_The Crucifix Across the Mountains_
The imperial road to Italy goes from Munich across the Tyrol, through
Innsbruck and Bozen to Verona, over the mountains. Here the great
processions passed as the emperors went South, or came home again from
rosy Italy to their own Germany.
And how much has that old imperial vanity clung to the German soul? Did
not the German kings inherit the empire of bygone Rome? It was not a
very real empire, perhaps, but the sound was high and splendid.
Maybe a certain Grössenwahn is inherent in the German nature. If only
nations would realize that they have certain natural characteristics, if
only they could understand and agree to each other's particular nature,
how much simpler it would all be.
The imperial procession no longer crosses the mountains, going South.
That is almost forgotten, the road has almost passed out of mind. But
still it is there, and its signs are standing.
The crucifixes are there, not mere attributes of the road, yet still
having something to do with it. The imperial processions, blessed by the
Pope and accompanied by the great bishops, must have planted the holy
idol like a new plant among the mountains, there where it multiplied and
grew according to the soil, and the race that received it.
As one goes among the Bavarian uplands and foothills, soon one realizes
here is another land, a strange religion. It is a strange country,
remote, out of contact. Perhaps it belongs to the forgotten, imperial
processions.
Coming along the clear, open roads that lead to the mountains, one
scarcely notices the crucifixes and the shrines. Perhaps one's interest
is dead. The crucifix itself is nothing, a factory-made piece of
sentimentalism. The soul ignores it.
But gradually, one after another looming shadowily under their hoods,
the crucifixes seem to create a new atmosphere over the whole of the
countryside, a darkness, a weight in the air that is so unnaturally
bright and rare with the reflection from the snows above, a darkness
hovering just over the earth. So rare and unearthly the light is, from
the mountains, full of strange radiance. Then every now and again recurs
the crucifix, at the turning of an open, grassy road, holding a shadow
and a mystery under its pointed hood.
I was startled into consciousness one evening, going alone over a marshy
place at the foot of the mountains, when the sky was pale and unearthly,
invisible, and the hills were nearly black. At a meeting of the tracks
was a crucifix, and between the feet of the Christ a handful of withered
poppies. It was the poppies I saw, then the Christ.
It was an old shrine, the wood-sculpture of a Bavarian peasant. The
Christ was a peasant of the foot of the Alps. He had broad cheekbones
and sturdy limbs. His plain, rudimentary face stared fixedly at the
hills, his neck was stiffened, as if in resistance to the fact of the
nails and the cross, which he could not escape. It was a man nailed down
in spirit, but set stubbornly against the bondage and the disgrace. He
was a man of middle age, plain, crude, with some of the meanness of the
peasant, but also with a kind of dogged nobility that does not yield its
soul to the circumstance. Plain, almost blank in his soul, the
middle-aged peasant of the crucifix resisted unmoving the misery of his
position. He did not yield. His soul was set, his will was fixed. He was
himself, let his circumstances be what they would, his life fixed down.
Across the marsh was a tiny square of orange-coloured light, from the
farm-house with the low, spreading roof. I remembered how the man and
his wife and the children worked on till dark, silent and intent,
carrying the hay in their arms out of the streaming thunder-rain into
the shed, working silent in the soaking rain.
The body bent forward towards the earth, closing round on itself; the
arms clasped full of hay, clasped round the hay that presses soft and
close to the breast and the body, that pricks heat into the arms and the
skin of the breast, and fills the lungs with the sleepy scent of dried
herbs: the rain that falls heavily and wets the shoulders, so that the
shirt clings to the hot, firm skin and the rain comes with heavy,
pleasant coldness on the active flesh, running in a trickle down towards
the loins, secretly; this is the peasant, this hot welter of physical
sensation. And it is all intoxicating. It is intoxicating almost like a
soporific, like a sensuous drug, to gather the burden to one's body in
the rain, to stumble across the living grass to the shed, to relieve
one's arms of the weight, to throw down the hay on to the heap, to feel
light and free in the dry shed, then to return again into the chill,
hard rain, to stoop again under the rain, and rise to return again with
the burden.
It is this, this endless heat and rousedness of physical sensation which
keeps the body full and potent, and flushes the mind with a blood heat,
a blood sleep. And this sleep, this heat of physical experience, becomes
at length a bondage, at last a crucifixion. It is the life and the
fulfilment of the peasant, this flow of sensuous experience. But at last
it drives him almost mad, because he cannot escape.
For overhead there is always the strange radiance of the mountains,
there is the mystery of the icy river rushing through its pink shoals
into the darkness of the pine-woods, there is always the faint tang of
ice on the air, and the rush of hoarse-sounding water.
And the ice and the upper radiance of snow are brilliant with timeless
immunity from the flux and the warmth of life. Overhead they transcend
all life, all the soft, moist fire of the blood. So that a man must
needs live under the radiance of his own negation.
There is a strange, clear beauty of form about the men of the Bavarian
highlands, about both men and women. They are large and clear and
handsome in form, with blue eyes very keen, the pupil small, tightened,
the iris keen, like sharp light shining on blue ice. Their large,
full-moulded limbs and erect bodies are distinct, separate, as if they
were perfectly chiselled out of the stuff of life, static, cut off.
Where they are everything is set back, as in a clear frosty air.
Their beauty is almost this, this strange, clean-cut isolation, as if
each one of them would isolate himself still further and for ever from
the rest of his fellows.
Yet they are convivial, they are almost the only race with the souls of
artists. Still they act the mystery plays with instinctive fullness of
interpretation, they sing strangely in the mountain fields, they love
make-belief and mummery, their processions and religious festivals are
profoundly impressive, solemn, and rapt.
It is a race that moves on the poles of mystic sensual delight. Every
gesture is a gesture from the blood, every expression is a symbolic
utterance.
For learning there is sensuous experience, for thought there is myth and
drama and dancing and singing. Everything is of the blood, of the
senses. There is no mind. The mind is a suffusion of physical heat, it
is not separated, it is kept submerged.
At the same time, always, overhead, there is the eternal, negative
radiance of the snows. Beneath is life, the hot jet of the blood playing
elaborately. But above is the radiance of changeless not-being. And life
passes away into this changeless radiance. Summer and the prolific
blue-and-white flowering of the earth goes by, with the labour and the
ecstasy of man, disappears, and is gone into brilliance that hovers
overhead, the radiant cold which waits to receive back again all that
which has passed for the moment into being.
The issue is too much revealed. It leaves the peasant no choice. The
fate gleams transcendent above him, the brightness of eternal,
unthinkable not-being. And this our life, this admixture of labour and
of warm experience in the flesh, all the time it is steaming up to the
changeless brilliance above, the light of the everlasting snows. This is
the eternal issue.
Whether it is singing or dancing or play-acting or physical transport of
love, or vengeance or cruelty, or whether it is work or sorrow or
religion, the issue is always the same at last, into the radiant
negation of eternity. Hence the beauty and completeness, the finality of
the highland peasant. His figure, his limbs, his face, his motion, it is
all formed in beauty, and it is all completed. There is no flux nor hope
nor becoming, all is, once and for all. The issue is eternal, timeless,
and changeless. All being and all passing away is part of the issue,
which is eternal and changeless. Therefore there is no becoming and no
passing away. Everything is, now and for ever. Hence the strange beauty
and finality and isolation of the Bavarian peasant.
It is plain in the crucifixes. Here is the essence rendered in sculpture
of wood. The face is blank and stiff, almost expressionless. One
realizes with a start how unchanging and conventionalized is the face of
the living man and woman of these parts, handsome, but motionless as
pure form. There is also an underlying meanness, secretive, cruel. It is
all part of the beauty, the pure, plastic beauty. The body also of the
Christus is stiff and conventionalized, yet curiously beautiful in
proportion, and in the static tension which makes it unified into one
clear thing. There is no movement, no possible movement. The being is
fixed, finally. The whole body is locked in one knowledge, beautiful,
complete. It is one with the nails. Not that it is languishing or dead.
It is stubborn, knowing its own undeniable being, sure of the absolute
reality of the sensuous experience. Though he is nailed down upon an
irrevocable fate, yet, within that fate he has the power and the delight
of all sensuous experience. So he accepts the fate and the mystic
delight of the senses with one will, he is complete and final. His
sensuous experience is supreme, a consummation of life and death
at once.
It is the same at all times, whether it is moving with the scythe on the
hill-slopes, or hewing the timber, or steering the raft down the river
which is all effervescent with ice; whether it is drinking in the
Gasthaus, or making love, or playing some mummer's part, or hating
steadily and cruelly, or whether it is kneeling in spellbound subjection
in the incense-filled church, or walking in the strange, dark,
subject-procession to bless the fields, or cutting the young birch-trees
for the feast of Frohenleichnam, it is always the same, the dark,
powerful mystic, sensuous experience is the whole of him, he is mindless
and bound within the absoluteness of the issue, the unchangeability of
the great icy not-being which holds good for ever, and is supreme.
Passing further away, towards Austria, travelling up the Isar, till the
stream becomes smaller and whiter and the air is colder, the full
glamour of the northern hills, which are so marvellously luminous and
gleaming with flowers, wanes and gives way to a darkness, a sense of
ominousness. Up there I saw another little Christ, who seemed the very
soul of the place. The road went beside the river, that was seething
with snowy ice-bubbles, under the rocks and the high, wolf-like
pine-trees, between the pinkish shoals. The air was cold and hard and
high, everything was cold and separate. And in a little glass case
beside the road sat a small, hewn Christ, the head resting on the hand;
and he meditates, half-wearily, doggedly, the eyebrows lifted in strange
abstraction, the elbow resting on the knee. Detached, he sits and dreams
and broods, wearing his little golden crown of thorns, and his little
cloak of red flannel that some peasant woman has stitched for him.
No doubt he still sits there, the small, blank-faced Christ in the cloak
of red flannel, dreaming, brooding, enduring, persisting. There is a
wistfulness about him, as if he knew that the whole of things was too
much for him. There was no solution, either, in death. Death did not
give the answer to the soul's anxiety. That which is, is. It does not
cease to be when it is cut. Death cannot create nor destroy. What
is, is.
The little brooding Christ knows this. What is he brooding, then? His
static patience and endurance is wistful. What is it that he secretly
yearns for, amid all the placidity of fate? 'To be, or not to be,' this
may be the question, but is it not a question for death to answer. It is
not a question of living or not-living. It is a question of being--to be
or not to be. To persist or not to persist, that is not the question;
neither is it to endure or not to endure. The issue, is it eternal
not-being? If not, what, then, is being? For overhead the eternal
radiance of the snow gleams unfailing, it receives the efflorescence of
all life and is unchanged, the issue is bright and immortal, the snowy
not-being. What, then, is being?
As one draws nearer to the turning-point of the Alps, towards the
culmination and the southern slope, the influence of the educated world
is felt once more. Bavaria is remote in spirit, as yet unattached. Its
crucifixes are old and grey and abstract, small like the kernel of the
truth. Further into Austria they become new, they are painted white,
they are larger, more obtrusive. They are the expressions of a later,
newer phase, more introspective and self-conscious. But still they are
genuine expressions of the people's soul.
Often one can distinguish the work of a particular artist here and there
in a district. In the Zemm valley, in the heart of the Tyrol, behind
Innsbruck, there are five or six crucifixes by one sculptor. He is no
longer a peasant working out an idea, conveying a dogma. He is an
artist, trained and conscious, probably working in Vienna. He is
consciously trying to convey a _feeling_, he is no longer striving
awkwardly to render a truth, a religious fact.
The chief of his crucifixes stands deep in the Klamm, in the dank gorge
where it is always half-night. The road runs under the rock and the
trees, half-way up the one side of the pass. Below, the stream rushes
ceaselessly, embroiled among great stones, making an endless loud noise.
The rock face opposite rises high overhead, with the sky far up. So that
one is walking in a half-night, an underworld. And just below the path,
where the pack-horses go climbing to the remote, infolded villages, in
the cold gloom of the pass hangs the large, pale Christ. He is larger
than life-size. He has fallen forward, just dead, and the weight of the
full-grown, mature body hangs on the nails of the hands. So the dead,
heavy body drops forward, sags, as if it would tear away and fall under
its own weight.
It is the end. The face is barren with a dead expression of weariness,
and brutalized with pain and bitterness. The rather ugly, passionate
mouth is set for ever in the disillusionment of death. Death is the
complete disillusionment, set like a seal over the whole body and being,
over the suffering and weariness and the bodily passion.
The pass is gloomy and damp, the water roars unceasingly, till it is
almost like a constant pain. The driver of the pack-horses, as he comes
up the narrow path in the side of the gorge, cringes his sturdy
cheerfulness as if to obliterate himself, drawing near to the large,
pale Christ, and he takes his hat off as he passes, though he does not
look up, but keeps his face averted from the crucifix. He hurries by in
the gloom, climbing the steep path after his horses, and the large white
Christ hangs extended above.
The driver of the pack-horses is afraid. The fear is always there in
him, in spite of his sturdy, healthy robustness. His soul is not sturdy.
It is blenched and whitened with fear. The mountains are dark overhead,
the water roars in the gloom below. His heart is ground between the
mill-stones of dread. When he passes the extended body of the dead
Christ he takes off his hat to the Lord of Death. Christ is the Deathly
One, He is Death incarnate.
And the driver of the pack-horses acknowledges this deathly Christ as
supreme Lord. The mountain peasant seems grounded upon fear, the fear of
death, of physical death. Beyond this he knows nothing. His supreme
sensation is in physical pain, and in its culmination. His great climax,
his consummation, is death. Therefore he worships it, bows down before
it, and is fascinated by it all the while. It is his fulfilment, death,
and his approach to fulfilment is through physical pain.
And so these monuments to physical death are found everywhere in the
valleys. By the same hand that carved the big Christ, a little further
on, at the end of a bridge, was another crucifix, a small one. This
Christ had a fair beard, and was thin, and his body was hanging almost
lightly, whereas the other Christ was large and dark and handsome. But
in this, as well as in the other, was the same neutral triumph of death,
complete, negative death, so complete as to be abstract, beyond cynicism
in its completeness of leaving off.
Everywhere is the same obsession with the fact of physical pain,
accident, and sudden death. Wherever a misfortune has befallen a man,
there is nailed up a little memorial of the event, in propitiation of
the God of hurt and death. A man is standing up to his waist in water,
drowning in full stream, his arms in the air. The little painting in its
wooden frame is nailed to the tree, the spot is sacred to the accident.
Again, another little crude picture fastened to a rock: a tree, falling
on a man's leg, smashes it like a stalk, while the blood flies up.
Always there is the strange ejaculation of anguish and fear, perpetuated
in the little paintings nailed up in the place of the disaster.
This is the worship, then, the worship of death and the approaches to
death, physical violence, and pain. There is something crude and
sinister about it, almost like depravity, a form of reverting, turning
back along the course of blood by which we have come.
Turning the ridge on the great road to the south, the imperial road to
Rome, a decisive change takes place. The Christs have been taking on
various different characters, all of them more or less realistically
conveyed. One Christus is very elegant, combed and brushed and foppish
on his cross, as Gabriele D'Annunzio's son posing as a martyred saint.
The martyrdom of this Christ is according to the most polite convention.
The elegance is very important, and very Austrian. One might almost
imagine the young man had taken up this striking and original position
to create a delightful sensation among the ladies. It is quite in the
Viennese spirit. There is something brave and keen in it, too. The
individual pride of body triumphs over every difficulty in the
situation. The pride and satisfaction in the clean, elegant form, the
perfectly trimmed hair, the exquisite bearing, are more important than
the fact of death or pain. This may be foolish, it is at the same time
admirable.
But the tendency of the crucifix, as it nears the ridge to the south, is
to become weak and sentimental. The carved Christs turn up their faces
and roll back their eyes very piteously, in the approved Guido Reni
fashion. They are overdoing the pathetic turn. They are looking to
heaven and thinking about themselves, in self-commiseration. Others
again are beautiful as elegies. It is dead Hyacinth lifted and extended
to view, in all his beautiful, dead youth. The young, male body droops
forward on the cross, like a dead flower. It looks as if its only true
nature were to be dead. How lovely is death, how poignant, real,
satisfying! It is the true elegiac spirit.
Then there are the ordinary, factory-made Christs, which are not very
significant. They are as null as the Christs we see represented in
England, just vulgar nothingness. But these figures have gashes of red,
a red paint of blood, which is sensational.
Beyond the Brenner, I have only seen vulgar or sensational crucifixes.
There are great gashes on the breast and the knees of the Christ-figure,
and the scarlet flows out and trickles down, till the crucified body has
become a ghastly striped thing of red and white, just a sickly thing of
striped red.
They paint the rocks at the corners of the tracks, among the mountains;
a blue and white ring for the road to Ginzling, a red smear for the way
to St Jakob. So one follows the blue and white ring, or the three
stripes of blue and white, or the red smear, as the case may be. And the
red on the rocks, the dabs of red paint, are of just the same colour as
the red upon the crucifixes; so that the red upon the crucifixes is
paint, and the signs on the rocks are sensational, like blood.
I remember the little brooding Christ of the Isar, in his little cloak
of red flannel and his crown of gilded thorns, and he remains real and
dear to me, among all this violence of representation.
'_Couvre-toi de gloire, Tartarin--couvre-toi de flanelle._' Why should
it please me so that his cloak is of red flannel?
In a valley near St Jakob, just over the ridge, a long way from the
railway, there is a very big, important shrine by the roadside. It is a
chapel built in the baroque manner, florid pink and cream outside, with
opulent small arches. And inside is the most startling sensational
Christus I have ever seen. He is a big, powerful man, seated after the
crucifixion, perhaps after the resurrection, sitting by the grave. He
sits sideways, as if the extremity were over, finished, the agitation
done with, only the result of the experience remaining. There is some
blood on his powerful, naked, defeated body, that sits rather hulked.
But it is the face which is so terrifying. It is slightly turned over
the hulked, crucified shoulder, to look. And the look of this face, of
which the body has been killed, is beyond all expectation horrible. The
eyes look at one, yet have no seeing in them, they seem to see only
their own blood. For they are bloodshot till the whites are scarlet, the
iris is purpled. These red, bloody eyes with their stained pupils,
glancing awfully at all who enter the shrine, looking as if to see
through the blood of the late brutal death, are terrible. The naked,
strong body has known death, and sits in utter dejection, finished,
hulked, a weight of shame. And what remains of life is in the face,
whose expression is sinister and gruesome, like that of an unrelenting
criminal violated by torture. The criminal look of misery and hatred on
the fixed, violated face and in the bloodshot eyes is almost impossible.
He is conquered, beaten, broken, his body is a mass of torture, an
unthinkable shame. Yet his will remains obstinate and ugly, integral
with utter hatred.
It is a great shock to find this figure sitting in a handsome, baroque,
pink-washed shrine in one of those Alpine valleys which to our thinking
are all flowers and romance, like the picture in the Tate Gallery.
'Spring in the Austrian Tyrol' is to our minds a vision of pristine
loveliness. It contains also this Christ of the heavy body defiled by
torture and death, the strong, virile life overcome by physical
violence, the eyes still looking back bloodshot in consummate hate
and misery.
The shrine was well kept and evidently much used. It was hung with
ex-voto limbs and with many gifts. It was a centre of worship, of a sort
of almost obscene worship. Afterwards the black pine-trees and the river
of that valley seemed unclean, as if an unclean spirit lived there. The
very flowers seemed unnatural, and the white gleam on the mountain-tops
was a glisten of supreme, cynical horror.
After this, in the populous valleys, all the crucifixes were more or
less tainted and vulgar. Only high up, where the crucifix becomes
smaller and smaller, is there left any of the old beauty and religion.
Higher and higher, the monument becomes smaller and smaller, till in the
snows it stands out like a post, or a thick arrow stuck barb upwards.
The crucifix itself is a small thing under the pointed hood, the barb of
the arrow. The snow blows under the tiny shed, upon the little, exposed
Christ. All round is the solid whiteness of snow, the awful curves and
concaves of pure whiteness of the mountain top, the hollow whiteness
between the peaks, where the path crosses the high, extreme ridge of the
pass. And here stands the last crucifix, half buried, small and tufted
with snow. The guides tramp slowly, heavily past, not observing the
presence of the symbol, making no salute. Further down, every mountain
peasant lifted his hat. But the guide tramps by without concern. His is
a professional importance now.
On a small mountain track on the Jaufen, not far from Meran, was a
fallen Christus. I was hurrying downhill to escape from an icy wind
which almost took away my consciousness, and I was looking up at the
gleaming, unchanging snow-peaks all round. They seemed like blades
immortal in the sky. So I almost ran into a very old Martertafel. It
leaned on the cold, stony hillside surrounded by the white peaks in the
upper air.
The wooden hood was silver-grey with age, and covered, on the top, with
a thicket of lichen, which stuck up in hoary tufts. But on the rock at
the foot of the post was the fallen Christ, armless, who had tumbled
down and lay in an unnatural posture, the naked, ancient wooden
sculpture of the body on the naked, living rock. It was one of the old
uncouth Christs hewn out of bare wood, having the long, wedge-shaped
limbs and thin flat legs that are significant of the true spirit, the
desire to convey a religious truth, not a sensational experience.
The arms of the fallen Christ had broken off at the shoulders, and they
hung on their nails, as ex-voto limbs hang in the shrines. But these
arms dangled from the palms, one at each end of the cross, the muscles,
carved sparely in the old wood, looking all wrong, upside down. And the
icy wind blew them backwards and forwards, so that they gave a painful
impression, there in the stark, sterile place of rock and cold. Yet I
dared not touch the fallen body of the Christ, that lay on its back in
so grotesque a posture at the foot of the post. I wondered who would
come and take the broken thing away, and for what purpose.
_On the Lago di Garda_
_1_