the Gulf of many things besides time which for
ever divides the world of the one from the world of the other. And
then you must essay to embody the visions of Patmos with a child's
colour-box and brushes, before you can compare the achievements--the
amazing achievements--of the monkish ideal with the achievements of
classic paganism.

With the school of Wilhelm Meister this tremendous revolution had
accomplished itself; and solely through the indomitable will of the
monk. The ideal of Greece had been to show how gods walk the earth. This
Christian ideal was to show how devout men and women walk with God.
Their ineffable heavenly faces look out from their golden world--

_Inviolate, unwearied,
Divinest, sweetest, best,_

upon this far-off, far other world, where nothing is inviolate, and
divinest things must come at last to tears and ashes.

But the monk had had his day as well as his way. The so-called Gothic
architecture had expressed its uttermost of aspiration and tenuity; and
painting had fulfilled its utmost accommodation to the ever more slender
wall-spaces and forms which this architecture necessitated. And once
again, in the fifteenth century, the time was ripe for a new transition.
Art was now to reveal the realities of this world, and to concern itself
with Man among them. And just as the law of reaction flung the mind
into religious revolt from the outworn dogmas and overgrown pretensions
of the monkish ideal, so did it drive the healthy reaction of art into
its own extravagances of protest. And we shall see how even a genius
like Holbein's was unable to entirely free itself from this reactionary
defect. For with all his astonishing powers, imaginative and technical,
he never wholly overcame that defect of making his figures too short and
too thick-set for grace, which amounted to a deformity in the full-length
figures of his early work, and was due to his fierce revolt from the
unnaturally elongated forms of an earlier period.

Yet we should make a grave mistake if we were to regard Holbein as cut
off by this reaction from all affinities with the monkish ideals of
the Cologne school. On the contrary. We shall see, especially in his
religious pictures, how many of those ideals had fed the very springs of
his imagination and sunk deep into his art; only expressing themselves
in his own symbolism and in forms unlike theirs.

* * * * *

In the Augsburg Gallery there is