CHAPTER V

to them as palpable everyday matters. In this it will be evident that it was different from the spiritualised belief in a union with God or Christ which seems to have animated the early Christian, and which survived in some of the medieval saints and mystics, such as St. Francis and St. Catherine of Siena. In short it is clear that such misery as 83 existed in the Middle Ages, was different in essence from that of our times; one piece of evidence alone forces this conclusion upon us: the Middle Ages were essentially the epoch of Popular Art, the art of the people; whatever were the conditions of the life of the time, they produced an enormous volume of visible and tangible beauty, even taken per se, and still more extraordinary when considered beside the sparse population of those ages. The “misery” from amidst of which this came, whatever it was, must have been something totally unlike, and surely far less degrading than the misery of modern Whitechapel, from which not even the faintest scintilla of art can be struck, in spite of the idealising of slum life by the modern philanthropic sentimentalist and his allies, the impressionist novelist and painter.