines that more than anything else characterizes them and
defies copying.

The world of matter, being no longer endowed with independent reality,
is no longer felt as a contamination incurred by the idea in its descent
into existence. The discrepancy is not final, so that the supremacy of
the spirit is not shown by resistance, but by taking it to heart,
carrying it out, and thereby overcoming it. In a Crucifixion of the
twelfth century, Life is figured on one side crowned and victorious, and
on the other Death overcome and slain. The finiteness of the finite is
not the barrier, but the liberation, of the infinite.

But the statue remains stone; this unmeaning emphasis of weight and
bulk, though diminished, is not to be