Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/326

 308 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. had first to quiet its wild barbarism; but wben its genius had cleared, Western hymns voiced Christian feeling more simply and directly than the hymns of Romanos, and Gothic cathedrals told their Christian story, and even expressed Christian emotion, with an adequacy making St. Sophia in comparison seem Hel- lenic and oriental rather than Christian. The styles and methods by which the young races of the West passed from the antique Christian basil- ica to Gothic are called Romanesque. Between these and the Byzantine there was a cardinal difference : Byzantine art was the work of a civilized and mature people, before whom lay no further growth; Roman- esque was the work of young peoples who were them- selves to advance, and with their progress perfect their art. Byzantine architecture in the sixth century reached its culmination in the perfection of dome con- struction. This was the final architectural achieve- ment of the Greek genius, creative still even in the transformation and perfecting of adopted forms. The past, changed, yet still the past, was triumphantly renewed in St. Sophia, quite as much through finished knowledge as through originative faculty, and all under the inspiration of Christianity. But Roman- esque architecture, instead of a last creation, was a growth of what was immature and crude; it had neither perfected knowledge nor a great inheritance of building tradition ; its varied progress in different Northern lands was homogeneous in this, that every- where it represented continually widening departure from the antique, and increasing knowledge of new principles of construction.