Finally:  connected with this profanity of temper is a strong tendency to deny the sacred element of colour, and make our boast in blackness.  For though occasionally glaring or violent, modern colour is on the whole eminently sombre, tending continually to grey or brown, and by many of our best painters consistently falsified, with a confessed pride in what they call chaste or subdued tints; so that, whereas a mediaeval paints his sky bright blue and his foreground bright green, gilds the towers of his castles, and clothes his figures with purple and white, we paint our sky grey, our foreground black, and our foliage brown, and think that enough is sacrificed to the sun in admitting the dangerous brightness of a scarlet cloak or a blue jacket.

These, I believe, are the principal points which would strike us instantly, if we were to be brought suddenly into an exhibition of modern landscapes out of a room filled with mediaeval work.  It is evident that there are both evil and good in this change; but how much evil, or how much good, we can only estimate by considering, as in the former divisions of our inquiry, what are the real roots of the habits of mind which have caused them.

And first, it is evident that the title “Dark Ages,” given to the mediaeval centuries, is, respecting art, wholly inapplicable.  They were, on the contrary, the bright ages; ours are the dark ones.  I do not mean metaphysically, but literally.  They were the ages of gold; ours are the ages of umber.

This is partly mere mistake in us; we build brown brick walls, and wear brown coats, because we have been blunderingly taught to do so, and go on doing so mechanically.  There is, however, also some cause for the change in our own tempers.  On the whole, these are much sadder ages than the early ones; not sadder in a noble and deep way, but in a dim wearied way,—­the way of ennui, and jaded intellect, and uncomfortableness of soul and body.  The Middle Ages had their wars and agonies, but also intense delights.  Their gold was dashed with blood; but ours is sprinkled with dust.  Their life was inwoven with white and purple:  ours is one seamless stuff of brown.  Not that we are without apparent festivity, but festivity more or less forced, mistaken, embittered, incomplete—­not of the heart.  How wonderfully, since Shakspere’s time, have we lost the power of laughing at bad jests!  The very finish of our wit belies our gaiety.

The profoundest reason of this darkness of heart is, I believe, our want of faith.  There never yet was a generation of men (savage or civilized) who, taken as a body, so wofully fulfilled the words “having no hope, and without God in the world,"[113] as the present civilized European race.  A Red Indian or Otaheitan savage has more sense of a Divine existence round him, or government over him, than the plurality of refined Londoners and Parisians:  and those among us who may in some sense be said to believe,