Sophon. You hear, Kosmon, that Christian prefers ripe youth to ripe manhood:  and he is right.  Early summer is nobler than early autumn; the head is wiser than the hand.  You take the hand to mean too much:  you should not judge by quantity, or luxuriance, or dexterity, but by quality, chastity, and fidelity.  And colour and tone are only a fair setting to thought and virtue.  Perhaps it is the fate, or rather the duty, of mortals to make a sacrifice for all things, withheld as well as given.  Hand sometimes succumbs to head, and head in its turn succumbs to hand; the first is the lot of youth, the last of manhood.  The question is—­which of the two we can best afford to do without.  Narrowed down to this, I think but very few men would be found who would not sacrifice in the loss of hand in preference to its gain at the loss of head.

Kosmon. But, Christian, in advocating a return to this pre-Raffaelle art, are you not—­you yourself—­urging the committal of “ruthless restorations” and “improvements,” new and vile as any that you have denounced?  You tell the artist, that he should restore the sacred edifice to its first purity—­the same as it was bequeathed by its pious and earnest builders.  But can he do this and be himself original?  For myself, I would above all things urge him to study how to reproduce, and not how to represent—­to imitate no past perfection, but to create for himself another, as beautiful, wise, and true.  I would say to him, “build not on old ground, profaned, polluted, trod into slough by filthy animals; but break new ground—­virgin ground—­ground that thought has never imagined or eye seen, and dig into our hearts a foundation, deep and broad as our humanity.  Let it not be a temple formed of hands only, but built up of us—­us of the present—­body of our body, soul of our soul.”

Christian. When men wish to raise a piece of stone, or to move it along, they seek for a fulcrum to use their lever from; and, this obtained, they can place the stone wheresoever they please.  And world-perfections come into existence too slowly for men to reject all the teaching and experience of their predecessors:  the labour of learning is trifling compared to the labour of finding out; the first implies only days, the last, hundreds of years.  The discovery of the new world without the compass would have been sheer chance; but with it, it became an absolute certainty.  So, and in such manner, the modern artist seeks to use early mediaeval art, as a fulcrum to raise through, but only as a fulcrum; for he himself holds the lever, whereby he shall both guide and fix the stones of his art temple; as experience, which shall be to him a rudder directing the motion of his ship, but in subordination to his control; and as a compass, which shall regulate his journey, but which, so far from taking away his liberty, shall even add to it, because through it his course is set so fast in the ways of truth as to allow him, undividedly, to give up his whole soul to the purpose of his voyage, and to steer a wider and freer path over the trackless, but to him, with his rudder and compass, no longer the trackless or waste ocean; for, God and his endeavours prospering him, that shall yield up unto his hands discoveries as man-worthy as any hitherto beheld by men, or conceived by poets.