tever is necessary to what we make our sole object is sure, in some
way or in some time or other, to become our master." And with the monk,
the true monk in his day of usefulness, every knowledge and every art
was good or bad according as it served monastic ideals. But it is absurd
to say that the monk--_qua_ monk--"put the intellect in chains." The
whole body of his oppression was not so paralysing as the iron little
finger of Malherbe and his school of "classic" despots. To charge upon
the monk the limitations of his crude thought and cruder methods is
about as intelligent as it would be to fall foul of Shakespeare because
boys played his women's parts.

The springs of Helicon were the monk's also, as witness Tuotilo and
Bernard of Clairvaux; but it was by the waters of Jordan that his
miracles were wrought. As Johnson somewhere says of Watts, "every kind
of knowledge was by the piety of his mind converted into theology." And
for the rest,--by the labour of his hands, by his fasting from the
things of the flesh, by his lofty faith--however erring or forgotten or
betrayed, in individual cases,--by every impressive lesson of a hard
life lived unto others and a hard death died unto himself, century
after century it was the monk who taught and helped the barbarian of
every land to turn the desolate freedom of the wild ass into a smiling
homestead and the savage Africa of his own heart into at least a better
place. The marvel is that he could at the same time find room or energy
to make his monastery also a laboratory, a library, and a studio. And
yet he did.

To say that he abhorred Greek ideals is to say that the shepherd abhors
the wolf. His life was one long fight with the insidious poison of the
Greek. He did not,--at any rate in his best days--believe at all in Art
for Art's sake; and had far too intimate an acquaintance with the
"natural man" to do him even justice. What he wanted was to do away with
him.

Yet with all its repellent features, it is to this unflinching
exclusiveness of the monkish ideal that we owe one of the most exquisite
blossoms on the stock of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,--their
innocent and appealing art; an art as original and as worthy of reverence,
within its own peculiar province, as the masterpieces of Greece or
Italy. You must turn from the beauty of Antinous to the beauty of, say,
the Saint Veronica, among the works of the Cologne school at Munich,
before you can estimate