Legends of the Madonna | Page 5

theology or artistic criticism; namely, that the worship of
the Madonna did prevail through all the Christian and civilized world
for nearly a thousand years; that, in spite of errors, exaggerations,
abuses, this worship did comprehend certain great elemental truths
interwoven with our human nature, and to be evolved perhaps with our
future destinies. Therefore did it work itself into the life and soul of
man; therefore has it been worked out in the manifestations of his
genius; and therefore the multiform imagery in which it has been
clothed, from the rudest imitations of life, to the most exquisite
creations of mind, may be resolved, as a whole, into one subject, and
become one great monument in the history of progressive thought and
faith, as well as in the history of progressive art.
Of the pictures in our galleries, public or private,--of the architectural
adornments of those majestic edifices which sprung up in the middle
ages (where they have not been despoiled or desecrated by a zeal as
fervent as that which reared them), the largest and most beautiful
portion have reference to the Madonna,--her character, her person, her
history. It was a theme which never tired her votaries,--whether, as in
the hands of great and sincere artists, it became one of the noblest and
loveliest, or, as in the hands of superficial, unbelieving, time-serving
artists, one of the most degraded. All that human genius, inspired by
faith, could achieve of best, all that fanaticism, sensualism, atheism,
could perpetrate of worst, do we find in the cycle of those
representations which have been dedicated to the glory of the Virgin.
And indeed the ethics of the Madonna worship, as evolved in art, might
be not unaptly likened to the ethics of human love: so long as the object
of sense remained in subjection to the moral idea--so long as the appeal
was to the best of our faculties and affections--so long was the image
grand or refined, and the influences to be ranked with those which have
helped to humanize and civilize our race; but so soon as the object
became a mere idol, then worship and worshippers, art and artists, were
together degraded.
It is not my intention to enter here on that disputed point, the origin of
the worship of the Madonna. Our present theme lies within prescribed
limits,--wide enough, however, to embrace an immense field of thought:
it seeks to trace the progressive influence of that worship on the fine
arts for a thousand years or more, and to interpret the forms in which it

has been clothed. That the veneration paid to Mary in the early Church
was a very natural feeling in those who advocated the divinity of her
Son, would be granted, I suppose, by all but the most bigoted reformers;
that it led to unwise and wild extremes, confounding the creature with
the Creator, would be admitted, I suppose, by all but the most bigoted
Roman Catholics. How it extended from the East over the nations of
the West, how it grew and spread, may be read in ecclesiastical
histories. Everywhere it seems to have found in the human heart some
deep sympathy--deeper far than mere theological doctrine could
reach--ready to accept it; and in every land the ground prepared for it in
some already dominant idea of a mother-Goddess, chaste, beautiful,
and benign. As, in the oldest Hebrew rites and Pagan superstitions, men
traced the promise of a coming Messiah,--as the deliverers and kings of
the Old Testament, and even the demigods of heathendom, became
accepted types of the person of Christ,--so the Eve of the Mosaic
history, the Astarte of the Assyrians--
"The mooned Ashtaroth, queen and mother both,"--
the Isis nursing Horus of the Egyptians, the Demeter and the Aphrodite
of the Greeks, the Scythian Freya, have been considered by some
writers as types of a divine maternity, foreshadowing the Virgin-mother
of Christ. Others will have it that these scattered, dim, mistaken--often
gross and perverted--ideas which were afterwards gathered into the
pure, dignified, tender image of the Madonna, were but as the voice of
a mighty prophecy, sounded through all the generations of men, even
from the beginning of time, of the coming moral regeneration, and
complete and harmonious development of the whole human race, by
the establishment, on a higher basis, of what has been called the
"feminine element" in society. And let me at least speak for myself. In
the perpetual iteration of that beautiful image of THE WOMAN highly
blessed--there, where others saw only pictures or statues, I have seen
this great hope standing like a spirit beside the visible form; in the
fervent worship once universally given to that gracious presence, I have
beheld an acknowledgment of a higher as well as gentler power than
that of