IV

There are two torrents that amaze me to consider—the one is Niagara,

and the other the stream of prayer falling perpetually in the Roman

Catholic Church. What with masses and the circulating exposition of the

Host, there is no day nor moment of the day in which the praises of God

are not being sung somewhere: in noble churches, in dim crypts and

underground chapels, in cells and oratories. I have been in a great

cathedral, sole congregant, and, lo! the tall wax candles were lit, the

carven stalls were full of robed choristers, the organ rolled out its

sonorous phrases, the priests chaunted, marching and bowing, the censer

swung its incense, the bell tinkled. Niagara is indifferent to

spectators, and so the ever-falling stream of prayer. As steadfastly and

unremittingly as God sustains the universe, so steadfastly and

unremittingly is He acknowledged, the human antiphony answering the

divine strophe. There be those who cannot bear that Niagara should fall

and thunder in mere sublimity, but only to such will this falling

thunder of prayer seem waste.

Yet as I go through these innumerable dark churches of Italy, these

heavy, airless glooms, heavier with the sense of faded frescoes and

worm-eaten pictures, and vaults and crypts, and mouldering frippery and

mildewed relics, and saintly bones mocked by jewelled shroudings, and

dim-burning oil-lamps—the blue sky of Italy shut out as in a pious

perversity—and more, when I see the subjects of the paintings and

gravings, these _Crucifixions_ and _Entombments_ and _Descents from the

Cross_, varied by the mimetic martyrdoms of the first believers, it is

borne in on me depressingly how the secret of Jesus has been darkened,

and a doctrine of life—“Walk while ye have the light . . . that ye may

be the children of light”—has been turned to a doctrine of death. St.

Sebastian with his arrows, St. Lawrence with his gridiron, are, no

doubt, sublime spectacles; but had not the martyr’s life been noble, and

had he not died for the right to live it, his death would have been

merely ignominious. The death of Socrates owes its value to the life of

Socrates. Many a murderer dies as staunchly, not to speak of the noble

experimenters with Röntgen rays, or the explorers who perish in polar

wastes, recording with freezing fingers the latitude of their death.

Painting half obeyed, half fostered this concentration on the Passion,

with its strong lights and shadows. Indeed, the artistic strength of the

mere story is so tremendous that it has wiped out the message of the

Master and thrown Christianity quite out of perspective. Tintoretto’s

frescoes in San Rocco—indeed, most sacred pictures—are like a

picture-book for the primitive. (_Picturæ sunt idiotarum libri._) The

anecdotal Christ alone survives. And the painters were the journalists,

the diffusers and interpreters of ideas.

The true Christ was crucified afresh in the interests of romance and the

pictorial nude. Crivelli painted with unction the fine wood and the

decorative nails of the Cross; even the winding-sheet is treated by

Giulio Clovio for its decorative value. Where in all these galleries and

legends shall we find the living Christ, the Christ of the parables and

the paradoxes, the caustic satirist, the prophet of righteousness, the

lover of little children? The living Christ was overcast by the livid

light of the tomb. He was buried in the Latin of the Church, while every

chapel and cloister taught in glaring colour the superficial dramatic

elements, and Calvaries were built to accentuate it, and men fought for

the Cross and swore by the Holy Rood, and collected the sacred nails and

fragments of the wood and thorns of the crown.

The Sacro Catino of Genoa Cathedral once held drops of the blood; a

chapel of marble and gold at Turin still preserves in the glow of

ever-burning lamps the Santo Sudario, or Holy Winding-sheet. Strange

mementoes of the _plein air_ Prophet who drew his parables and metaphors

from the vineyard and the sheepfold! The Santo Volto for which pilgrims

stream to Lucca is not the holy face of loving righteousness, but a

crucifix miraculously migrated from the Holy Land and preserved in a toy

_tempietto_. Of the fifteen mysteries of the Roman Catholic Rosary, five

are of Birth, five of Death, five of Glory. But none are of Life. There

are also the rosaries of the Five Wounds and the Seven Dolors.

No doubt the majestic and sombre symbolism of the Cross owed its power

over gross minds to its very repudiation of the joy of life, but the

soul cannot healthily concentrate on death, nor can “Holy Dying” replace

“Holy Living.” Those early purple and gold mosaics of the Master with

His hand on the Book of Life, placed over altars—as in the cathedral of

Pisa—taught, for all their _naïveté_, the deeper lesson: “Ego sum lux

mundi.” The rude stone sculptures on the portals of Parma Baptistery

depict a Christ grotesque in a skull-cap, yet active in works and words

of love, and Duccio’s panels on that reredos in Siena in the dawn of

Italian art equally emphasise the life of Christ, and not its mere

ending. In fact, the earlier the art the less the insistence on darkness

and death. The Christians of the Catacombs, for whom death and darkness

were daily realities, turned all their thoughts to light and life. They

enjoyed their crypts more than the Christians of to-day enjoy their

cathedrals. “_The Acts of the Apostles_,” says Renan in his _St. Paul_,

“are a book of joy.” It was the later ages, which found the battle won,

that took an artistic and morbid pleasure in depicting martyrdoms and

created those pictorial concepts that tend to caricature Christianity.

It is worth remarking that Tempesta, who brought pictorial martyrology

to its disgusting climax in S. Stefano Rotondo at Rome, came so late

that he lived to see the eighteenth century in. A pity that temporary

necessities of martyrdom among the early Christians lent colour to the

misconception of Christianity as a religion of death. Toleration or

triumph robbed the saint of his stake, and left to him a subtler and

severer _imitatio Christi_. Buried so long beneath his own Cross, the

true Christ will rise again—to the cry of “Ecce Homo!”

On that day the teaching of Arius as to the originate nature of Christ,

or the modal trinitarianism of Sabellius by which the same God

manifested Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, may cease to be a

heresy, or Joachim of Flora’s expectation of a Super-Gospel of the

Spirit may find transformed fulfilment. For if Christianity has a

future, that future belongs, not to its dogmas, but to its heresies, the

thought of the great souls who, instead of receiving it passively,

wrestled for themselves with its metaphysical and spiritual problems,

and passed through the white fires and deep waters of the cosmic

mystery. There is scarcely a heresy but will better repay study than the

acrid certainties of St. Bernard or the word-spinnings of Athanasius

triumphant _contra mundum_.

Art is, indeed, not sparing of the resurrected Christ who rules in

glory, such as He whose majestic figure dominates and pervades St.

Mark’s; but this Christ who presides in so many pictures at the Last

Judgment, His foot on the earth-ball, His angel-legions round Him, and

who, indeed, in some is actually represented as creating Adam or giving

Moses the Law; this Christ who—by a paradoxical reversion to the Pagan

need for a human God—has superseded His Father with even retrospective

rights, is still further removed than the crucified Christ from the

Christ of life.

This apotheosis, how inferior in grandeur to his true presidence over

the centuries that followed his death! And this death, how infinitely

more tragic than the conventional theory of it! Naught that man has

suffered or man imagined, no Dantesque torture nor Promethean agony, can

equal the blackness of that ninth hour when “Jesus cried with a loud

voice, saying, _Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?_” Where be the twelve

legions of angels, where the seat for the Son of Man at the right hand

of power? Why this mockery, this excruciation?

Purblind must be the dry-as-dust who can read this passage and doubt

that Jesus was an historical person. As if, despite Psalm xxii, the

writers of Matthew and Mark could have invented so wonderful a touch, or

would, had they understood its full import, have inserted so flagrant a

contradiction of the Christian concept—a contradiction that can only be

counteracted by an elaborate theory of _kenosis_. The dying cry of Jesus

stamps him with authenticity, as the complaints of the Israelites

against their leader guarantee Moses and the Exodus.

What a colossal theme—Ormuzd broken by Ahriman, the incarnation of

light and love agonising beneath the heel of the powers of darkness and

goaded into the supreme cry: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken

me?” I have seen only one _Crucifixion_ that adequately renders this

dreadful moment—the supreme loneliness, the unrayed blackness—for most

_Crucifixions_ are populated and bustling, like Tintoretto’s or

Altichieri’s or Foppa’s or Spinello Aretino’s, or that congested canvas

of the brothers San Severino, when they are not also like Michele da

Verona’s, a translation of the tragedy into a Carpaccio romance of

trumpeters and horsemen and dogs and lovely towered cities and mountain

bridges, not to mention the arms of the magnificent Conte di Pitigliano.

But what painter it is who has caught the true essence and quiddity of

the Crucifixion I cannot remember, nor haply if I saw his picture in

Spain and not in Italy, nor even if I dreamed it.

Lucas Van der Leyden and Van Dyck give us the lonely figure, but in

Italian art before our own day I can only recall it in an obscure

picture of the Parmese school, and in a small painting of the

eighteenth-century Venetian, Piazzetta. Tura’s impressive, sombre study

is only a fragment of a stigmata picture. Guido Reni suggests the

loneliness, but he leaves the head haloed and melodramatic, besides

sketching in shadowy accessories. A nineteenth-century Italian, Giocondo

Viglioli, places the lonely Christ against the shadowy background of the

roofs and towers of Jerusalem. But the picture I have in my mind is

Rembrandtesque, the blacks heaviest at the figure in the centre, who,

unillumined even by a halo, uncompanioned even of thieves, hangs nailed

upon a lonely cross in a vast deserted landscape. For Jesus at this

tremendous moment is alone—however vast the crowd—alone against the

universe, and this universe has turned into a darkness that can be felt;

felt as a torment of body as well as a shattering of the spirit.

When I looked upon the myth of Psyche in the Villa Farnesina at Rome as

designed by Raphael, it was borne in on me how the primitive Greek,

penetrated by the certainty and beauty of his body, had made the world

and the gods in its image. But the race of Jesus, evolved to a higher

thought, had demanded that the universe should answer to its soul.

“Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” asks Abraham severely

of God in another epochal passage of the Bible. And now here is a scion

of Abraham who has staked his all upon the innermost nature of things

being one with his own, upon a universe aflame with love and

righteousness and pity, and lo! in this awful hour it seems to reveal

itself as a universe full of mocking forces, grim, imperturbable, alien.

It is an epic moment—the tragedy not only of Jesus, but of man soaring

upwards from the slime—

“Such splendid purpose in his eyes”

—and finding in the cosmos no correspondence with his vision. Nor could

Jesus, who had outgrown the notion of a heavenly despot, even find the

satisfaction of the Prometheus of Æschylus:

“You see me fettered here, a god ill-starred,

The enemy of Zeus, abhorred of all

That tread the courts of his omnipotence,

Because of mine exceeding love for men.”

Yet in a sense the despair of Jesus was unwarranted. The universe had

not forsaken him; it contained, on the contrary, the media for his

eternal influence. On the physical plane, indeed, it could do nothing

for him; crucifixion must kill or the cosmos must change to chaos. But

on the spiritual plane he could neither be killed nor forsaken.

Infinitely less tragic his death than that of Napoleon, of whom we might

say, in the words of Sannazaro,

“Omnia vincebas, superabas omnia Cæsar,

Omnia deficiunt, incipis esse nihil.”

It was Moses who more voluntarily than Jesus offered his life that the

equilibrium of this righteous universe should not be shaken. “Ye have

sinned a great sin; and now I will go up unto the Lord; peradventure I

shall make an atonement for your sin.” And the atonement offered ran:

“Blot me, I pray Thee, out of Thy book which Thou hast written.” Here,

then, in the Old Testament, and not in the New, first appears the notion

of vicarious atonement. But the Old Testament sternly rejects it;

“Whoever hath sinned against Me, him will I blot out of My book.” Beside

which trenchant repudiation the Christian reading of the Old Testament

as a mere prolegomenon to the Crucifixion, an avenue to Calvary strewn

with textual finger-posts, appears a more than usually futile word-play

of the theological mind. One might, indeed, more easily discover the

germ of the atonement idea in Iphigenia. And that the Greek mind had

spiritualised itself—even before it contributed the _logos_ to

Christianity—is obvious not only from its literature and its Orphic and

Eleusinian mysteries, but from its art. For the Hellenic art of Raphael

was, after all, only the Renaissance view of Hellas, and the Greek myths

in his hands were merely a charming Pagan poetry, no truer to the

Hellenism of the great period than was the “Endymion” or “Hyperion” of

Keats. How can I look at the statue of Apollo in this same Museum of

Naples and not see that the very type of Christ had been pre-figured? I

mean the Christ with the haunting eyes and the long ringlets, for this

Apollo is a nobler figure by far than the Christ of the Byzantine

mosaics. And I am not the first to remember that Apollo is the Son of

Zeus the Father.

It is very strange. The Greeks, beginning with a Nature-religion, come

in the course of the centuries to find it inadequate and to yearn for

something beyond—

“Tendebantque manus ulterioris ripæ amore.”

The Nature-religion, therefore, gradually replaces itself by a Jewish

heresy, expounded in Greek, largely influenced by Greek Alexandrian

philosophy, and organised by a Greek-speaking tent-maker of Jerusalem

named Saul or Paul, who, shutting out infinity with a tent, after the

fashion of his craft, left a Church where he had found a Christ. Some

fourteen centuries later old Greek thought is rediscovered, and operates

as the great liberator of the mind from the constriction of this Church

which has obscured and overgloomed Nature. But only subconscious of

itself, this movement back to Nature, this renewed _joie de vivre_,

finds its expression in the adornment of altars for the worship of

sorrow, and under the ribs of death a new soul of loveliness is created

that can vie with the art of the Greeks. And finally this new

Nature-worship grows conscious again of its inadequacy to the soul of

man, there is a Reformation and a Counter-Reformation, and then both are

outgrown and humanity stands to-day where the old Greeks stood at the

dawn of Christianity. The wheel has come full circle. And meantime the

original Mosaic cult stands unmoved by these two millenniums of heresy,

unbroken by the persecution, still patiently awaiting the day when “God

shall be One and His Name One.” What are the fantasies of literature to

the freaks and paradoxes of the World-Spirit?

V

It is as the Bambino that Christ chiefly _lives_ in Art, and at this

extreme, too, we miss his true inwardness. Yet the tenderness of the

conception of the Christ-babe makes atonement. What can be more touching

than Gentile da Fabriano’s enchanting altar-piece of the _Adoration of

the Magi_, in which—even as the glamorous procession of the Three Kings

resteeps the earth in the freshness and dew of the morning—the

dominance of holy innocence seems to bathe the tired world in a wistful

tenderness that links the naïve ox and ass with the human soul and all

the great chain of divine life.

The Christ-child, held in his mother’s arms, lays his hand upon the

kneeling Magi’s head, yet not as with conscious divinity: ’tis merely

the errant touch of baby fingers groping out towards the feel of things.

No lesson could be more emollient to rude ages, none could better serve

to break the pride and harshness of the lords of the earth. “A slave

might be elder, priest, or bishop while his master was catechumen,” says

Hausrath of the early days of Christianity. Yet this delicious and

yearning vision of a sanctified and unified cosmos remains a dream;

futile as a Christmas carol that breaks sweetly on the ear and dies

away, leaving the cry of the world’s pain undispossessed. It was

precisely in Christian Rome that slavery endured after all the other

Great Powers of Europe had abolished it.

Nay, were the dream fulfilled it could not undo the centuries of harsh

reality. Here in Naples, under the providence of a kindly English

society, the wretched breed of horses, whose backs were full of sores,

whose ribs were numerable, have been replaced by a sleek stock,

themselves perhaps soon to be replaced by the unsentient motor. But what

Motor Millennium can wipe out the ages of equine agony?

And despite the Christ-child and the Christ crucified, nowhere does the

triumph of life run higher than in this sunny land of religious gloom,

Mantegna’s conversion of the babe into a young Cæsar being a true if

unconscious symbol of what happened to the infant. Flourishing the

forged _Donation of Constantine_ to prove its claim to the things that

were Cæsar’s, it grew up into that “Terrible Pontiff” whose bronze

effigy by Michelangelo was so aptly cast into a cannon, and whose

Christian countenance you may see in the Doria Gallery at Rome; or into

that Borgian monster who was to bombard a fortress on Christmas Day, and

who, crying joyfully, “We are Pope and Vicar of Christ,” hastened to don

the habit of white taffeta, the embroidered crimson stola, the shoes of

ermine and crimson velvet. God might choose to be born in the poorest

and worst-dressed circles of the most unpopular People, but the lesson

was lost. His worshippers insisted on thrusting Magnificence back upon

Him. Or perhaps it was their own Magnificence that they were protecting

against His insidious teaching. Consider their cathedrals, built less in

humility than in urban emulation—the Duomo of Florence to be worthy of

the greatness, not of God, but of the Florentines; S. Petronio to

eclipse it to the greater glory of Bologna; Milan Cathedral to surpass

all the churches in Christendom, as Giangaleazzo’s palace surpassed all

its princely dwellings. In whose honour did the Pisans encircle their

cathedral with a silver girdle, or the Venetians offer ten thousand

ducats for the seamless coat? Poor Babe, vainly didst thou preach to

Italy’s great families, when in humble adoration of thee they had

themselves painted in thy blessed society, the Medici even posing to

Botticelli as the Three Magi, and thrusting their magnificence into thy

very manger.

And in our own northern land the ox, companion of the manger, for whose

fattening at Christmastide St. Francis said he would beg for an imperial

edict, is fattened indeed, but merely for the Christmas market, stands

with the same pathetic eye outside the butcher’s shop, labelled “Choose

your Christmas joint,” and the clown and pantaloon come tumbling on to

crown the sacred birthday.

Alas! history knows no miracles of transformation. Evolution, not

revolution, is the law of human life. In Santa Claus’s stocking what you

shall truly find is traces of earlier feasts. The Christian festival

took over, if it transformed to higher import, the Saturnalia of earlier

religions and natural celebrations of the winter solstice. Holly does

not grow in Palestine; the snowy landscapes of our Christmas cards are

scarcely known of Nazareth or Bethlehem; mince-pie was not on the menu

of the Magian kings; and the Christmas tree has its roots in Teutonic

soil. But even as the painters of each race conceived Christ in their

own image, so does each nation unthinkingly figure his activities in its

own climatic setting. And perhaps in thus universalising the Master the

peoples obeyed a true instinct, for no race is able to receive lessons

from “foreigners.” The message, as well as the man, must be translated

into native terms—a psychological fact which missionaries should

understand.

Nor is it in the Palestine of to-day that the true environment of the

Gospels can best be recovered, for, though one may still meet the

shepherd leading his flock, the merchant dangling sideways from his ass,

or Rebeccah carrying her pitcher on her shoulder, that is not the

Palestine of the Apostolic period, but the Palestine of the patriarchs,

reproduced by decay and desolation. The Palestine through which the

Galilæan peasant wandered was a developed kingdom of thriving cities and

opulent citizens, of Roman roads and Roman pomp. Upon those bleak

hill-sides, where to-day only the terraces survive—the funereal

monuments of fertility—the tangled branchery of olive groves lent magic

to the air. That sea of Galilee, down which I have sailed in one of the

only two smacks, was alive with a fleet of fishing vessels. Yes, in the

palimpsest of Palestine ’tis an earlier writing than the Christian that

has been revealed by the fading of the later inscriptions of her

civilisation. And even where, in some mountain village, the rainbow-hued

crowd may still preserve for us the chronology of Christ, a bazaar of

mother-o’-pearl mementoes will jerk us rudely back into our own era.

But—saddest of all!—the hands of Philistine piety have raised churches

over all the spots of sacred story. Even Jacob’s well is roofed over

with ecclesiastic plaster; incongruous images of camels getting through

church porches to drink confuse the historic imagination. Churches are

after all a way of shutting out the heavens, and the great open-air

story of the Gospels seems rather to suffer asphyxiation, overlaid by

these countless chapels and convents. Is it, perhaps, allegorical of the

perversion of the Christ-teaching?

The humanitarian turn given to Yuletide by the genius of Dickens was at

bottom a return from the caricature to the true concept. Dickens

converted Christmas to Christianity. But over large stretches of the

planet and of history it is Christianity that has been converted to

Paganism, as the condition of its existence. Russia was baptized a

thousand years ago, but she seems to have a duck’s back for holy water.

And even in the rest of Europe upon what parlous terms the Church still

holds its tenure of nominal power! What parson dares speak out in a

crisis, what bishop dares flourish the _logia_ of Christ in the face of

a heathen world? The old gods still govern—if they do not rule. Thor

and Odin, Mars and Venus—who knows that they do not dream of a return

to their ancient thrones, if, indeed, they are aware of their exile.

Their shrines still await them in the forests and glades; every rock

still holds an altar. And do they demand their human temples, lo! the

Pantheon stands stable in Rome, the Temple of Minerva in Assisi, Paestum

holds the Temples of Ceres and Minerva, and on the hill of Athens the

Parthenon shines in immortal marble. Their statues are still in

adoration, and how should a poor outmoded deity understand that we

worship him as art, not as divinity? It does but add to his confusion

that now and anon prayers ascend to him as of yore, for can a poor

Olympian, whose toe has been faith-bitten, comprehend that he has been

catalogued as pope or saint? Perchance some drowsing Druid god, as he

perceives our scrupulous ritual of holly and fir-branch, imagines his

worship unchanged, and glads to see the vestal led under the mistletoe

by his officiating priest. Perchance in the blaze of snapdragon some

purblind deity beholds his old fire-offerings, and the savour of turkey

mounts as incense to his Norse nostrils. Shall we rudely arouse him from

his dream of dominion, shall we tell him that he and his gross ideas

were banished two millenniums ago, and that the world is now under the

sway of gentleness and love? Nay, let him dream his happy dream; let

sleeping gods lie. For who knows how vigorously his old lustfulness and

blood-thirst might revive; who knows what new victims he might claim at

his pyres, were he clearly to behold his power still unusurped, his

empire still the kingdom of the world?