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History constantly proves that the worthiest prizes of life, its
loftiest virtues, and its most ennobling ambitions, are sold only at
the price of suffering. The great world-religions, Buddhism and
Christianity, began with proclaiming this final fact of life; and to
its instinctive recognition by the experience of all mankind are due
their conquests over the faiths which held out the allurements of
material success and physical pleasure. The spirit of Christianity is
the spirit of sadness. To it the house of mourning is ever better than
the house of mirth. The Cross is the symbol of suffering; the steps
are blood-stained that mount to Calvary; anguish and death are at its
summit; for suffering and death are the signs, the admonitions, and
the entrance to the Infinite.

Art acknowledges the same inspirations as its highest. Sad emotions
attract most potently because they arise from the unplumbed depth of
the soul, and suggest its limitless dimensions. They attest the words
of the poet, that “Man’s grief is but his grandeur in disguise.” There
is always a strange attraction about scenes of suffering; the appetite
is always keen “to sup full of horrors;” our emotions are more
profoundly stirred by the spectacle of pain and anguish than by that
of any imaginable pleasure.

Therefore the works as well as the lives of great artists have been
full of sadness. The group of the Laocoon struggling in the deadly
coil of the serpent; the agony of the crucifixion; the tragedies of
love and jealousy and devotion,――these have been the chosen themes of
painters, sculptors and dramatists; chosen because they mark
graphically the struggles of our common nature with its limits,
ennobled by its ambition to leap beyond them.