Above all, an entirely new conception of
the Infinite and of man's relation to it came in with Christianity. That,
and not the finite, is always the background, consciously or not. It
changed the scene of the last act of every drama to the next world.
Endless aspiration of all the faculties became thus the ideal of
Christian life, and to express it more or less perfectly the ideal of
essentially Christian art. It was this which the Middle Ages
instinctively typified in the Gothic cathedral,--no accidental growth,
but the visible symbol of an inward faith,--which soars forever upward,
and yearns toward heaven like a martyr-flame suddenly turned to stone.
It is not without significance that Goethe, who, like Dante, also
absorbed and represented the tendency and spirit of his age, should,
during his youth and while Europe was alive with the moral and
intellectual longing which preluded the French Revolution, have loved the
Gothic architecture. It is no less significant that in the period of
reaction toward more positive thought which followed, he should have
preferred the Greek. His greatest poem, conceived during the former era,
is Gothic. Dante, endeavoring to conform himself to literary tradition,
began to write the _Divina Commedia_ in Latin, and had elaborated several
cantos of it in that dead and intractable material.
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