els shedding radiance around them, swaying in mystic
linked dances, mingling with the sordid noises of toil seraphic
harmonies, now near, now dying away into distance, voices singing of
the sunshine and flowers of Paradise. And for others, for the lean and
tattered peasant, with the dull, apathetic resignation of the starved
and goaded ox or horse, sleeping on the damp clay of his hut and eating
strange flourless bread, and stranger carrion flesh, there came a world
of the supernatural, different from that of the monk or the artisan, at
once terrifying and consoling; the divinities cast out by Christianity,
the divinities for ever newly begotten by nature, but begotten of a
nature miserably changed, born in exile and obloquy and persecution,
fostered by the wretched and the brutified; differing from the gods of
antiquity as the desolate heath, barren of all save stones and prickly
furze and thistle, differs from the fertile pasture-land; as the forests
planted over the cornfield, whence issue wolves, and the Baron's
harvest-trampling horses, differ from the forests which gave their
oaks and pines to Tyrian ships; divinities warped, and crippled, grown
hideous and malignant and unhappy in the likeness of their miserable
votaries.

This is the real supernatural, born of the imagination and its
surroundings, the vital, the fluctuating, the potent; and it is this
which the artist of every age, from Phidias to Giotto, from Giotto to
Blake, has been called upon to make known to the multitude. And there
had been artistic work going on unnoticed long before the time of any
painter or sculptor or poet of whom we have any record; mankind longed
from the first to embody, to fix its visions of wonder, it set to work
with rough unskilful fingers moulding into shape its divinities. Rude
work, ugly, barbarous, blundering scratchings on walls, kneaded clay
vessels, notched sticks, nonsense rhymes; but work nevertheless which
already showed that art and the supernatural were at variance, the
beaked and clawed figures outlined on the wall were compromises between
the man and the beast, but definite compromises, so much and no more of
the man, so much and no more of the beast; the goddess on the clay
vessels became a mere little owl; the divinities even in the nonsense
verses were presented now as very distinct cows, now as very distinct
clouds, or very distinct men and women; the vague, fluctuating
impressions oscillating before the imag