The need to indicate that the source of value is not the accident of Nature, but Nature redeemed, regenerated by spirit, that all values are moral values, led to a certain abstractness of treatment,—­on one side qualities to be embodied, on the other figures to receive them, so that the character seems adventitious, detachable, not thoroughly at one with the form.  For instance, the fiends in the Orvieto Inferno are not terror embodied, as the Jove of Phidias embodied dignity and command; but the terrific is accumulated on the outside of them, as tusks, claws, etc.  One can easily believe that the ancient sculptors, had it been lawful, could have put more horror into the calm features of a Medusa than is contained in all this apparatus and grimace.  The concreteness of the antique, the form and meaning existing only for each other, is gone; the union is occasional only, and needs to be certified and kept up afresh on every new occasion.  The form must assert itself, must show itself alive and quick, not the dead sign of a meaning that has fled.  It would have been a poor compliment to a Greek sculptor to say that his work was life-like; he might answer with the classically disposed visitor of the Elgin marbles in Haydon’s anecdote,—­“Like life!  Well, what of that?” He meant it for something much better.  But during the Middle Ages this is constantly the highest encomium.  Amid the utmost rudeness of conception and of execution, we see the first trace of awakening Art in the unmistakable effort to indicate that the figures are alive; and in the cathedral-sculpture of the best time this is still a leading characteristic.  Even the single statues have for their outlines curves of contrary flexure, expressing motion; they seem to wave in the air, and their faces to glow with passing emotion.  The animals are often uncouth, but the more life-like; a turn of the head or of the eye, a restless, unbalanced attitude, brings us nearer to the actual living creature than the magnificent repose of the antique lions and eagles,—­as if they did not trust to our recognizing their character, but were prepared to demonstrate it with beak and claws.  Even in the plants, though strictly conventionalized, it is the freedom and spring of their lines that more than anything else characterizes them and defies copying.

The world of matter, being no longer endowed with independent reality, is no longer felt as a contamination incurred by the idea in its descent into existence.  The discrepancy is not final, so that the supremacy of the spirit is not shown by resistance, but by taking it to heart, carrying it out, and thereby overcoming it.  In a Crucifixion of the twelfth century, Life is figured on one side crowned and victorious, and on the other Death overcome and slain.  The finiteness of the finite is not the barrier, but the liberation, of the infinite.