ith contemptuous pity for its darkness. But until his day comes, our
farthing-dips seem to make a gaudy illumination. And, meantime, we are
alive; we walk about; we, too, can swell the chorus which the Initiated
chant in every century with the same fond confidence: "We alone enjoy
the Holy Light."

The New is ever becoming old; the old ever changing into New. And if we
ask why each waxes or wanes just when it does and as it does, there is,
in the last analysis, no better answer than Aurora's explanation for
chancing on the poets--

_Because the time was ripe._

And the Holbein century is one of stupendous Transitions because the
time was ripe; and not simply because printing was invented, or Greek
scholars were driven from Constantinople to scatter abroad in Europe, or
Ferdinand and Isabella wanted a direct route to Cathay, or Friar Martin
nailed ninety-five Theses to the door of Wittenberg's church, and built
himself thereby an everlasting name as Luther.

And because the time was ripe for a new Art, even more than because this
or that great painter entrained it, it also had its transition period,
and Holbein is set down in manuals as a transitional painter. Teutonic,
too; because all Christian art is either Byzantine or Italian or
Teutonic in its type.

When it first crept from the catacombs under the protection of the
Constantinople Court it could but be Byzantine; that strange composite
obtained by stripping the Greek "beast" of every pagan beauty and then
decking it out with crude Oriental ornament. But who that prizes the
peculiar product of that fanaticism would have had its cradle without
this sleepless terror, lest for the whole world of classic heathendom
it should lose the dear-bought soul of purely Christian ideals? Or who,
remembering that in thus relentlessly sacrificing its entire heritage of
pagan accumulation it put back the clock of Art to the Stone Age, and
had to begin all over again in the helpless bewilderment of untaught
childish effort,--could find twice ten centuries too long for the
astounding feat it achieved? Ten centuries, after all, make but a
marvellous short course betwixt the archaic compositions of the third
century and the compositions of Giotto or Wilhelm Meister.

A great deal of nonsense is talked about the "tyrannies" which the
Monastic Age inflicted on Art. Of course, monasticism fostered fanaticism.
It does not need the luminous genius that said it, to teach us that
"wha