its symbolism, wide and deep as the Christian, but the symbolism expressed a totally different order of conceptions. The Greek honored the body, and aimed at the perfect representation of it, because he deified nature, and strove to approach her as closely as possible. The Christian, on the contrary, despised the Body. He looked on Nature herself as partaking of the Fall, and thereby impure, alien from God. The Body, thus conceived as the perishable vehicle of the Soul, was not a fitting symbol. He did not try to express his Ideal in the Body, but beyond it.

This contrast is well seen in the early forms of each Art: the Eginetan statues, and the paintings of Giotto and Perugino. In the Eginetan sculpture the bodies are represented with a truth and beauty perfectly marvellous, when contrasted with the want of truth and expression in the faces, all of one type, and all with the same fixed smile. In Giotto and Perugino the faces are admirable in expression, but the figures are singularly ill-drawn and ungraceful. The Greek thought less of the soul than of the body, less of expression than of form. The face and its expression were to him only details of the general physigonomy of the external man. To the Christian the face was the physiognomy, for it expressed the soul. A complete Man was the ideal of the one, a complete Soul the ideal of the other.

In stating thus decisively that Realism is the dominant characteristic of the Greek mind, as Idealism is of the Christian, it may be worth while to guard against misconception, and correct a very general error, the error, namely, of supposing that the Greeks had no Spiritualism mingling with their Realism. What was before said of Germany equally applies to Greece; we may fix our attention on the dominant characteristic, but we must not

forget that there are numerous varieties. Thus, even in the palmy days of Grecian thought we shall find thinkers as unmistakeably idealistic as any to be found in Germany. Xenophanes was such, Pythagoras was such, and we have only to look into Plato, or still more into Plotinus and the Alexandrian writers, to see an Idealism and an Asceticism comparable to the extremes of the middle-age extravagances.

I have dwelt on the capital distinction between Pagan and Christian Art as a means of more thoroughly elucidating the spirit of German Art. For German Art carries further than any other the Idealism which is essential to Christianity; and indeed the words German and Christian are frequently used as convertible terms. The doctrines which changed the thought of Europe, were welcomed by the Germans, prepared to accept them. Already they had an Evil Principle, - Loki. They had their giants and dwarfs, their elves and kobolds, good and evil spirits. They had, moreover, Priestesses and Prophetesses; and these women, whom they held to be divinely inspired, the Christians, by a natural consequence of the logic which turned gods into demons, accused of being inspired by the devil. The long and terrible history of Witchcraft tells what fanaticism could make of such logic. Inspiration which did not come from the Church, clearly came from the devil. Epileptic women were 'possessed.' Women who had more than ordinary acuteness were accused of witchcraft. This derivation of the Witch from the Priestess is but another illustration of that tendency to diabolize which may be seen running throughout the speculations and literature of the Middle Ages. The Church proclaimed itself sole possessor of the Truth, sole repository of inspiration, sole miracle-worker; but as there were some wonders performed without the aid of the Church, the priests

naturally declared those wonders counterfeits. For Satan was not only the enemy of God, he was in every way his imitator. There is a curious indication of this in the Celtic myth of Merlin the great magician, whom Satan in imitation begat from a virgin.* It is on this imitative action' of Satan that the whole world of magic and witchcraft rests. He parodied the holy miracles in devilish wonders; and as the Church had its inspired men, so had Satan his apostles and wonder-workers. The pious man gave his soul to God and renounced the world's pomps; the impious man gave his soul to the Devil for possession of the world's pomps. A formal compact and covenant gave Satan the reversion of a soul. Faust is a type of such covenants. But the Faust-legend is noble compared

with the legend of the Witches' Sabbath.

Women, who from the earliest days had been regarded as weak, subordinate and somewhat accursed, and who in Eve had given the first example of willingness to listen to Satan, were selected by popular belief as the Chosen Ones of the Devil. Men also were chosen, and these were Wizards or Magicians; but they were less numerous than the witches, a fact which Sprenger, in his famous manual of witchcraft, Malleus Maleficarum, thinks it necessary to explain. Men and women paid a terrible penalty to superstition; they were persecuted and burnt by thousands. No one doubted the fact of their covenant with Satan. one doubted that they held their Witches' Sabbath on the Blocksberg, and elsewhere, of which circumstantial narratives were ready to attest every detail. From nine o'clock till midnight Wizards and Witches assembled. Satan appeared, sometimes in the form of a lusty dancer gayly

No

*Johannes Scherr: Geschichte Deutscher Cultur und Sitte, p. 354; a work to which I am indebted for many details.

dressed, but mostly in the majestic form of a dusky, hideous man, half man, half goat, seated on a throne of gold and ebony. He wore a crown of little horns, and besides this crown he had two horns at the back of his head, and one upon his brow, which shed rays of light brighter than the moon. His large owl eyes flashed a fearful light. His fingers terminated in claws, his chin carried a goat's beard, a forked tail completed his terrible aspect. No sooner did he appear than the whole assembly knelt before him, denying God; then kissing his left hand, left foot left side (with other less honorable parts of his person), they proclaimed him Lord. They confessed to him their sins, which consisted of going to church, honoring Christian ceremonies, and not doing all the evil which opportunity permitted. He awarded penances and absolution. Then began the Satanic Mass, at the close of which came the Sacrament of bread and wine; but the hellish Host was black and tough, like an old shoe, and the wine bitter. Then followed the Witches' Dance, every face turned round, gazing at the festive tables. During the saturnalia the Devil embraced them one after the other, and bade them imitate him in doing evil whenever they could.

This was no mere play of imagination, it was a devout belief; to doubt was to incur the accusation of being in league with Satan; those who were bold enough to express scepticism, were burnt as worse than heretics. The belief in witchcraft was by no means confined to Germany, but in Germany the belief was more fruitful than elsewhere. The legendary lore of the German people is mainly composed of what may be called the goblin-element. And very noticeable it is that when the Reformation came to scatter to the winds all the Legends of Catholicism, it never touched the true goblin-legend.

Luther believed not only in the Devil, but in witches, with hearty belief; and one day seeing a poor Cretin, he declared the boy was possessed,' and bade them throw him into the water.

6

However strong this Idealistic tendency, it was of course incapable, even when most dominant, of overruling entirely the Realism, which made men cling fast to Nature, and to Sensuous pleasures. We shall therefore at all times find a struggle between the two tendencies even in Germany; and it has been remarked that the two great poets of the middle ages, Wolfram von Eschenbach in his Parzival, and Gottfried von Strasburg in his Tristan und Isolde, represent the same Antagonism of Idealism and Realism, as Klopstock and Wieland, Schiller and Goethe, subsequently represented. Indeed, the progress of human development moves through a series of oscillations. One Idea rules the day, to be dethroned by an antagonist, which, in its turn, is dethroned. Every epoch has one dominant tendency, which in expressing itself exhausts itself; and thus, as Heine felicitously says, 'every age is a sphynx, which sinks into the earth as soon as its problem is solved.' Herein lies the secret of triumphant

reactions.

or, to use

In History, in Philosophy, in Art, there is a perpetual antagonism between Freedom and Despotism, Spiritualism and Materialism, Mysticism and Rationalism our former distinction - Idealism and Realism. The struggle is supported by the clamorous instincts of mankind to look forward to an Age of Perfection, and to look backward to an Age of Gold. The contemplation of this antagonism asserting itself through successive reactions, has thrown some minds into scepticism, others into indifference. The ultimate reconciliation of these antagonists will only be possible when Philosophy and Art shall have