into questionable limitations, not to be assumed without express
warrant, as exception, miracle, and in things consecrated and set apart.
Hence the patchwork composition of the early painters; we see in it an
extreme diversity of value ascribed to the things about them. It is a
world partly divine and partly rubbish; not a universe, but a collection
of fragments from various worlds. The figures in their landscapes do not
tread the earth as if they belonged there, but like actors upon a stage,
tricked up for the occasion. The earth is a desert upon which stones
have been laid and herbs stuck into the crevices. The trees are put
together out of separate leaves and twigs, and the rocks and mountains
inserted like posts. In the earliest specimens the figures themselves
have the same piecemeal look: their members are not born together, but
put together. We see just how far the soul extends into them,--sometimes
only to the eyes, then to the rest of the features, afterwards to the
limbs and extremities. Evidently the artist's conception left much
outside of it, to be added by way of label or explanation. In the trees,
the care is to give the well-known fruit, the acorn or the apple, not
the character of the tree; for what is wanted is only an indication what
tree is meant. The only tie between man and the material world is the
_use_ he makes of it, elaborating and turning it into something it was
not. Hence the trim _orderliness_ of the mediaeval landscape. Dante shows
no love of the woods or the mountains, but only dread and dislike, and
draws his tropes from engineering, from shipyards, moats, embankments.

The mediaeval conception is higher than the antique; it recognizes a
reality beyond the immediate, but not yet that it is the reality of the
immediate and present also. But Art must dislodge this phantom of a
lower, profane reality, and accept its own visions as authentic and
sufficient. The modern mind is in this sense less religious than the
mediaeval, that the antithesis of phenomenal and real is less present to
it. But the pungency of this antithesis comes from an imperfect
realization of its meaning. Just so far as the subjection of the finite
remains no longer a postulate or an aspiration, but is carried into
effect,--its finiteness no longer resisted or deplored, but
accepted,--just so far it ceases to be opaque and inert. The present
seems trivial and squalid, because it is clutched and held fast,--the
fugitive im