  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a kindly English society, the wretched breed of horses, whose backs were full of sores, whose ribs were numerable, have been replaced by a sleek stock, themselves perhaps soon to be replaced by the unsentient motor.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? THE CARPENTER’S WIFE: A CAPRICCIO“Habent sua fata—feminÆ.” Although the Pilgrims’ Way is a shady arcade, yet the ascent from Vicenza was steep enough to be something of a penance that sultry spring evening, and I was weary of the unending pillars and the modern yet already fading New Testament frescoes between them. But I was interested to see which parish or family had paid for each successive section, and what new name for the Madonna would be left to inscribe upon it. For even the Litany of Loreto seemed exhausted, and still the epithets poured out—“Lumen Confessorum,” “Consolatrix Viduarum,” “Radix Jesse,” “Stella Matutina,” “Fons Lachrymarum,” “Clypeus Oppressorum”—a very torrent of love and longing. At last as I neared the summit of the Way, a fresco flashed upon me the meaning of it all—an “Apparitio B.M.V. in Monte Berico, 1428,” representing the Virgin in all her radiant beauty appearing to an old peasant-woman. So this it was that had raised this long religious road to the Church of Our Lady of the Mountain! I remembered the inscription in S. Rocco, telling how 30,000 men had pilgrimed here in 1875—“spectaculum mirum visu.” But where was the church that had been built over the spot of the Madonna’s appearance? I looked up and sighed wearily. I was only half-way up, I saw, for the road turned sharply to the right, and a new set of names began, and a new set of frescoes—still cruder, for I caught sight of nails driven into the Cross through the writhing frame of the Christ. But even my curiosity in the cornucopia of epithets was worn out. The corner had a picturesque outlook, and on the hill-side a bench stood waiting. Vicenza stretched below me, I could see the Palladian palaces admired of Goethe, the Greek theatre, the Colonnades, the Palace of Reason with its long turtle-back roof; and, beyond the spires and campaniles, the gleam of the Venetian Alps. A church-bell from below sounded for “Ave Maria.” I sat down upon the bench and abandoned myself to reverie. Why should not the Madonna appear to me? I thought. Why this preference for the illiterate? And then I remembered that this very Pilgrims’ Way had served as a battle-ground for the Austrians and the poor Italians of ’48. How these Christians love one another! I mused. And so my mind’s eye flitted from point to point, seeing again things seen or read—in that inconsequent phantasmagoria of reverie—to the pleasant droning of the vesper bell. Presently, telling myself it was getting late, I arose and continued my ascent to the Church of Our Lady of the Mountain. But I looked in vain, as I came up the hill, for the inscriptions and the frescoes. The sun was lower in the west, but the sunshine had grown even sultrier, the sky even bluer, the road even steeper and rougher, and it was leading me on to a gay-flowering plain lying in a ring of green hills amid the singing of larks and the cooing of turtle-doves. And on this plain I saw arising, not the church of my quest, but a far-scattered village, whose small square, primitive houses would have seemed ugly had their roofs not been picturesque with storks and pigeons and their walls embowered in their own vines and fig-trees and absorbed into the pervasive suggestion of threshing-floors and wine-presses and rural felicity. By a central fountain I could perceive a group of barefoot maidens, each waiting her turn with her water-jar. They seemed gaily but lightly clad, in blue and red robes, with bracelets gleaming at their wrists and strings of coins shining from their faces. Anxious to learn my whereabouts, yet shy of intruding upon this girlish group, I steered my footsteps towards one who, her urn on her shoulder, seemed making her way by a side-track towards a somewhat lonely house on the outskirts, overbrooded by the brow of a hill. She was brown-skinned, I saw as I came near, very young, but of no great beauty save for her girlish grace and the large lambent eyes under the arched black eyebrows. “Di grazia?” I began inquiringly. “Aleikhem shalÔm,” tripped off her tongue in heedless answer. Then, as if grown conscious I had said something strange, she paused and looked at me, and I instinctively became aware she was a Hebrew maiden. Yet I had still the feeling that I must get back to Vicenza. “How far is thy servant from the city?” I asked in my best Hebrew. “From Yerushalaim?” she asked in surprise. “But it is many parasangs. Impossible that thou shouldst arrive at Yerushalaim before the Passover, even borne upon eagles’ wings. Behold the sun—the Sabbath-Passover is nigh upon us.” Ere she ended I had divined by her mispronunciation of the gutturals and by the Aramaic flavour of her phrases that she was a provincial and that I was come into the land of Canaan. “What is this place?” I inquired, no less astonished than she. “This is Nazara.” “Nazara? Then am I in Galila?” “Assuredly. Doubtless thou comest from the great wedding at Cana. But thou shouldst have returned by way of Mount Tabor and the town of Endor. Didst thou perchance see my mother at Cana?” “Nay; how should I know thy mother?” I replied evasively. She smiled. “Am I not made in her image? But overlong, meseems, have ye all feasted, for it is two days since we expect my mother and brothers.” “Shall thy servant not carry thine urn?” I answered uneasily. “Nay, I thank thee. It is not a bowshot to my door. And,” she added with a gentle smile, “my brothers do not carry my burdens; why should a stranger?” “And how many brothers hast thou?” I asked. “Some are dead—peace be upon them. But there are four yet left alive—nay,” she hesitated, “five. But our eldest hath left us.” “Ah, he hath married a wife.” She flushed. “Nay, but we speak not of him.” “There must ever be one black sheep in a flock,” I murmured consolingly. She brightened up. “So my brother Yakob always says.” “And Yakob should speak with authority on the colour of sheep, and not as the scribes.” I laughed with forced levity. Her brow wrinkled thoughtfully. “Doubtless Yeshua is possessed of a demon,” she said. “One of our sisters, Deborah, was likewise a Sabbath-breaker, but now that she is old, having nineteen years and three strong sons, she is grown more pious than even our uncle Yehoshuah the Pharisee.” “Lives she here?” “Ay, yonder, near my mother’s sister, the wife of HalphaÏ.” She pointed towards a battlemented roof, but my eyes were more concerned with her own house, at which we were just arriving. It was a one-storey house, square and ugly like the others, redeemed by its little garden with its hedge of prickly pear, though even this garden was littered with new-made wheels and stools and an olive-wood table. “HalphaÏ is gone up for the Passover,” she added. She stopped abruptly. The tinkle of mule-bells was borne to us from a steep track that came to join our slower pathway. “Lo, my mother!” she cried joyfully; and placing her urn upon the ground, she hastened down the narrow track. I moved delicately, yet not without curiosity, to the flank of the hedge, and presently a little caravan appeared, ambling gently, with the girl walking and chattering happily by the side of her mother, who rode upon an ass. I noticed that the woman, who was small and spare, listened but little to her daughter’s eager talk, and seemed deaf to the home-coming laughter of her four curly-headed sons, who rode their mules sideways, with their legs dangling down like the fringes of their garments. Her shoulders were sunk in bitter brooding, and when a sudden stumbling of her ass made her raise her head mechanically to pull him up, I saw the shimmer of tears in her large olive-tinted eyes. Certainly I should not have called her made in the image of her daughter, I thought at that moment, for the face was sorely lined, and under the cheap black head-shawl I saw the greying hair that was still raven on her arched eyebrows. But doubtless the burden of much child-bearing had worn her out, after the sad fashion of Eastern women. These reflections were, however, dissipated as soon as born, for a little cry of dismay from the girl brought to my perception that it was the forgotten water-jar that had caused the ass’s stumble, and that the urn now lay overturned, if not shattered, amid a fast-vanishing pool. The little mishap made her brothers smile. “Courage!” cried the eldest. “Yeshua will fill it with wine instead.” At this all the four rustics broke into a roar of merriment. The youngest, a mere beardless youth, added in his vulgar Aramaic, “What one ass hath destroyed another will make good.” The little woman turned on him passionately. “Hold thy peace, Yehudah. Who knows but that he did change the water into wine?” “Let him come and do it here,” retorted the eldest. “Thou hast not forgotten what befell when he essayed his marvels in Nazara. No mighty works could he do here, albeit Shimeon and YosÉ, inclining their ears to Zebedee’s foolish wife, were ready to sit on his right and left hand in the Kingdom.” The two young men who had not yet spoken looked somewhat foolish. “He laid his hand upon sick folk and healed them,” one said in apology. “How many?” queried young Yehudah scornfully. “And how many are alive to-day? Nay, Shimeon, if he be Messhiach let him heal us of these Roman tyrants—not go about with their tax-farmers!” “Peace, Yehudah!” The little mother looked round nervously, and a fresh terror came into those tragic eyes. There was something to me deeply moving in the sight of that shrinking little peasant-woman surrounded by these strong, tall rustics whom she had borne and suckled. “Let Yeshua hold his peace!” answered the lad angrily, “and not prate about rendering unto CÆsar the things that are CÆsar’s. But, God be thanked, a greater Yeshua hath arisen—Ben Abbas—a true patriot, who one day——” “Aha! Behold my flock at last!” Startled by this sudden new angry voice, I glanced over the hedge, and saw standing on the doorstep cut in the rock, with a hammer in his horny hand, a big red-bearded peasant with bushy eyebrows. “These two days, Miriam, have I awaited thee.” The little woman slid meekly off her ass. “But, Yussef,” she said mildly, “thou saidst thou wouldst go up for the Paschal sacrifice!” “And how could I go up to the Holy City with all this work to finish, and not one of my four sons to carry my work to Sepphoris before the Sabbath!” He glared at them as they began to lead their beasts behind the garden. “HalphaÏ was sorely vexed that I did not company him and join in his lamb-group. And the house is not even ready for Passover at home; I shall be liable to the penalty of stripes.” “I baked the mazzoth ere I departed,” his wife protested, “and Sarah hath purged the house of leaven.” She patted her daughter’s head. “Sarah?” he growled, reminded of a fresh grievance. “Sarah should have had a husband of her own. But with these idle sons of mine, feasting and merrymaking while I saw and plane, I cannot even save fifty zuzim for her dowry.” Sarah blushed and hastened to pick up her urn and carry it back to the fountain. “Nay, but we have tarried at Kephar Nahum,” said Yakob defensively, as he disappeared. The carpenter turned on his wife, his eyes blazing almost like his beard. His hammer struck the table in the garden, denting it. “’Twas to see thy loveling thou leftest home!” The little mother went red and white by turns. “As my soul liveth, Yussef, I knew not he would be at the wedding.” “He was at the wedding?” he asked, softened by his surprise. “Ay, he and his disciples.” “Disciples!” The carpenter sniffed wrathfully. “A pack of fishers and women, and that yellow-veiled Miriam from Magdala.” “The Magdala woman was not there!” she murmured, with lowered eyes. “She knew thy kinsman would not suffer her pollution. Ah, Miriam, what a son thou hast brought into the world!” Her eyes filled with tears. “Thou must not pay such heed to the Sanhedrim messengers. In their circuit to announce the time of the New Moon they gather up all the evil rumours of Galila. This Magdala woman is repentant; her seven devils are cast out.” “Miriam defends Miriam,” he said sarcastically. “But thou canst not say I trained him not up in the way he should go. Learning could we not afford to give him, but did not thine own brother, Jehoshuah ben Perachyah, teach him Torah, and did I not teach him his trade? His ploughs and yokes were the best in all Galila.” “And now his followers say his homilies are the best,” urged the poor mother. “Homilies?” he roared. “Blasphemies! But were his Midraschim Holy Writ itself, I agree with Ben Sameos (his memory for a blessing!) greater is the merit of industry than of idle piety.” “But why should he work?” cried Yakob, who with Yehudah now reappeared from the stable. “Would that the wife of Herod’s steward followed me!” “Or even that Susannah ministered to us with her substance!” added Yehudah. “Then I too would teach, take no thought for the morrow!” And he laughed derisively. “He never took thought for anything save himself,” said Yussef, shaking his head. “Dost thou not remember, Miriam, those three dreadful days when he was lost, as we were returning from his Bar-Mitzvah in Yerushalaim! God of Abraham, shall I ever forget thy heart-sickness! And what was it he answered when we at length found him in the Temple with the doctors? He was about his father’s business! He was assuredly not about my business.” “The Sabbath and Passover are drawing nigh,” she murmured, and slipped past her sons into the house. “And what did he answer thee at Kephar Nahum?” her husband called after her. “‘Who is my mother?’ The godless scoffer! The Jeroboam ben Nebat! I thank the Lord I did not try to bring him back home. He might have asked, ‘Who is my father?’” There was no reply, but I heard the nervous bustling of a broom. The carpenter turned to Yakob. “And what said he at Cana?” “He demanded wine, he and his disciples!” “Methought he was an Ebionite or an Essene!” “Nay, as thou saidst, Yeshua was ever a law unto himself. But there was no wine.” “No wine?” cried Yussef. “So great a wedding company and no wine? Methought the Chosan was rich enough to plant wine-booths all the way from Cana to Nazara, like the Parnass of Sepphoris, and had as many gold and silver vessels as the priests in the Temple.” “True, my father, but Yeshua had brought with him that vile tax-farmer Levi, who grinds the faces both of rich and poor, and, seeing the spying publican, the bridegroom straightway bade the servants hide the precious flagons and goblets, lest more taxes be squeezed out for the Romans.” Yussef grinned knowingly. “And so poor Yeshua must go athirst.” “Nay, but hear. When he clamoured for wine the servants wist not what to do, and my mother said gently to him, ‘They have no wine.’ But Yeshua turned upon her like a lion of Mount Yehudah upon a lamb, and he roared, ‘Woman, what have I to do with thee? My hour is not yet come to be a Nazarite.’” The carpenter chuckled. “Now she will know to stay at home. ‘Woman, what have I to do with thee?’” he repeated with unction. “Howbeit, my mother feared that his demon again possessed him, and she besought the servants to do whatsoever he said unto them. But they still held back. Then Yeshua, understanding what it was they feared, said, ‘Bring the water-pots.’ So they went out and brought the earthen pots wherewith we had washed our hands for the meal—albeit Yeshua would not wash his—and lo! they were full of wine.” The carpenter repeated his knowing grin. “And Levi the publican—what said he?” “He was the first to cry ‘A miracle!’” laughed Yakob, “and Shimeon-bar-Yonah held up his hands and cried, ‘Master of the Universe! Now is Thy glory manifest!’” Yussef joined in his son’s laugh. “Is not Shimeon the lake fisherman?” “Yea, my father; him whom Yeshua calls the Rock.” “The Rock, in sooth!” broke in fiery young Yehudah. “Say rather, the Shifting Sand. It was from Shimeon I learned to be a Zealot, and now this recreant MaccabÆan is bosom friend of Roman tax-gatherers and babbles of the keys of Heaven.” “Babble not thyself, little one,” the father rebuked him. He turned to Yakob. “And what said Yeshua after the wine?” “When he beheld his disciples had drunk new faith in him, he too was flown, and prophesied darkly that he would appear on the right hand of power, with clouds of glory and twelve legions of angels, whereat my mother feared that his madness was come upon him as of yore, and she made us follow in his train as far as his lodging in Kephar Nahum. And we spake privily to Yudas that he should watch over him till his unclean spirit was exorcised.” “Yudas!” cried Yussef. “What doth an honest Israelite like Yudas in such company? But did I not foretell what would come of all these baptizings of Rabbi Jochanan, all these new foolish sects with their white garments and paddles and ablutions? Canaan is full of wandering madmen. The Torah I had from my father, Eli—peace be upon him!—is holy enough for me, and may God forgive me that I have not gone up to kill the Paschal lamb.” Yakob lowered his voice. “Thou wouldst have met the madman.” “What! Yeshua is gone to Yerushalaim?” “Sh! My mother knoweth naught. We spake him secretly as though converted, saying, ‘Lo! we have seen this day how thou workest miracles. But if thou do these things, show thyself to the world. Depart hence and go into YudÆa, that men may see the works that thou doest.’ For there is no man that doeth anything in secret, and he himself seeketh to be known openly. So he is gone up to Yerushalaim!” The malicious glee on Yakob’s face was reflected in his father’s. “Now shall the mocker be mocked! Even thy learned uncle, Ben Perachyah, they scoff at for his accent, nor will they let him read the prayers. How much less, then, will they listen to Yeshua!” “And the Pharisees hate him,” said Yakob, “because he hath called them vipers, and the Shammaites for profaning the Sabbath; even the Essenes for not washing his hands before meals.” “And all the Zealots hold him a traitor!” cried Yehudah with flashing eyes. “Nor will the Sadducees or the Boethusians listen to a carpenter’s son,” added Yakob laughingly. “Shame on thee, Yakob, for fouling thine own well!” And Sarah, returning with her pitcher on her shoulder, went angrily within. Yakob grew red. “And dost thou think the nobles of Yerushalaim who eat off gold and silver will follow him like fishers?” he called after her. “Say they not already, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazara?’” “Yeshua is gone to Yerushalaim?” The little mother had dashed to the door, her eyes wide with terror. The urn she had just taken from her daughter fell from her trembling hand and shattered itself on the rocky doorstep, splashing husband and son. “Woman!” cried the carpenter angrily, “have more care of my substance!” “Yeshua is gone to Yerushalaim!” she repeated frenziedly. “Ay, like a good son of Israel. He hath gone up for the Paschal sacrifice. Mayhap,” he added with his chuckle, “he will do wonders with the blood of the lamb. Come, Miriam, let us change our garments and anoint ourselves for the festival.” He pushed the woman gently within the room, but she stood there as one turned into a pillar of salt, and with an Eastern shrug he went in. Presently Sarah came and wiped the steps with a clout and gathered up the shards, and then, with a new pitcher on her shoulder, she bent her steps towards the fountain. I skirted round to meet her on her return, not a little to her amazement; but this time she surrendered her burden to my entreaty, though the ungainly manner in which I poised the pitcher lightened her clouded brow with inner laughter. “This wandering brother of thine,” I ventured to ask at length, “dost thou think harm will befall him in Yerushalaim?” Her brow puckered thoughtfully. “Perchance these strangers will believe on him, not knowing as we do that he hath a demon. Yeshua was wroth with us when he came, crying out that a man’s foes are those of his own household, and a prophet is nowhere without honour save in his own country. But how should Yeshua be able to work miracles more than Yakob or Yehudah? When he stood up in our synagogue on the Shabbos to read and expound the prophet Yeshaiah, his lips were touched with the same burning coal—almost he persuaded me to be a heretic—but inasmuch as he could do no miracles, all they in the synagogue were filled with wrath, and rose up and thrust him out of the city.” She pointed to the brow of the hill hanging over us. “Up there they led him, that they might cast him down headlong. But out of compassion for my mother, who had followed with the crowd, they let him go, and he returned to Kephar Nahum and continued to make yokes and wheels for his livelihood.” “And he still works there?” “Nay, he neglected his craft to preach in the great synagogue built by the centurion—indeed, it is a hot place for work down there by the lake, neither is it so healthy as here in Nazara. Also he had free lodging with the family of Shimeon-bar-Yonah whom they call Petros, while Shalome, the wife of Zebedee, and other women tended him and mended his garments. But his fever took him and he began to wander about all Galila, teaching in the synagogues and preaching his strange gospel?” “What gospel?” “How should a girl know? Some heresy anent the Kingdom. And there went out a fame of him through all the region round about, and some said he healed all manner of sickness, so that there followed him great multitudes of people. But many came to us and said, ‘Alas! he is beside himself.’ And the Messengers of the New Moon told us many strange tales, so that my mother was nigh distraught, and when it was bruited that he had said Kephar Nahum shall be thrust down to hell, she journeyed thither, she and my brothers, to bring him home and watch over his affliction. But lo! they could not lay hold of him, for he was surrounded by such a press of people that they could not even come nigh unto him. So she sent a message that his mother and brothers desired to have speech of him. And he answered, ‘Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?’ and he stretched forth his hand towards his disciples and said, ‘Behold my mother and my brothers.’ So she returned home sorely stricken, and put on mourning garments, and even the birth of her grandchildren gave her no joy. But when came the marriage of her rich kinsman in Cana my father would have her go, being weary of her weeping and thinking to cheer her heart; but lo! her last state is worse than her first, inasmuch as——” She broke off abruptly as we reached the hedge of prickly pear. “But why have I told all this to a stranger?” “Because I have none else with whom to eat the Passover,” I answered boldly. She turned and looked at me. Then, taking her pitcher from me with a word of thanks, “I will tell my father,” she answered gravely. I waited in the little garden, watching a patriarchal tortoise. Presently the carpenter reappeared on the doorstep, a new man in festal garment and mien, his head anointed with oil. “Baruch Habaa!” he cried cordially. “Since I cannot go up to Yerushalaim, Yerushalaim comes up to me.” I followed him into the house, duly kissing the mezuzah as I went through the door. The room was small and dark, with bare walls built of little liver-coloured blocks of cemented stone, and the matted floor seemed to hold less furniture than that which littered the garden. The carpenter’s bench had been covered with cushions, and I could see that the divan was used for a bed. Very humble was the house-gear, these earthenware dishes and metal drinking-cups and brass candlesticks on the Passover table, and I saw no ornaments save a few terra-cotta vases, a Hebrew scroll or two, and a rudely painted coffer. The housewife, busy at the hearth with the roasted egg and bone of the ritual, greeted me with wistful eyes and lips that vainly tried to murmur or smile a welcome, and I watched her deft mechanic movements as I sat lightly gossiping with the males over the exegesis of the seventh chapter of Yeshaiah. I told them that the Septuagint translator had darkened the fourteenth verse by loosely “Nay, I am no friend of the Romans,” I said reassuringly. Yehudah continued the formula sullenly. It was as I had always heard it, save for the question, “Why is the meat all roasted and none sodden or boiled?” But the father had scarcely begun his ritual reply when we heard a loud knocking on the door, the latch was lifted, and in another instant we saw a burly man panting on the threshold, and behind him, more vaguely in the dusk, an agitated woman under a head-shawl. “O Reb Yussef!” breathed the newcomer. “HalphaÏ!” cried the carpenter in amaze. “Art not in Yerushalaim?” The little mother had sprung to her feet. “They have killed my Yeshua!” she shrieked. “Sit down, woman!” said the carpenter sternly. But she gestured to the figure in the rear: “Speak, my sister, speak.” “Nay, I will speak,” grumbled her sister’s husband. “Why else did I take horse from the Holy City without hearing the Levites sing or the trumpets blow for the blood-sprinkling? Thy Yeshua came up through the Fountain Gate riding on an ass, and as one flown with new wine.” “Yea, the wine of the water-pots!” laughed Yakob. “And a very great multitude spread their garments in the way; others cut down branches from the trees and strewed them in the way. And the multitudes that went before and that followed cried, ‘Hosanna to the son of David!’” He paused for breath, leaving this picture suspended, and I saw a new light leap into the mother’s tragic eyes, a strange exaltation as of a secret hope incredulously confirmed. “In Yerushalaim?” she breathed. “They cry Hosanna in Yerushalaim?” “Yea,” said her sister. “And HalphaÏ told me, even the little children cried, ‘Hosanna to the son of David!’” The carpenter was crumbling a mazzo with nervous fingers; an angry vein swelled on his forehead. “And Pilatus permitted this?” he cried. “Patience, Reb Yussef!” said HalphaÏ. “There is more to come. For, growing yet more swollen in his presumption, Yeshua went to the Holy Temple, and, entering the Court of the Gentiles, where sit those who sell the sheep and the oxen and doves, instead of purchasing a sacrifice for his sins, he drove them all out with a scourge of small cords and poured out the changers’ money!” Horror held the household dumb. I saw HalphaÏ look round complacently, as though compensated for his hot ride to Nazara. “And ye know what profit Hanan makes out of his bazaars,” he added significantly. The mother was wringing her hands. “Hanan will never forgive him,” she cried. “They will kill him as they killed Jochanan the Baptizer.” “Peace, woman,” said Yussef impatiently. “The High Priest and the Elders will but drive him from the city.” “Nay, nay,” said HalphaÏ. “They hold him captive. And his disciples are fled. All save Yudas, who led a multitude with swords and staves to find him. And Shimeon-bar-Yonah too is taken, merely because his speech betrayeth him as a GalilÆan. How then should I dare stay, who have the ill-hap to be married to his mother’s sister!” The little mother was moving towards the door. Her husband stopped her. “Whither goest thou?” “To saddle the ass. I must to Yerushalaim!” “Thou!” “Who else? Shall that yellow-veiled woman of Magdala give him comfort?” “And will he take comfort from thee? Doth he not teach his followers to hate their father and their mother? And doth he not scoff at the womb that bare him?” “Not he, but his demon,” she answered obstinately, and pressed forward again. His brow grew black. “But it is the Sabbath!” “It is my first-born.” “Thou speakest more foolishly than Job’s wife. Now we see whence Yeshua sucked his blasphemies.” “It is my first-born!” she repeated more frenziedly. “Thy first-born! But did he keep to-day the Fast of the First-born?” “Let her go, Yussef,” pleaded HalphaÏ. “As Rabbi Hillel taught (his memory for a blessing), the Sabbath was handed to man, not man to the Sabbath!” “And the wife to the husband,” retorted Yussef, “not the husband to the wife. I forbid thee, Miriam, to disturb the Passover peace. Go—and I put thee away publicly!” She blenched and sank back on the divan. “Peace?” she moaned. “Thou callest this peace!” “Obey thy lord, Miriam! I will go.” And HalphaÏ’s wife stooped and kissed her. Miriam burst into loud sobs. She caught her sister to her breast, and the two women mingled their tears. The carpenter shrugged his shoulders. “Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who hast not made me a woman,” he said drily. The walls of the little room seemed higher, the light stronger, the prayer devouter, the company more numerous. Instead of the two little Sabbath candles and the earthenware dishes, I saw a barbaric blaze of gold and rich stuffs and jewels, and my eyes blinked before the flames of tall candles shining in gold candlesticks on a magnificent altar, in the niche of which stood a black cedar-wood idol, crowned and holding a crowned doll, and wrapped in a marvellous ornate vestment widening out like a bell. Over my head around the rough, liver-coloured stone walls hung lamps and bronzes and candles held by Cupids, and gilded busts, and medallions and hearts and bronze reliefs and pictures, and even a cannon-ball, and at my feet surged the white head-shawls of prostrate worshippers, like a great wave breaking on the crimson steps of the altar. And gradually I became aware that the room had now doors on the right and the left, and these of bronze and wondrously wrought after the fashion of the Renaissance, through which a stream of worshippers poured, kissing the bronze as they passed in and out. And following one stream and vaguely looking for Miriam and her husband and the Passover table, I was borne back into the room, through another door, and now found myself in a narrow and still more crowded space at the back of the altar, where the gorgeous jewelled black idol with her doll stood in her niche in the gleam of ever-burning silver lamps, and I saw a golden eagle in a yellow sun flying over her head, and over the eagle two gilded angels holding a glittering wreath, and still higher, through a hole in the roof, as riding on clouds, a blue-mantled Mother and Child among a soaring escort of angels, while near the floor I beheld a large metal box with a yawning slit, into which a kneeling, weeping press of people rained money. “Il Santo Camino, signore!” said an ingratiating voice, and looking up I perceived at my side a beadle with a wand. “The holy kitchen?” I repeated in amaze. “Si, signore. Here is the hearth at which the Madonna cooked for the Holy Family.” He pointed to the money-box, and I now indeed recognised the fireplace whence Miriam had taken the roasted bone and egg. But it had moved to another side of the living-room, unless I was confused by the altar planted in the place of the Passover table. “Then this is the house of Nazara?” I said in a whisper, for, dazed as I was, I feared to disturb the worshippers. “Sicuro!” He smiled reassuringly. “La Santa Casa! Here the Holy Family abode in the peace and love of the Holy Ghost. And here there is Plenary Indulgence every day in the year. Ecco! One of their pots!” And he produced a terra-cotta vessel, not unlike one I had seen the little olive-eyed woman wiping, save that it was lined with gold and adorned with bas-reliefs of the Manger and the Annunciation. “That must have cost money,” I murmured feebly. “GiÀ,” he assented complacently. “And behold the Madonna Nera, carved by St. Luke. Her attire is worth 1,800,000 lire.” “Come?” I gasped. He spurned a sobbing peasant-woman with his foot and cleared a space with his staff that he might plant me at the centre of the money-box. “Passi,” he said pleasantly, seeing I hesitated to displace these passionate souls. “Regard the jewels and precious stones of her robe, the diamonds, emeralds, and pearls in her crown, the collars of Oriental pearl, the rings, the crosses of topaz and diamonds, the Bambino’s diamond necklace, the ring on his finger, the medallion with the great diamonds given by the King of Saxony——” He trolled off the glittering catalogue, on and on, in a joyous, dominant voice, to which the sighs and groans of the worshippers made an undertone. Countesses and Cardinals, Popes and Marchese had vied in dressing the idol, and decorating the kitchen. “And you must see the Treasury,” he wound up. “Gifts from all the royal houses of Europe to Our Lady of Loreto!” “Loreto?” I repeated dully. He looked at me sharply, as at a scoffer. “But how did the Holy House get to Loreto?” I added hastily. “It was carried by angels,” he answered simply. “But when?” “On the night of the tenth of December in the year 1294 from the bearing of the Virgin.” “Who saw it carried?” “You are an Englishman,” he answered briefly. “You shall see it in English.” He made a path through the praying crowd, and I followed him without, and my breath failed me as I became aware that the Holy House was inclosed in a precious outer casing of marble, carved with beautiful reliefs of the life and death of the Virgin, holding all round its four lofty walls niches with statues of prophets and sybils and other gleaming altars, each with its surf of worshippers, and that this marvellous screen, so rich in the work of the Masters, was itself engirdled by a vast high-domed church with rich-dyed windows, gilded like a Venetian palace and full of arches and pillars and altars and chapels and mosaics and statues and busts and thick-populated frescoes, while from the centre of the choir windows a haloed Lady in a blue mantle gazed down upon her white-hooded ghostly worshippers filling the nave. And all around her from the interlacing of the arches and from the painted walls haloes gleamed like a firmament of crescent moons. “Behold there!” said the beadle, pointing with his staff, and I saw that round the projecting base of the marble walls ran two deep parallel furrows. “Worn in the stone by the knees of six centuries of pilgrims,” he said pleasantly. “Of course there are not many to-day, being an ordinary Sunday, but in the year there are a hundred thousand, and in the season of the pilgrimages, or on the Feast of the Assumption——” An expressive gesture wound up the sentence. We passed along the aisles, just peeping into the copious chapels, all pervaded by the ubiquitous Maria in picture or mosaic, in statue or bas-relief—Maria Immaculate, Maria the Virgin, Maria the Mother of God, Maria the Compassionate, Maria the Mediatress, Maria Crowned; and the marriage of Maria, and her death, and the visit to Elizabeth, and the Annunciation, and her family tree, and the disputes of the Sorbonne over the dogmas concerning her. And as we walked the organ began pealing, and priests and choristers chanted. “Ecco!” cried the beadle, as he stopped in the left aisle and pointed to a great black-framed slate between two altars. “In your own English!” I looked and read the headline of white letters: “The Wondrous Flitting of the Kirk of our Blest Ledy of Lavreto.” Underneath ran in parallel columns these two sentences: “By decree of the Meikle Werthy Monsignor Vincent Casal of Bolonia Ruler of This Helly Place Vnder the protection of the Mest Werthy Cardinal Moroni.” “I Robert Corbington Priest of the Companie of Jesvs in the Zeir MDCXXXV Heve Trvlie translated the premisses of the Latin Storie Hangged vp in the seyd Kirk.” And underneath these parallel statements were the words, “To the Praise and Glorie of the Mest Pvre and Immaculate Virgin.” Then began the story proper: “The Kirk of Lavreto was a caumber of the hovse of the blest Virgin near Jerusalem in the towne of Nazaret in which she was borne and treined vp and greeted of the angel and hairin also Conceaved and norisht har sonne Jesvs.” My eye ran impatiently over these known details and lighted at a lower point of the great dimly lit slate. “Pavl de Sylva an eremyt of micle godliness, wha woned in a cell near by this Kirk whair daily he went to mattins, seyd that for ten zeirs, one the eight of September, twelve hovrs before day, he saw a light descend frem heaven vpon it, whilk he said was by the bu weathair shawed har selfe [sic] one the feest of har birth. In proof of all whilk twa verteous men of the seyd towne of Recanah many times avowed to me Rvler of Terreman and Govenor of the forseyd Kirk as followeth. Ane of them, nemmed Pavle Renallvci, affirmed that his grandsyres grandsyre sawe when the angels broght it over sea setting it in the forseyd wood and hed oft frequented it thair, the other nemmed Francis Prior sicklik seyd that his Grandsyre, being a hunder and twaintie zeirs awd hed also meikle havnted it in the same place and for a mere svr testimony that it had beine thair he reported that his grandsyres grandsyre hed a hovse beside it wharin he dwelled and that in his dayes it was beared by the angels frae thence to the hill of they tweye brothers whar they set it as seyd....” “The angels seem to have carried it about more than once,” I interrupted. “GiÀ,” said the beadle. “At first they placed it on the hill of Picino, in a grove of laurels which bowed before it and remained in adoration. But so many thieves and assassins took cover under them to plunder the pious pilgrims of their offerings that the laurels raised their heads again, and after a stay of only eight months the Holy House moved.” “And came here?” “Not yet. It moved first to a pleasant hill belonging to the brothers Artici, ancestors of Leopardi.” “Ah, the hill of they tweye brothers,” I murmured. “But the treasure heaped upon it dazzled them. They might have fought over it like Cain and Abel. So the house moved on.” “And yet even Leopardi chanted the Madonna,” I said. “Lo credo,” said the beadle, unastonished. “And there is still an inscription on the hill, but it does not console the neighbourhood any more than the chapel at Ravinizza.” “The chapel at Ravinizza?” “Did I not say? That was where it stopped first—near Dalmatia.” “Quite a wandering Jew-house,” I murmured. “That was in 1291, when the Holy Land fell into the power of the Infidel” “Ah, that was why it left Palestine!” “Naturally. And you may imagine the agony of the Dalmatians when they returned from the Crusades to find the Holy House no longer in Ravinizza. Even to-day the pilgrims sail out in little boats singing, ‘Return to us, Maria, with thy house!’ But how could it return to Dalmatia, seeing that seventy-five years before it left Palestine the blessed St. Francis had foretold its coming here by his word Picenum, which is a region on our side of the Adriatic, and being, moreover, interpreted by Latin scholars is a prophetic acrostic?” “It seems a pity the house did not come straight to Loreto,” I ventured. “We are fortunate it did not go straight back to Nazareth after the battle of Lepanto,” he said simply. “It was after our Lady’s victory over the Turks that this marble screen was placed around it. Here is the Treasury.” And thrusting roughly through the press of congregants, he opened a door and ushered me into a palatial room where under the ceiling-frescoes of Pomerancio of Pesaro I saw what seemed a vast bazaar of every precious article known to humanity. “The New Treasury,” he said apologetically. “The old treasure was seized by Napoleon. It was worth 96,000,000 lire.” He looked sad. “And how much is this worth?” “Only 4,000,000.” And the unctuous catalogue recommenced. “A Genoese family had given this case of jewellery; it was worth 100,000 lire. These were the copes and vestments of Pio Nono (150,000 lire). This was the diadem of Maria, Queen of Spain, wife of Carlo IV—behold the amethysts, the brilliants, the rubies. These Oriental pearls were from the Princess of WÜrtemberg. Each pearl cost 150,000 lire and there were forty-three pearls—the signore could calculate for himself. This diamond tiara with an Oriental pearl in the centre was given by Maria Louisa, Duchessa di Parma. It was worth 420,000 lire.” “Restoring some of her first husband’s plunder,” I interrupted. “GiÀ. And the Madonna Nera was given back too. And this pearl and gold covering for her is from Maria Theresa, Archduchess of Austria. It is worth 12,000 lire. And Giuseppe Napoleon’s wife gave us this monstrance. And this cup is from Prince Maximilian of Austria, and these regalia——” The list went on, and I studied a coral model of the Santa Casa with the Mother and Son riding on the roof, while from the church came a boy’s voice soaring heavenward. “And do you refuse offerings from those who are not royal?” I broke in at last. “Ah, no,” he said seriously. “See! In that glass case are a thousand rings from a thousand pilgrims, and this standard is from a pilgrim of Budapest, and this little wooden ship—the Maria—was given by a sailor, and this pearl showing the Madonna and her Son was found inside a fish by a fisherman, and these ornaments painted with the juice of grass are the work of priests, and this beautiful bronze candelabrum was given by the Guild of Blacksmiths of Bologna. A Capuchin father from South America brought us these great bouquets of flowers made of the wings of Brazilian birds, and a Roumanian noble this little Byzantine brass Madonna, and Prince Carraciolo of Naples——” “Basta!” I cried hurriedly, for he was back in the “Almanach de Gotha,” and, slipping a large piece of silver with a royal portrait on it into his hand, I moved towards the door. His face shone. “But you have not seen the cups in the Santa Casa from which the Holy Family drank. And their little bells, and——” “I have seen enough,” I said. “And the cannon-ball,” he went on in undiminished gratitude. “The cannon-ball which shattered the pavilion of Pope Julius II when he was besieging a city, but which by the grace of the Blessed Virgin left him un——” I escaped into the crowd of snooded peasant women and worked my way along the aisle till I stood outside the portal under a gigantic Madonna and Child. But the beadle was beside me. “Go and look at the Fontana della Santa Casa.” And he pointed in parting gratitude to the centre of the piazza. “Bellissima!” I did not go, but I looked at the great marble fountain with its grotesque beasts and Cupids and basins, and remembering the humble village fountain at which the carpenter’s daughter had filled her urn, I turned sharply to the right and found myself descending a long sordid street of shops and stalls, all doing a busy trade—despite the Sunday—in crosses, rosaries, crucifixes, chaplets, picture-postcards, medals, and all the knick-knacks of holiness. Sometimes through open windows of the ugly one-storey houses I caught sight of the landscape below—the path descending to the sea, bordered with buttercups and a-flutter with birds, the rolling olive-plains, the strip of blue sea, the wonderful headland. Never had I seen a lovelier view shut out by meaner buildings. With its patches of refuse and its dreary shops and booths it seemed the ugliest street in all Italy, bearing on its face the mark of its bastard origin—a city grown up not from natural healthy human life, but for the exploitation of a miracle. And this it was that drew gold like water from the crowned heads of Europe. And this it was that had drawn hither even Descartes, the first Apostle of Philosophic Doubt. Surely “Non cogito, ergo sum,” is the motto of Faith, I thought. I stood in a vast ancient market-place among canvas-covered stalls, by a lovely fountain with a smiling little Bacchus that faced an old cathedral, and I gazed like ten thousand others at a lovely open-air pulpit that rose in the shadow of a tall campanile. From a bronze capital it rose, girdled with beautiful marble reliefs of dancing children by Donatello and protected from the sun by a charming circular roof, and in this delectable coign of vantage stood a priest holding something that fevered the perspiring mob. “La sacra cintola! La sacra cintola!” I knew what the Virgin’s girdle would be like, for had I not seen her handing it to St. Thomas in Lippo Lippi’s picture in this same town of Prato, as she flew up to heaven in the radiance of her youth and beauty, standing on cherubs’ heads and escorted by angels? But now so far as I could see this tasselled belt, it seemed to correspond ill with the waist measurement of the little mother of Nazara. Some white pigeons fluttered round the priest’s head and settled on the pulpit, and a great sigh of ecstasy went up from the people. I looked round at the little Bacchus. But he was still smiling. I stood before an altar in a little church, but this time a sweet-faced woman in a wimple stood beside me. “The wall is behind the altar,” she said. “And once a year the miraculous image of the Madonna of the Bed is shown to the people of Pistoja and the pilgrims, exactly as Our Lady of the Graces impressed it on this piece of wall here when she appeared to the sick girl. Very beautiful is she in her crown and mantle, clasping to her arms the crowned Bambino as she flies upwards.” “And where is the bed?” “The bed was removed from this sanctuary, which it blocked up disproportionately. A separate little chapel was built for it.” We passed to the bed-chapel by way of the old cloisters of the Ospedale, and saw in a small room a heavy brownish wooden bed with a red quilt, made as for an occupant. A Madonna and Child was painted on the headpiece, and a Madonna and Child at the foot, and a Madonna and Child hung on the wall. “And when was the miracle wrought?” I asked. “In 1336.” The very year of the death of Cino, the poet of Pistoja and the friend of Dante, I remembered. And Dante and Cino had receded into the dim centuries while this bed with its prosaic quilt and pillows stood stolid, inscribed at head and foot with inscriptions dated 1336 and 1334, begging me to pray for the souls of Condoso Giovanni and Fra Ducchio. “Here,” explained the sweet-faced sister, “the poor girl had lain many long years, incurable, when one day the Virgin appeared in dazzling beauty, holding the Child, and told two little boys who happened to be in the hospital to fetch brother Jacopo della Cappa. The venerable brother, being busy confessing, refused to be disturbed, whereupon the Virgin sent a second message bidding him come at once, for she desired him to predict a pestilence in Pistoja, of which he would die in a month. So he came forthwith, but he had scarcely entered the room when the dazzling apparition disappeared. But she left the invalid girl in perfect health, and her holy image on the wall.” “And did Fra Jacopo duly die?” “To the day. And so great was the plague that there was scarcely any one left to administer the last office.” “As disproportionate as the bed to the church,” I thought, “to kill off all Pistoja and save one bedridden girl.” But how utter such a thought to this sweet-faced sister? “Since then the bed and the image on the wall have wrought many miracles,” she said. “The blind have had their sight, the deaf their hearing, the paralysed their limbs. That was why the name was changed from Our Lady of the Bed to Our Lady of the Graces. And countless were the pilgrims that came. But in 1780 the wicked Scipione Ricci, who was a secret Jansenist, was made our bishop, and he tried to destroy the faith in our sanctuary and in the Girdle of Prato. But our neighbours of Prato rose against him, rushed into the cathedral, smashed his episcopal chair, and sacked his palace. He had to resign his bishopric, and so our faith was purged of the heretic, and Maria was avenged. Ah, that jubilee of her Immaculate Conception in 1904! It was a day of Paradise.” Again a haze disturbs my vision. For a moment I see the little olive-eyed Jewess of Nazara, racked between husband and son, wringing her impotent hands; then my vision clears, and I am reading a printed Italian prayer before a chapel of the Madonna in a mighty fane. “To the Holy Immaculate Virgin of Hope Venerated in the Basilica of S. Frediano “Kneeling before you, Immaculate Virgin, Mother of God, consoler of the afflicted, refuge of sinners, we pray you to turn upon us your looks full of goodness, compassion, and love. You see all our spiritual and temporal needs. Obtain from your divine Son sincere contrition for sin, light to know the truth, force to conquer temptations, help to believe and act as true Christians, patience in tribulations, peace of heart, holy perseverance to the end. Obtain for us that there may remain far from us disease, pestilence, hunger, war, earthquakes, fires, drought, flood, sudden death. Take this City under your particular protection, preserve it, defend it, cause ever to reign therein the spirit of religion and of concord, and in private families mutual charity, domestic content, and good morals.... Whoever will devoutly recite this will acquire forty days’ Indulgence already conceded by His Most Reverend Excellence Monsignore the Archbishop Filippo Santi. “Lucca, 1848.” I seemed to be back in Asia on a burning June day fifteen hundred years before this prayer was written, much pushed about by the crowd that surged round a church. “Is it the Whitsuntide service?” I asked a priest at last in the Greek I heard on all sides. “Nay; art a barbarian or a worshipper of the Temple of Diana that thou knowest not the Church of the Theotokos, and the great Imperial Council of Bishops that is sitting there to avenge the insults of Nestorius to the Virgin?” “What insults?” I murmured. “Surely thou hast snored in the cave in the Pion Hill with our Seven Sleepers! This blasphemous Patriarch of Constantinople denies our Lady the title Theotokos, would argue that she is not Mother of God, but that the Christ born through her was only the human part of Him, not the Eternal Logos.” His voice trembled, his beady eyes flamed with passion. “And he dares come defend his thesis here—in Ephesus, where the Holy Virgin lies buried! But our saintly Cyril of Alexandria hath drawn up twelve anathemas and will stamp him out as he stamped out that minx Hypatia.” “Is Cyril here too, then?” “Ay, and what an ambrosial homily he preached! ‘Hail, Mary, Mother of God, spotless dove! Hail, Mary, perpetual lamp at which was kindled the Sun of Justice! Hail, Mary! Thanks to Thee, the archangels rejoice and sing; thanks to Thee, the Magi followed the star; thanks to Thee the college of Apostles was established....’” His voice died away in reminiscent ecstasy. “Then Cyril and Nestorius are now in debate?” “Nay, the heretic shrinks from appearing—he pretexts that all the bishops are not arrived, and he induced the Emperor’s commissioner to protest against the sitting. But as thou seest, the Council is going on—hath been going on from early morn—there are two hundred bishops.” “There are only a hundred and fifty,” put in a voice. “It is scandalous.” “Ay,” assented another voice. “Where is the Patriarch of Antioch?” The priest turned on the Nestorians. “It is beasts like you with whom Paul fought here,” he said. “Beast thyself,” retorted a physician in a long robe, “to suggest that God could be contained in the womb.” It was the beginning of a scuffle that grew to a bloody battle between the Nestorian minority and the orthodox. Daggers and scimitars gleamed in the air. I saw a group of Nestorians take refuge in a church, but fly from it again, leaving a trail of bleeding corpses along the aisle. The survivors made for the harbour, hoping doubtless for safety in the multitude of boats and ships. And ever thicker grew the crowd surging round the Council-chamber, till at last as the long summer day closed, a rumbling as of distant thunder was heard from within—“Anathema! Anathema!” And the cry passed to the crowd—“Anathema! Anathema!”—till the whole firmament seemed to crash and rock with it and men cheered and danced and tossed their weapons in air. And as the venerable figures began to troop out and the word came that Nestorius was deposed, a thousand torches leapt as by magic into flame, and men escorted the Bishops to their lodgings, leaping and singing, and lo! round the whole city blazed illuminations and bonfires. And my eyes, piercing through the future, beheld Italian bottegas with immortal Masters and Pupils, turning out through the centuries portraits of the Madonna and Child, to be blazoned henceforward inseparable, a symbol of the true faith: delectable, innumerable, filling the whole earth with their glory. The close smell of the studios gave way again to the odour of crowded humanity and I was in the arena of Seville. But never, not even at Easter, had I seen the populace so joyous, the ladies shrouded in such rich mantillas or flirting such precious fans, the picadors so gaily caparisoned, the toreadors so daring, the bulls maddened with so many banderillas or disembowelling so many horses. It was the mutual ecstasy of slaughter. And from all parts of the city penetrated the chiming of bells, while the thunder of festive cannon sometimes drowned even the roar of the ring. And at every thrilling stroke or perilous charge there came from parted lips, “Ave Maria purissima” or “Viva nuestra SeÑora,” and from all around rose the instinctive reply: “Sin peccado concebida.” Gradually, as I listened to the conversation in the intervals of the bull fights, I became aware of the sense of the Fiesta. All this overflow of religious rapture sprang not from the bulls but the Bull—Regis Pacifici—which after centuries of passionate controversy had at last been launched by Paul V in this sixteen hundred and seventeenth year from the bearing of the Virgin, forbidding the opponents of Immaculate Conception to sustain their doctrine in public. Maria had been conceived without sin. The last flaw had been removed from her perfection. “Heaven rewards us for expelling the last of the Moors,” cried a lovely SeÑora with a dazzling flash of eyes and teeth. “And now that we have purged Spain and placed her and her mighty possessions under the protection of the Immaculate Conception, her future shall be even more glorious than her past.” But my reply was drowned by the roar of the ring as the dead bull was trailed off at a gallop. “Ave Maria purissima!” “Sin peccado concebida!” I am still in Spain, watching SeÑor BartholomÉ EstÉban Murillo polish off his Madonnas for country fairs or South American convents. Presently under the guidance of SeÑor Pacheco, Holy Inquisitor of pictures, he paints the popular dogma of the day, in the shape of little angels floating below a lovely lady in a blue mantle standing with clasped hands on the earth-ball, and the scene shifts to France where two centuries later the picture is purchased at a fabulous price by the Louvre, just before Pio Nono from his refuge at Gaeta publishes the Bull Ineffabilis, definitely declaring that the freedom of the Virgin from original sin is a divine revelation. Cheap coloured pictures of the “Immaculate Conception” multiply, and Bernadette, a pious young shepherdess in the French Pyrenees, beholds in a grotto by a spring a White Lady, veiled from head to foot, with a cerulean floating scarf, a chaplet with golden links, and two golden roses on her naked feet, who announces herself as “The Immaculate Conception” and demands a Procession to her shrine. And before my eyes unrolls the long panorama, painted in immortal colours by the epical brush of Zola: the mushroom Lourdes of hotels and holy shops replacing the rude village, the Hospital of our Lady of Sorrows, the crowned statue of our Lady of Salvation, the Fathers of the Grotto, the Blue Sisters, the Church of the Rosary, the Basilica swathed in splendid banners, glittering with golden hearts innumerable, and jewels and marbles and marvellous lamps; the unending masses and litanies, the three hundred thousand pilgrims a year, the thaumaturgic bathing pools, unclean, abominable, the White Train rolling through the night with its hideous agglomeration of human agonies, amid ecstatic canticles to the Madonna, the thirty thousand tapers winding round in leagues of flame to the rhythm of interminable invocations, the perpetual thunder of supplication breaking frenziedly on the figure of the Madonna framed in the ever-blazing Grotto. The thunder continued but it was again the roar of an arena, though by the towered old palaces round the great semi-circle of cobbled piazza and by the fountain with the bas-reliefs of Christian virtues I knew I was back in Italy, in my beloved Siena. But what was this smoky flame that shot skyward and what was this tree near the Christian fountain that they were breaking up to throw on the bonfire? What was this dreadful sport that had replaced the Palio? In a vast pyre burnt a great huddle of writhing figures, whose shrieks were drowned by the fiendish roar of the drunken mob. “Viva Maria! Viva Maria!” And I remembered that Siena had peculiarly dedicated itself to the Holy Mother, was the civitas Virginis, and that the Madonna was its feudal suzerain, formally presented with the keys of its gates. Visions from the old chronicles floated before me—the dedication of 1260, the weeping Syndic in his shirt, a rope round his neck, prostrate with the Bishop before the altar of the Virgin, or walking behind her as she was carried in the great barefoot procession to the chanting of Ave Marias; and the victory over Florence that duly followed, when, throwing her white mantle of mist over her city, she enabled her faithful feudatories to slay ten thousand Florentines “as a butcher slays animals in a slaughter house,” so that the Malena ran bank-high with blood, and the region, polluted by the carcases of eighteen thousand horses, was abandoned to the wild beasts, and coins were struck in her honour; and the renewed dedications whenever the Commune was in peril, the gorgeous processions and “Te Deums,” the great silk standard showing the Madonna rising into heaven over the city, the Cardinal, the Prior, the Captain of the People, the Signoria in violet and cloaked as on Good Friday, the trumpeters trumpeting in the striped Duomo, the feudal keys in a silver basin, the fifty poor damsels in white, dowered annually so long as the Virgin did her duty as suzerain?—— But the shrieks from the bonfire brought me back to the moment. “Whom are they burning?” I cried in horror. “Only Jews,” replied my neighbour reassuringly, and indeed, I could now distinguish the Hebrew death-cries of the victims. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord Our God, the Lord is One.” “We burn them and the Tree of Liberty together!” my neighbour chuckled. “No godless French Republic for us!” A fierce yell from the crowd underlined his remark. He craned forward, beaming, exalted. “They have found another! O Blessed Virgin of Comfort, they have found another!” And I perceived, dragged along towards the pyre by her greying hair, a little olive-eyed Jewish mother, whose worn face I seemed to recognise under her dishevelled head-shawl. “Viva Maria! Viva Maria! Viva la Madre di Dio!” The spectacle was too horrible. With a convulsive shudder I shook off these visions and rose, cramped, to my feet. The sun was dipping beyond the mountains of Vicenza, the peaceful bell from below was still tolling, the air was cool and delicious. Now I could continue my climb to the church of Our Lady of the Mountain. And the loving epithets recommenced—“Debellatrix Incredulorum,” “Janua Coeli,” “Turris Davidica,” without pause, without end. And as I walked, other of her countless names began crowding upon me, from “Our Lady of Snows” to “Our Lady of Sorrows,” from “Our Lady of the Porringer” to “The Queen of the Angels,” and all the symbols of her, from the Pomegranate to the Sealed Book, from the Dove to the Porta Clausa; and all the myriads of churches and altars that had been dedicated to her from Rome to Ecuador—from Milan Cathedral with its hundred spires to the humblest wayside shrine of Sicily or Mexico—and all the feasts, all the “Months of Maria,” all the Pilgrimages, with all the medals and missals, all the effigies in wood or wax or bronze, all the marbles and mosaics, from the crude little black sacrosanct Byzantine figures to the exquisitely tender marble PietÀ of Michelangelo, and all the convents and orders she had created, all the Enfants de Marie, and Serviti di Maria, and Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, and all the hymns, antiphons, litanies, lections, carols, canticles. The air was full of organ sounds and the melody of soaring voices. “Ave Maris Stella” they sang, and “Salve Regina” and “Stabat Mater,” and then in an infinite incantation, sounding and resounding from all the spaces of the world: “Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis! Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis!” And her figure floated before me, pure, radiant, loving, as it has floated before millions of households for hundreds of years, consoling, blessing, vitalising. And I thought of her long adventure to reach this marvellous apotheosis: in what a strange little source this mighty river had begun; how that looseness of the Septuagint translator in rendering the Hebrew for “maiden” by “virgin” in an utterly irrelevant passage of Isaiah had led to Mary’s virginity; how she had remained a virgin through all the vicissitudes of her married life, Joseph turning into a man of eighty with children by his former wife, or even remaining virgin himself, the brothers of Jesus changing into his cousins; how her son had been born as a ray of light or even as an illusive appearance; how, with the growth of theology and Mariolatry and nunneries and monasteries, she had grown holier and holier, immaculate, impeccable, a model to men and maidens, the Queen of Heaven, mighty beyond all the saints, giving four feast-days to the Church, entering into the liturgy, redeeming souls from purgatory on Assumption Day, and even sustaining the saintly with her milk; how her final purification from the taint of original sin had been a stumbling block for the more rigid theologians, St. Bernard opposing the festival, Aquinas and the Dominicans denying the dogma against Duns Scotus and the Franciscans; but how the “intellectuals”—so serviceable to the mob when their logic found contorted reasons for the popular faith—were sooner or later swept aside, the harsh definers of heresy themselves left heretics, when they ran counter to the popular emotion, the popular festivals, the popular instinct for an ideal of purity and perfection. What a curious play and interplay of schoolman-logic and living emotion, working ceaselessly through the centuries, combining or competing to re-shape and sublimate the carpenter’s wife till she was wrought to the mould of the popular need, her very parents, unknown to the Gospels, becoming, as Joachim and Anna, the centre of a fresh cycle of legends, pictures, Church festivals. And what uncountable volumes of monumental learning and jejune controversy, from Augustus and Anselm and the venerable Bede to the two thousand and twelve pages of Carlo Passaglia of Lucca, the respondent to Renan! And my thoughts turned from the theologians to the poets and painters, to the Vergine Bella e di sol vestita—the beautiful Apocalyptic Virgin, clothed with the sun—of Petrarch, and the weeping Virgin of Tasso, and the Vergine Madre Figlia del tuo Figlio of Dante, and the images in all these forms created by the artists, for whom the Madonna sufficed to open all the mansions of art; who could cluster all the poetry of the world round her glory or her grief, were it rural loveliness or the beauty of lilies, or lofty architecture, or space-rhythm, or begemmed and brocaded attire, or the sculptural nude; who set her rich-carved throne, adorned with arabesques or hued in strange green and gold, amid palatial pillars under diapered ceilings or within glamorous landscapes, or in the bowers of roses or under the shadow of lemon-trees; who even crowned her with the Papal tiara. But none of these images would stay with me: for not even the triple crown, surmounted by the golden globe and cross, not even this symbol of temporal, spiritual, and purgatorial authority, could banish the worn face of the carpenter’s wife under the cheap head-shawl, the little olive-eyed mother in Israel, in whose ears sounded and resounded the terrible words: “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” THE EARTH THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE: OR THE ABSURDITY OF ASTRONOMYFrom the swinging of the bronze lamp in the nave of Pisa Cathedral Galileo caught the idea of measuring Time by the pendulum; by the telescope he made at Padua he mapped Space. Within a decade of the burning of Giordano Bruno the heavens were opened up to show the infinity of worlds, and the heliocentric teaching of Copernicus was confirmed by the revelation of Jupiter’s satellites. What the Sidereus Nuncius of Galileo announced was the end of an era. By this terrible book and his terrible telescope the poor little earth was pushed out of the centre of the stage. The moon—no longer teres atque rotunda—lost her beautiful spheric smoothness, her very light was a loan—unrepaid. Great Sol, himself, the old lord of creation, gradually sank to the obscure coryphÆus of some choric dance veering towards and around some ineffable pivot in a measureless choragium. The ninefold vault engirdling Dante’s universe was shrivelled up. The cosy cosmos was replaced by a maze of solar systems, glory beyond glory, of milky ways that were but clouds of worlds, thick as a haze of summer insects or a whirl of sand in the Sahara. The poor human brain reeled in this simoom of stars, and to complete its confusion, the philosophers hastened to assure it that with the universe no longer geocentric, man could no longer flatter himself to be its central interest. “So many nobler bodies to create, Greater, so manifold, to this one use,” appeared disproportionate to Milton’s Adam. Homo could not be the Master-Builder’s main concern—the great human tragedy was a by-product. A sad conclusion, and possibly a true—but a conclusion utterly unwarranted by these premises. More sanely did the beneficent and facile Raphael remind the doubting Adam, “Whether heaven moves or earth Imports not.” The noble astronomic questionings in the eighth book of “Paradise Lost” testify to the ferment among the first inhabitants of the new cosmos—Milton was born in the same year as the telescope and met Galileo at Florence—but despite the poet’s half-hearted protests, man has swallowed too humbly the doctrine that our earth is not the centre of the universe. Pray do not confound me with those pious pundits whose proofs of the flatness of the earth are still the hope of a lingering sect, and a witness to the immortality of human stupidity. I am no Muggletonian whose sun is four miles from the earth. I have no lance to tilt against the mathematicians and their tubes. But I fail to see how the mere broadening out of our universe can displace Terra from the centre. Till we have the final and all-inclusive chart of the heavens—and worlds immeasurable are still beyond our ken, worlds whose light speeding to us at eleven million miles or so a minute is still on its way—how can any one assert conclusively that our earth is not in the exact centre of all the systems? That it goes round the sun—instead of being the centre of the sun’s revolution—is nothing against its supremacy or central status. The fire exists for the meat, though the spit revolves and not the fire. And if the earth be not in the centre of the systems, it assuredly remains at the centre of Space. For by that old definition of Hermes Trismegistus to which Pascal gave currency, every point of an infinite area is really its centre, even as no point is its circumference. And in a psychological sense too, wherever a spectator stands is the centre of the universe. But grant the earth be not the centre of Space or the systems! What then? How does it lose its lofty estate? Is London at the globe’s kernel? Did the axis pass through Rome? Kepler wasted much precious time under the current philosophic obsession that the orbits of the planets must be circular—since any figure less perfect than a circle were incompatible with their dignity. Hence the cumbrous hypotheses to explain their apparent deviation from perfection, hence was the sphere girt “With centric and eccentric scribbled o’er, Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb.” The same fallacy of symmetry surely underlies the notion that the earth is dethroned from its hegemony of the stellar system merely because the lines drawn to it from every ultima Thule of the universe are unequal. ’Tis a confusion of geometric centre with centre of forces. It may be that just this asymmetric station was necessary for the evolution of the universe’s crowning race. For if the Universe has not its aim and centre in man, pray to what other end all this planetary pother? If man is but a by-product of the cosmic laboratory, what is the staple? Till this question is answered, we may safely continue anthropocentric. Man abased forsooth by this whirl of mammoth worlds! Nay, ’tis our grandeur that stands exalted, our modesty that stands corrected. We did not dream that our facture required such colossal machinery, that to engender us a billion billion planets must be in experimental effervescence. A fig upon their size! Do we rank Milton inferior to the megatherium? Can a man take thought by adding a cubit to his stature? The ant is wiser than the alligator, and the sprawling saurians of the primal slime may have their analogue in the huge weltering worlds that have never evolved a human brain. And had the earth swollen herself to the gross amplitude of the sun, her case were no better: she would still be—in the infinite wash of Space—a pebble, even as a pebble is a stellar system in miniature. There lies the paradox of infinity. Nothing in it is large enough to be important—if quantity is the criterion of importance. To be in one spot of Space is as dignified or undignified as to be in another. Why, I wonder, has position in Time escaped this invidious criticism. As well assert that nothing important can happen or nothing that happens can be important, because everything must happen at a mere point of Time, which is not even Time’s central point. It was a truer sense of values that made Christendom and Islam boldly place their foundation at Time’s central point, up to which or back to which all the ages lead. The year One begins with Christ’s birth, with Mohammed’s Hegira. In the same spirit, though with a more literal belief, did the old cartographers draw their world round Jerusalem as a centre. Position in Time or Space is not the measure of importance, but importance is the measure of position in Time or Space. Where the highest life is being lived, there is the centre of the world, and unless a higher life is lived elsewhere, the centre of the universe. Not, where are we in Space, but are we on the central lines of cosmic evolution? That is the question. Theology, then, stands where it did, wherever Terra stands. Not the mythical theology of sacred books, but the scientific theology of sacred facts. The expansion of the universe from a mapped parish to a half-uncharted wilderness of worlds cannot shake religion—a Deity is more suitably lodged in infinity than on a roof-garden—but it did shake the Church, so recklessly committed to a disprovable cosmogony. And the Church burnt books and men with its habitual consuming zeal, denying the motion of the earth as it had denied the Antipodes, clinging to an earth surrounded by menial planets, as it had clung to the flat plane of “Christian Topography.” But is there nothing to be said for the Churchmen? Were they mere venomous obscurantists? Nay, they were patriots fighting for their father-world, for the cosmos of their ancestors, pro aris et focis. They saw their little universe threatened by the rise of a great stellar empire. They saw themselves about to be swallowed up and lost in its measureless magnificence. And so in a frenzy of chauvinism they gagged Galileo and burned Giordano Bruno, those traitors in the camp, in league with Reason, emperor of the stars. But despite the Church’s defeat, our little globe still maintains a sturdy independence. And until you bring me evidence of a superior genus, I shall continue to regard our good red earth as the centre of creation, and man as the focus of inter-celestial planetary forces. Millions of spiritual creatures may walk the earth unseen, as Milton asserts, and millions more may be invisible in Mars and the remoter seats of the merry-go-round, but de non apparentibus et de non existentibus eadem est ratio. It is William James who of all philosophers in the world would argue our fates regulated by superior beings with whom we co-exist as with us our cats and dogs. The analogy has not even one leg to stand on. The cat and the dog have solid proof of our existence, they see and hear us, and we share with them a large segment of existence. Our anatomy and theirs are much of a muchness. They divide with us our food and our drink and bask at the same fire, nay, it requires a vast conceit to look them in the face and deny our kinship. But who save Gulliver hath beheld a bodily Superman or partaken of his meals? Even with our spiritual superiors, with our Shakespeares and Beethovens, we have a substantial basis of identity. The range of thought which circumscribes ours must at the same time partially coincide with it, and though our thoughts be not wholly their thoughts, their thoughts must needs be partially ours. God may be infinitely more than man, but He is not finitely less. Even a God without humour would be—to that extent—man’s inferior. Matthew Arnold’s gibe of the “magnified non-natural man” is groundless. I do not become a magnified non-natural dog because I have attributes in common with my terrier. The God of theology is already divested of man’s matter; deflate Him likewise of man’s spirit, and what remains? In robbing their Deity of all human traits the de-anthropomorphic philosophers have overshot the mark and reduced Him to a transcendental nullity who can neither be comprehended by His creatures nor comprehend them. Or if they allow Him ideas and passions, they neutralise and sterilise them in a frenzy of scholastic paradox. “Amas, nec Æstuas,” cries St. Augustine, “zelas et securus es; pÆnitet te et non doles; irasceris et tranquillus es.” God repents, but without regret; He is angry but perfectly tranquil. To evade the limitations of any attribute we endow Him at the same time with its opposite, as who should say a white negro. But such violent assaults upon the unthinkable yield no prize either of understanding or of satisfaction. If “the love that moves the sun and the other stars” be not that same love which a noble man may feel for his fellow-creatures of every order of being, if it be a love that is at the same time indifference, or even hate, then it may equally be expressed as “the hate which moves the sun and the other stars” (and which is at the same time love). Or it may find far honester expression as the agnostic’s unknowable—the X that moves the sun and the other stars. If God’s justice be not man’s justice, then it is no justice. It must be our justice—if it is justice at all—our justice, only occupied and obscured by innumerable pros and cons to us unknown, and extending over times and spaces beyond our ken, so that were we placed in possession of all the evidence we should applaud the verdict. The philosophers do but narrow their God under illusion of broadening Him—or rather they broaden Him so tenuously that He becomes an infinite impalpability, whose accidental evaporation would scarcely be noted. It was a more consistent mystic who said: “God may not improperly be styled nothing.” So that our circumnavigation of the infinite brings us back to our noble selves and our own door-step. The sun is still there to give us light by day, and the moon and stars still shine to give us light by night. Nor is it less their function to nourish us with beauty and with mystery. “When Science from Creation’s face Enchantment’s veil withdraws, What lovely visions yield their place To cold material laws!” Campbell, who thus complained, was no profound poet. The laws are neither cold nor material, nor do the lovely visions yield their place. Their loveliness is as abiding as the laws which produce them. ’Tis true that at first Galileo seemed to have profaned Cynthia, the “goddess excellently bright.” The moon, the beautiful moon of poets and lovers, lay betrayed—a dead planet, a scarred desolation, seamed with arid ravines and pitted with a pox of craters. Is then the moon of the poets a delusion which science bids us put away like a childish toy? No, by her own heavens, no. A more scientific science restores the glamour. The moon has all the beauty she appears to have. The loveliest woman’s face, viewed through a magnifying glass, appears equally scarred and seamed and pitted. But here ’tis the lens that is accused of falsification, ’tis the ugliness that is pronounced the delusion—a face was meant to be seen at a certain distance and with the natural eye. Even so—and the moon chose her distance with admirable discretion. The synthesis of everyday reality is always man’s central verity. The peering unnatural scientific vision of the moon has the lesser truth, is but a spectral rim of the whole-orbed reality. ’Tis the poet’s moon that is the full moon. But the poet were as foolish as the astronomer if he in his turn imagined himself dealing with absolutes, if he forgot that in logic as in landscape all views depend on the point at which you place yourself. It is only from the true point of view that the earth remains the centre of the universe. OF AUTOCOSMS WITHOUT FACTS: OR THE EMPTINESS OF RELIGIONSAnd what is the invasion of our consciousness by the extended stellar system to its invasion by the intensive infinities of our own globular parish? The endless galaxy of the centuries and the civilisations has opened out before our telescopic thought. We are no longer at the centre of our cosmos—we can no longer snuggle in a cosy conceptual world, Classical or Christian, nor can we make the best of both these worlds, like Raphael or Milton. The dim populations have become lurid. Japan pours her art upon us, and her equal claim to hold a chosen people—“pursuing,” as its Emperor’s oath declares, “a policy co-extensive with the heavens and the earth.” Egypt unrolls the teeming scroll of her immemorial dynasties. The four hundred millions of China lie on our imaginations like a nightmare in yellow, and we perceive that the maker of man hath a predilection for pigtails. India opens out her duskily magnificent infinities and we are grown familiar with Brahma and Vishnu, with Vedas and Buddha-JÂtakas. Persia reveals to us in the Zend Avesta of Zoroaster a strangely modern gospel, glimmering through grotesque images of space and time. Mohammed is no longer an Infidel, and we recognise the subtlety alike of the Motekallamin and the Arabic Aristotelians. We respect the Norse Gods and the great Tree Yggdrasil. The Teutonic divinities have reappeared in every part of the civilised earth and their operatic voice is heard with more reverence than any other god’s. Even the old Peruvian civilisation solicits us, that successful social order of the Incas. The stellar swirl of worlds is a crude puzzle in quantity beside these mental worlds which the peoples have spun for themselves like cocoons. But not only the peoples. Each creature that has ever lived, from the spider to Shakespeare, has spun for itself its own cosmos. Microcosm we cannot call this cosmos, since that implies the macrocosm drawn to smaller scale, and this—like all creations—is a mere selection from the universe, excluding and including after its own idiosyncrasy. Autocosm is the word we need for it—a new word, but a phenomenon as old as the first created consciousness, and a phenomenon that has never perfectly repeated itself since that day. For no two autocosms have ever been precisely alike. In the lower orders of being the autocosm may be substantially identical throughout all the individuals of the species, but as we mount in the grade of organisation, the autocosm becomes more and more individual. And even the large generic autocosms, how variously compounded—the scent-world of dogs, the eye-world of birds, the uncanny touch-world of bats, the earth-world of worms, the water-world of fishes, the gyroscopic world of dancing-mice, the flesh-world of parasites, the microscopic world of microbes. These worlds do not need untrammelled orbits, they intersect one another inextricably in an infinite interlacing. Yet each is a symmetric sphere of being, a rounded whole, and to its denizens the sole and self-sufficient cosmos. One creature’s poison is another creature’s meat, one creature’s offal is another creature’s paradise, and our cemetery is a nursery aswarm with creeping mites. If on the one hand Nature seems a wasteful housekeeper, scattering a thousand seeds that one may bear, on the other hand she appears ineffably ingenious in economising every ort and oddment, every cheese-paring and scum-drop as the seed-plot of new and joyous existence. Life, like an infinite nebulous spirit, bursts in through every nook and cranny of matter, squeezing itself into every possible and improbable mould, and even filling a chink in an existing creature rather than remain outside organisation. And each atom of spirit that achieves material existence takes its cramped horizons for the boundaries of the universe and itself as the centre of creation. Woe indeed to the creature that has seen beyond its own boundaries, that can weave no cosy autocosm to nestle in. This is what happens to your Shakespeares and your Schopenhauers; this is the “Everlasting Nay” of “Sartor Resartus.” Life is become “A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.” Such an autocosm is the shirt of Nessus. Hercules must tear it off or perish. And we are all the time changing our autocosms. That is the meaning of experience. Only the fool dies in the same cosmos in which he was born, and a great teacher or a great statesman changes the autocosm of his generation. Here be the true weavings with which Time’s Shuttle is busy, these endless patternings and re-patternings of mental worlds, adjusted to ever-changing creatures, and ever-shifting circumstances. The birth and death of planets is stability compared with this mercurial flux, which in the human world is known as movements of thought and religion, growths and decays of language, periods of art and politics. History is the clash of autocosms, and every war is a war of the worlds. As I walk into Milan Cathedral, the modern autocosm fades out with the buzz and tingle of the electric cars that engirdle the great old building, and the massive walls of the mediÆval autocosm shut me into a glowing gloom of unearthly radiance, whose religious hush is accentuated by the sound of soft bells. Only the dominating figure on the cross seems out of tone; this blood is too violent for peace. What a paradox that the Christians are such dominant races—perhaps they needed this brake. But even without the blood, the cruciform dusk of the interior is in discord with the lace-work of the exterior, recalls the sombreness below the glittering Renaissance. All this multitudinous microscopic work is waste, all this wealth of fretwork and final, for it is only at a distance, when the details have faded into the mass, that this mass appears noble. And this, too, is like the Catholic autocosm, with its rococo detail and its massive magnificence. And round the Cathedral, as I said, rages the modern order—is not Milan the metropolis of Italian science and do not all tram-roads lead to the Piazza del Duomo?—and a ballet I saw in La Scala danced the carmagnole of the new world. “Excelsior” was its jubilant motto, the ascent being from Cathedrals to Railway Bridges and Balloons. A Shining Spirit of Light (Luce) inspired CiviltÀ and baffled the priestly powers of darkness (Tenebre), while ineffably glittering coryphÉes proclaimed with their toes “Eureka!” But ah! my dear Corybants of Reason, an autocosm may be habitable and even comfortable in despite of Science. Its working value is independent of its containing false materials, or true materials in false proportions. And yet, my dear devotees of Pragmatism—that parvenu among Philosophies—its utility does not establish its truth. A false coin will do all the work of a true coin so long as it is not found out. Nevertheless there exists a test of coins independent of their power of gulling the public. And there exists a name for those who continue to circulate a coin after they know it to be false. The Pragmatist may apply his philosophy to justify past forms of belief and action, now outmoded, but he will do infinite mischief if he tries to juggle himself or the world into such forms of belief or action because they lead to spiritual and practical satisfactions. Oh, what a tangled web we weave When first we practise to believe! Nay, it is doubtful whether satisfaction can come as the sequel of any but a genuine and involuntary belief. There is much significance in the story of the old Welsh lady who desired the removal of the mountain in front of her window and complained to her pastor that all her prayers had been unable to move it a single inch. “Because you have not real faith,” was the glib clerical reply. Whereupon, resolved to have “real faith,” the old lady spent a night of prayer on her knees opposite the mountain. When morning came, and she rolled up the blind, lo! the mountain stood as before. “There!” she exclaimed. “Just as I expected!” This pseudo-faith is, I fear, all that the Pragmatist can beguile or batter himself into, for if he has real faith he needs no Pragmatism to justify it by. I grant you—indeed I have always pointed out—that there is a large area of the autocosm given over to artistic, moral and spiritual truths which are their own justification. But it is only where there is no objective test of truth that Pontius Pilate’s question may be answered with the test of success and stimulation. Wherever it is possible to compare the autocosm with the macrocosm, contradiction must be taken as the mark of falsity, and either our notion of the macrocosm must be amended, or our autocosm. Of course in the last analysis the macrocosm is only the autocosm of its age, but it is the common segment of all the individual autocosms. And while they are liable to shrivel up like pricked bladders, the objective universe can only expand and expand. Despite La Scala and its dÆdal Modernism, it was, I fear, the Catholic autocosm which fascinated me most in Italy, with its naÏve poetry, its grossness, its sublimity, and its daring distortions of the macrocosm. The very clock-wheels in their courses fight against reality. Read in the great church of S. Petronio the directions on the two clocks of Fornasini, one giving the solar time in the antique Italian style—when the hour varied with the daylight—and the other the mean time of the meridian of Bologna. “Subtract the time on the Italian clock from 24 o’clock, add the remainder to the time indicated on the other clock, but counted from 1 to 24 o’clock. The time thus obtained will be the hour of Ave Maria!” The hour of Ave Maria! Not some crude arithmetical hour. Not the hour of repose from work, not the hour of impending sunset, but the hour of the vesper bell, the hour of Ave Maria! How it circumlaps, this atmosphere, how it weaves a veil of pity and love between man and the macrocosm. It is nearly three and a half centuries since Italy helped to break the power of the Paynim at Lepanto, yet the belief that the Madonna (who could not free her own land from the Turk) was the auxilium Christianorum, is as lively as on the day when the bigoted Gregory XIII instituted the Feast of the Rosary to commemorate her victory. At Verona I read in a church a vast inscription set up at the tercentenary of the battle, still ascribing the victory not only to the “supreme valour of our arms steeled by the word of Pius V,” but also to “the great armipotent Virgin.” Saints that I had in my ignorance imagined remote from to-day, shelved in legend and picture, retired from practical life, are, I found, still in the full exercise of their professional activities as thaumaturgists; and scholastic philosophers whose systems I had skimmed in my youth as archaic lore, whom I had conceived as buried in encyclopÆdias and monastic libraries, blossom annually in new editions. There is the Angelic Doctor—Preceptor as he was styled on the title-pages—whom I had thought safely tucked away in the tenth canto of the “Paradiso.” In the Seminario Vescovile of Ferrara I beheld the bulky volumes of his “Summa TheologiÆ” in the pious hands of the fledgeling priests, in a class-room whose ceiling bears the sombre frescoes with which Garofalo had enriched the building in its palmy days as a Palazzo. And the theology has decayed far less than the frescoes. Still, that which we look upon as the faded thought of the Middle Ages, serves as the fresh bread of life to these youthful souls. Little did I dream when I first saw Benozzo Gozzoli’s picture of The Triumph of St. Thomas, or Taddeo Gaddi’s portrayal of his celestial exaltation over the discomfited Arius, Sabellius, and Averroes, that I should see with my own eyes scholars still at the feet of the Magister studentium of the thirteenth century. Well may the Pope undaunted launch his Encyclicals, and the Osservatore Romano remark that “the evolution of dogma is a logical nonsense for philosophers and a heresy for theologians.” Pascal summed it up long ago: “Truth on this side of the Pyrenees, Falsehood beyond.” What is true in the Piazza of St. Peter grows false as you pass the Swiss Guards. Catholic truth, like the Vatican, is extra-territorial. Why should it concern itself with what is believed outside? Even the Averroist philosophers taught that their results were true only in philosophy, and that in the realm of Catholicism what the Church taught was true. And though “impugning the known truth” be one of the sins against the Holy Ghost, the known truth and the Church truth show scant promise of coinciding. And the triumph of St. Thomas continues, as saint no less than as teacher. “Divus Thomas Aquinas” I found him styled in Perugia. His Festa is on March 7, as I read in a placard in the Church of S. Domenico in Ferrara. “Festa dell’ Angelico Dottore S. T. d’Aquinas San Patrono delle Scuole Cattoliche.” On the day of the Festa there is plenary indulgence for all the faithful. There was another indulgence “per gli ascritti alla Milizia Angelica.” But whether the Angelic Militia are the pupils of the Angelic Doctor I am not learned enough to say. His even earlier saintship, St. Antony, not only continues to dominate Padua from his vast monumental Church, and enjoy his three June days of Festa in his nominal city, but his tutelary grace extends far beyond. In the Church of San Spirito in the Via Ariosto of Ferrara, the famous preacher to the fishes was—after the earthquake of 1908—the target of three days of prayer. The house Ariosto built himself in the fifteenth century stands in the same street, but Ariosto’s world of mediÆval chivalry is shattered into atoms while St. Antony still saves Ferrara from earthquake. Yes—allowing Messina and Reggio to be annihilated—the Saint in 1908 said to the seismic forces, “So far and no farther,” and ’tis not for me, whose umbrella he recovered on the very day I mocked at his pretensions, to resent his preferences. Three days of thanksgiving (mass in the morning at his altar and prayers and Benediction in the afternoon), “per lo scampato flagello del Terremoto,” rewarded his partiality for Ferrara. The town keeps doubtless a morbid memory of earthquakes, for from an old German book printed at Augsburg by Michael Manger, I learn that the terrible Terremoto of 1570, “in Welschland am Po,” started in Ferrara on a 16th in the night and lasted till the 21st, during which time two hundred people perished, and many houses with a dozen churches, monasteries and nunneries were destroyed in Ferrara alone. Why St. Antony nodded on that occasion is not explained. Nor why he should have limited his protection to the Jews, not a man of whom was injured. Perhaps he had not yet recognised the claim of Ferrarese Christianity upon him. There is a wistful note in the prayer placarded in the Ferrarese church of San Francesco. “O great saint, commonly called the saint of Padua, but worthy to be called the saint of the world.... You who so often pressed in your arms the celestial Bambino!” Happy Paduans, to whom this chronological prodigy is securely attached, who indeed hastened to build a Cathedral round him in the very year of his canonisation (1232). Here amid crudely worked flowers, crutches, photographs and other mementoes of his prowess, the faithful may find remission of their sins or expiation of the faults of their dead. For what limit is there to his intercessory power? Let me English the prayer hung up in his chapel. Every religion has its higher and more sophistic presentation, but it is well to turn from the pundits to the people. “Orazione a S. Antonio di Padova. “Great St. Antony, the Church glories in all the prerogatives that God has favoured you with among all the saints. Death is disarmed by your power; error is dissipated by your light. They whom the malice of man tries to wound receive from you the desired relief. The leprous, the sick, the crippled, by your virtue obtain cure, and the hurricanes and the tempests of the sea calm themselves at your command; the chains of slaves fall in pieces by your authority, and the lost things are found again by your care and return to their legitimate possessors. All those who invoke you with faith are freed from the evils and perils that menace them. In fine, there is no want to which your power and goodness do not extend.” Here the intermediary has practically superseded the Creator, even if dulia be still distinguished from latria. Rimini was likewise safeguarded from the earthquake of 1908, but not by St. Antony. A saint of its own, the glorious Bishop and Martyr, St. Emidio, “compatrone della cittÀ, protettore potentissimo contro il flagello del Terremoto,” received the Three Days’ Solemn Supplication, and the Riminese were adjured in many a placard to repeat their fathers’ glorious outburst of faith before the thaumaturgic images when the city was delivered from the frightful earthquake of 1786. But on the whole the saints can scarcely have done their duty by the old towered cities, for all Italy is full of the legend of toppled towers. In war-perils it is the Archangel Michael who is the power to approach. A prayer, ordered by Pope Leo XIII to be said in all the churches of the world on bended knees after private mass, pleads to that Holy Prince of the celestial legions to defend us in battle and to thrust Satan and other roving spirits of evil back to Hell. “Tuque, Princeps MilitiÆ Coelestis, Satanam aliosque spiritus malignos, qui ad perditionem animarum pervagantur in mundo, divina virtute in infernum detrude. Amen.” That Satan still has the entry of the Catholic autocosm, I was indeed not unaware. But I was certainly taken aback to find the Plague still curable by Paternosters. Yet this is what I was told in a little church in Brescia devoted to Moretto’s works and monument, and summing up in letters of gold the whole duty of man. “Christians! Bless the most holy name of God and of Jesus, Respect the Festas, Keep the Fasts and the Abstinences! In short, only by Prayer And Penitence will cease Great Mortality, Famine And every Epidemic.” I had regarded the Salute and the other Plague-Churches of Venice as mere historic curiosities, and written it down as an asset of human thought that the Plague of 1630 was due to the filthiness and congestion of the Levantine cities. That when 60,000 Venetians died—“uno sterminato numero” as the tablet in the Salute says—the Venetian Republic should with vermicular humility erect a gorgeous church in gratitude for the Death-Angel’s moderation—this might pass in 1630, like St. Rocco’s neglect in performing only the few desultory miracles recorded in the wooden bas-reliefs of his choir. In the seventeenth century one might even adore the angel of Piero Negri’s staircase-fresco of Venice Relieved of the Pest, tardily as he came to relieve those ghastly visions of the plague-pit which Zanchi has painted, facing him. But that in 1836 Venice should have decreed a Three Days’ Thanksgiving to the “DeiparÆ Virgini salutari” for salvation from “the cholera fiercely raging through Europe” shows that two centuries had made no change in the Catholic autocosm, nor in the caprice of its Olympians. Venice had already passed under the Napoleonic reign of pure reason, and in an old poster of the Teatro Civico I read an invitation to the citizens to “democratise” the soil of the theatre by planting here the Tree of Liberty and dancing the graziosissima Carmagnola. But revolutions, French or other, leave undisturbed the deep instinct of humanity which demands that things spiritual shall produce equipollent effects in the physical sphere. “E pur si muove,” as Galileo said a hundred and thirty years after his death. The Catholic autocosm and the objective macrocosm begin to rub against each other even in the churches. Quaintly enough ’tis over the popular practice of spitting that science and religion come into friction. The priest who convoyed me through the Certosa of Pavia seemed to regard his wonderful church as a glorified spittoon, and notices in every church in Italy make clear the universality of the offence. But whereas at Pavia you are asked “For the decorum of the house of God do not spit on the pavement,” in Brescia the deprecation is headed: “Lotta Contro la Tuberculosi,” as though the most penitent and pious might be rewarded for church-going by consumption. The Cremona and Lucca churches compromise: “Out of respect for the house of God and for hygiene please do not spit on the pavement.” In Verona the formula is practically the same: “Decency and hygiene forbid to spit on the pavement.” In Bologna the modern autocosm was, I gather, even more victorious, for in time of plague, some frescoes in S. Petronio were whitewashed over. I trust for the sake of symbolic completeness these were frescoes of St. Sebastian and St. Rocco, the protective plague-saints. A false cosmos, I said, like a false coin, may be as useful as a true one, so long as it is believed in. As long as the attrition of the macrocosm outside does not wear a hole in the Catholic autocosm, it will keep its spheric inflation. For there is nothing to wear a hole from inside, nothing contrary to pure reason, nothing inconsistent with something else. There is no À priori reason why saints should not control the chain of causation by spiritual forces as engineers and doctors control it by physical forces at the bidding of intelligence. There is no formal ground for denying that penitence puts cholera to flight. It is merely a matter of experience—and even Popes and Cardinals remove to cooler places when the pest breaks out at Rome. There is no conceptual reason why there should not be a Purgatory, nor why masses and alms for the dead (or still more the emotions of love and remorse which these represent) should not enable us to assist the posthumous destinies of those we have lost, nor why our sainted dead should be cut off from all fresh influence upon our lives. It seems indeed monstrous that they should pass beyond our yearning affection. In these and other things the Catholic autocosm gives hints to the Creator and shows how the “sorry scheme of things” may be moulded “nearer to the heart’s desire.” Nor is there any reason why there should not be a Trinity or a vicarious Atonement. These concepts, indeed, explain obscurum per obscurius?— “No light but rather darkness visible?—” and seem less natural and more complicated than the Jewish theory of a divine unity and a personal human responsibility. But complexity and incomprehensibility are not proofs of falsity. Tertullian, indeed, in his great lyric cry of faith, would make them proofs of truth. Certum est quia impossibile est. And it may be conceded to Tertullian that in a universe of mystery all compact, the word of the enigma can scarcely be a platitude. But there is a limit to this comfortable canon. Impossibility can only continue a source of certitude so long as transcendental theological conceptions are concerned. But when, leaving the tenuous empyrean of metaphysics, the Impossible incarnates itself upon earth, it must stand or fall by our terrestrial tests of historic happening, and the canon should rather run: Providing it has really happened, its mere impossibility does not diminish its certitude. So that, per contra, if it never happened at all, its mere impossibility cannot guarantee it. Impossibility is a quality it shares with an infinite number of propositions, and if it wishes to single itself out from the crowd, it must seek extraneous witnesses to character. And if it fails in this quest, its impossibility will not save it. We may believe the unproved, but not the disproved. The true interpretation of the universe must be incomprehensible, my interpretation is incomprehensible, therefore my interpretation is true—what tyro in the logics will not at a leap recognise the fallacy of the undistributed middle? Yet on this basis rest innumerable volumes of apologetics. Nay, Sir Thomas Browne himself fell into this “Vulgar Error.” “Methinks,” he cries, basing himself upon Tertullian, “there be not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active faith ... I love to lose myself in a mystery, to pursue my Reason to an O altitudo!” As if “O altitudo” is not pursuable by the simplest pagan, following the maze of Space and Time. The author of “Religio Medici” confesses that certain things in Genesis contradict Experience and History, but he adds: “Yet I do believe all this is true, which indeed, my Reason would persuade me to be false; and this I think is no vulgar part of Faith, to believe a thing not only above, but contrary to Reason and against the Arguments of our proper Senses.” Pardon me, esteemed Sir Thomas. It is precisely the vulgar part of Faith—Religio Populi! It is putting the disproved and disprovable on the same plane as the unproved and the unprovable, where alone the ecstasy of the O altitudo may be legitimately pursued. The friction between the Bible and Science has grown raspier since Sir Thomas’s day, and by a new turn in human folly we are told that Science is bankrupt—with the implication that therefore the Bible is solvent. Poor old autocosms! They are both bankrupt, alas! Neither the ancient Bible nor the twentieth century Science can pay twenty shillings in the pound. Not that the Bible cannot meet its creditors honourably, nor that Science will not be permitted to go on dealing. The salvage from both is considerable. But neither can afford an autocosm in which the modern intellect can breathe and the modern soul aspire. Nor was such work ever within the capacity of Science. She, the handmaid of religion, forgot her place when she aspired to the pulpit. And religion, with Time and Space and Love and Death for texts around her, stepped down from hers when she persisted in preaching from withered parchments of ambiguous tenor and uncertain authorship. What can be more pathetic than the joy of orthodoxy when the pick strikes some Old Testament tablet and it is discovered that there really was an Abraham or a Lot. As well might a neo-Pagan exult because the excavations in Crete prove that the Minotaur really existed—but as a fighting bull to which toreadors imported from conquered Athens sometimes fell victims. Not even Lot’s wife supplies sufficient salt to swallow Genesis with. The Old Testament autocosm is dead and buried—it cannot be dug up again by the Palestine Exploration Fund. It is no longer literally true, even in the Vatican, where, if I understand aright, only the miracles of the New Testament still preserve their authenticity. “Things are what they are, and the consequences will be what they will be,” as the much-deluded Butler remarked. Wherefore, though you imagine yourself living in your autocosm, you are in truth inhabiting the macrocosm all the time and obnoxious to all its curious laws and inflexible realities. It is as if, playing cards in the smoking-room of a ship and fancying yourself at the club, you should be suddenly drowned. Only by living in the macrocosm itself can you avoid the stern surprises which await those who snuggle into autocosms. Hence the perils of the Catholic autocosm for its inhabitants. For in the real universe pestilences and earthquakes are not due to the wrath of God. The physical universe proceeds on its own lines, and the religious motives of the Crusaders did not prevent a Christian host from dying of the putrefying infidel corpses which it had manufactured so abundantly. Nor did heaven endorse the theory of the Children’s Crusade—that innocence could accomplish what was impossible for flawed manhood. The poor innocents perished like flies, or were sold into slavery. These things take their course as imperturbably as Halley’s comet, which refused to budge an inch even before the fulminations of Pope Callixtus III. Nor is the intermission of earthquakes or pestilence to be procured by the intercession of the saints or by the efficacy of their relics. A phial of the blood of Christ was carried about in Mantua during the plague of 1630, but there were not enough boats to carry away the corpses to the lakes. It was those marshes round Mantua that should have been drained. But it is in vain God thunders, “Thus and thus are My Laws. I am that I am.” Impious Faith answers, “Not so. Thou art that Thou art not.” Pestilence—we know to-day—can be averted by closing the open cesspools and opening the sunless alleys of mediÆvalism; malaria can be minimised by minimising mosquitos, and earthquakes can be baffled by careful building after the fashion of Japan, which, being an earthquake country, behaves as such. After the Messina earthquake the Japanese Government sent two professors—one of seismology and the other of architecture—to study it and to compare it with the great Japanese earthquake of 1891, and they reported that although the Japanese shock was greater and the population affected more numerous, the number of Italian victims was four hundred and thirty times as great as the number of Japanese, and that “about 998 out of 1000 of the number killed in Messina must be regarded as having fallen victims to the seismologically bad construction of the houses.” But where reliance is placed on paternosters and penitence, how shall there be equal zeal for antiseptics or structural precautions? The censer tends to oust the fumigator, and the priest the man of action. “Too easily resigned and too blindly hopeful,” says the Messagero of Rome, commenting on the chaos that still reigns among the population of Messina. “Trust in God and keep your powder dry” was the maxim of a Protestant. Cromwell but echoed the Psalmist, “Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war and my fingers to fight.” This is the spirit that makes the best of both cosms. The too trustful denizen of the Catholic autocosm with his damp powder and his flaccid fingers risks falling a prey to the first foe. But the balance-sheet is not yet complete. For it may be better to live without sanitation or structural precaution and to die at forty of the plague or the earthquake, after years of belief in your saint or your star, than to live a century without God in a bleak universe of mechanical law. True, the believer has the fear of hell, but by a happy insanity it does not interfere with his joie de vivre. He has had, indeed, to pay dearly for the consolation and courage the Church has sold him—since we are at the balance-sheet let this be said too—and seeing how in the last analysis all this overwhelming ecclesiastic splendour has come out of the toil of the masses, I cannot help wondering whether the Church could not have done the thing cheaper. Were these glittering vestments and soaring columns so absolutely essential to the cult of the manger-born God? But perhaps it was the People’s only chance of Magnificence. And after all the mediÆval cathedrals were as much public assembly rooms as churches. Dear wrinkled contadine whom I see prostrated in chapels before your therapeutic saints; dear gnarled facchini whose shoulders bow beneath the gentler burden of adoration; poor world-worn beings whom I watch genuflecting and sprinkling yourselves with the water of life, as the spacious hush and the roseate dimness of the great cathedral fall round you; and you, proud young Venetian housewife, whose baby was carried to baptism in a sort of cage, and who turned to me with that heavenly smile after the dipping and that rapturous cry, “Ora essa È una piccola Cristiana!”—and most of all you, heart-stricken mothers whose little ones have gone up to play with the Madonna’s bambino, think ye I would prick your autocosm with my quill or withdraw one single ray from the haloes of your guardian genii? Nay, I pray that in that foreign land of death to which we must all emigrate, ye may find more Christian consideration than meets the emigrants to England or America. May your Christ be waiting at the haven ready to protect you against the exactions of Charon, to rescue you from the crimps, and initiate you into the alien life. Only one thing I ask of you—do not, I pray you in return, burn up my autocosm—and me with it. And ye, gentlemen of the cassock and the tonsure, continue, unmolested by me, your processions and your pageants and your mystic operas and ballets, your drinking ceremonials and serviette-wipings; for, bland and fatherly as you seem, you are the fiercest incendiaries the world has ever known—the arson of rival autocosms your favourite virtue. And I am not of those who hold your power or passion extinct. Even in your ashes live your wonted fires, and I may yet see the pyres of Smithfield blaze as in the days of Mary. For to hold the keys of Heaven and Hell is as unsettling as any other form of monopoly. Human nature cannot stand it. And by every channel, apert or subterranean, you are creeping back to power, carrying through all your labyrinths that terrible torch of faith. Already relics have been borne in procession at Westminster. But perhaps I wrong you. Perhaps your very Inquisition will make some concession to science and the age, and electrocute instead of burning. But though ye burn me or electrocute, yet must I praise your Church for its three great principles of Democracy, Cosmopolitanism, and Female Equality. At the apogee of its splendour, in the days before its autocosm contradicted the known macrocosm, it made a brotherhood of Man and a United States of Europe, and St. Catherine and St. Clara ranked with St. Francis and St. Dominic. What can be more wonderful than that an English menial, plain Nicholas Breakspeare, should rise into Pope Adrian IV, and should crown Barbarossa at Rome as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, or that when this Empire’s fourth Henry must fain go to Canossa, it was the reputed son of a carpenter that kept him waiting barefooted in the snow? Contrast all this with the commercial chauvinism, the snobbery, and the Mussulman disdain of woman into which Europe has fallen since the “Dark Ages.” I grant that the Papacy was as far from ensuring a human brotherhood as the Holy Roman Empire was from the ideal of Petrarch, yet both institutions kept the ideal of a unity of civilisation alive, and if they did not realise it better, was it not because two institutions aiming at the same unification are already a disturbing duality? The situation under which the Emperor elected the Pope who consecrated the Emperor, or the Pope excommunicated the Emperor who deposed the Pope and elected an anti-Pope, was positively Gilbertian, and the grim comedy reached its climax when Pope and anti-Pope used their respective churches as fortresses. The old duel persists to-day in the tug-of-war between Court and Vatican, and the Pope is so little a force for unification that he still refuses to recognise the unity of Italy. Yet no ironies of history can destroy the beauty of the Catholic concept. “I lift mine eyes and all the windows blaze With forms of Saints and holy men who died, Here martyred and hereafter glorified; And the great Rose upon its leaves displays Christ’s Triumph, and the angelic roundelays, With splendour upon splendour multiplied; And Beatrice again at Dante’s side No more rebukes, but smiles her words of praise. “And then the organ sounds, and unseen choirs Sing the old Latin hymns of peace and love And benedictions of the Holy Ghost; And the melodious bells among the spires O’er all the house-tops and through heaven above Proclaim the elevation of the Host.” That is the Catholic autocosm at its loveliest, as seen by the poet of the Pilgrim Fathers when under the spell of translating Dante. And ’tis, indeed, no untrue vision of its ideal. I saw an old statue of St. Zeno in his church at Verona, and the saint, who began life as a fisherman, appeared as proud of his fish pendent as of his crozier. Can one imagine a British bishop in a fishmonger’s apron? Even the Apostles are doubtless conceived at the AthenÆum Club as a sort of Fishmongers’ Company, with an old hall and a ’scutcheon. For England combines with her distrust of High Church a ritual of High Life, which is the most meticulous and sacrosanct in the world. Nor is there any record of a British bishop behaving like St. Zeno when the Emperor Gallienus gave him the crown from off his own head, and the saint requested permission to sell it for the benefit of the poor. True, British bishops are not in the habit of exorcising demons from the daughters of emperors, but neither are they in the habit of dividing their stipends among curates with large families. St. Zeno, by the way, came from Mauretania, and St. Antony was not really of Padua, but of Portugal. ’Twas a free trade in saints. There was no protection against protectors. Virgil and BoËthius themselves enjoyed a Christian reputation. One does not wonder that even Buddha crept into the calendar by an inspired error. It is heartening to come on an altar in Verona to St. Remigio, “apostle of the generous nation of the French,” to find Lucca Cathedral given over to an Irish saint and honouring a Scotch king (“San Riccardo, Re di Scozia”), and to read of King Canute treating with Pope John and Emperor Conrad for free Alpine passes to Rome for English pilgrims. Universities too were really universal. The Angelic Doctor was equally at home in Naples, Paris, and Cologne. What can be more nobly catholic than the prayer I found pasted outside Italian churches: “My God, I offer Thee all the masses which are being celebrated to-day in all the world for the sinners who are in agony and who must die to-day. May the most precious Blood of Jesus the Redeemer obtain for them mercy!” True, the poetry of this prayer is rather marred by the precise information that “every day in the universe about 140,000 persons die: 97 every minute, 51 millions every year,” but not so grossly as by the indulgences accorded to the utterers. Why must this fine altruism be thus tainted? But alas! Catholicism perpetually appears the caricature of a great concept. Take for another example the methods of canonisation, by which he or she who dies “in the odour of piety” may pass, in the course of centuries, from the degree of venerable servant of God to the apogee of blessed saintship. What can be grander than this notion of taking all time as all earth for the Church’s province? Yet consider the final test. The great souls she has produced must work two posthumous miracles, forsooth, before they can be esteemed saints. By what a perversion of the spiritual is it that holiness has come to be on a par with pills! Surely a true Church Universal should canonise for goodness of life, not for mortuary miracles. Joan of Arc, who must wait nigh five hundred years for saintship—did not the miracle of her life outweigh any possible prowess of her relics? But despite, or rather because of, this grossness, the walls of the Catholic autocosm are still stout: centuries of friction with the macrocosm will be needed to wear them away. The love of noble ritual and noble buildings, of ordered fasts and feasts, of authority absolute; the comfortable concreteness of Orthodoxy beside the nebulousness of Modernism; the sinfulness of humanity, its helplessness before the tragic mysteries of life and death; the peace of confession, the therapeia of chance and hypnotism, the magnetism of a secular tradition, the vis inertiÆ—all these are pillars of the mighty fabric of St. Peter. But even these would be as reeds but for the massive prop of endowments. ’Tis Mortmain—the dead hand—that keeps back Modernism. So long as any institution possesses funds, there will never be any lack of persons to administer them. This is the secret of all successful foundations. The rock on which the Church is founded is a gold-reef. And it is actively defended by Persecution and the Index, by which all thought is equally excluded, be it a Darwin’s or a Gioberti’s, a Zola’s or a Tyrrell’s. Who then shall set a term to its stability? With such a marvellous machinery at hand for the Church Universal of the future—so democratic, so cosmopolitan, so free from sex injustice—it seems a thousand pities that there is nothing to be done with it but to scrap it. Surely it should be adapted to the macrocosm, brought into harmony with the modern mind, so that, becoming again the mistress of our distracted and divided world, moderating the frenzy of nationalisms by a European cult and a European culture, keeping in their place the mediocrities who are seated on our thrones, and the democracies when they stray from wisdom, it could send out a true blessing urbi et orbi. But this, I remember, is an Italian fantasy. OF FACTS WITHOUT AUTOCOSMS: OR THE IRRELEVANCY OF SCIENCEI did not need the lesson of the Scala ballet—CiviltÀ inspired by Luce and chasing Tenebre. I know that that light is electric. Have I not found it in the deepest crypt of the underground cathedral of Brescia, illuminating the two Corinthian pillars from the Temple of Vespasius? Have I not seen in the quaint sleepy alleys of rock-set Orvieto the wayside shrine of the Madonna utilised to hold an electric lamp? And have I not seen that ancient marble shrine between Carrara and Avenza supporting the telegraph wires, or the crumbling tower of Lucca the telephones? And did I not watch the thousand-year-old cathedral of Genoa—with St. Lorenzo’s martyrdom on its faÇade—preparing to celebrate the fourth centenary of St. Caterina—“whose mortal remains in their urn have not felt the injury of time”—by a thorough cleansing with a vacuum cleaner? Ceaselessly throbbed the engine, like the purr of a pious congregation, and the hose extended to the uttermost ledges of the roof, sucking in dust immemorially undisturbed. And the cathedral clock of Verona that looks down on Charlemagne’s paladins, Roland and Oliver, in rude stone—did it not tell me the correct time? Yes, ’tis the hour of Science. And the contribution of Italy to Science is almost as great as her contribution to Art or Religion. A country that can produce St. Francis, Michelangelo, and Galileo, that founded at Verona the first geological museum and at Pisa the first botanical garden, has indeed all winds of the spirit blowing through her. But except in Da Vinci, Art and Science have not been able to lodge together. Him the sketches for his flying-machines in the Ambrosian library make a boon-fellow of Wright, Voisin, and Santos, as Luca Beltrami enthusiastically proclaims. Galileo had some pretensions to letters, writing essays and verses, and is even suspected of a comedy. But the life of Galileo practically divides Italy’s art period from her scientific, so far at least as the material arts are concerned. His amanuensis, Torricelli, preluded the barometer, and the creation of electrical science by Galvani and Volta was a main factor in the evolution of our modern world of machinery. Venice and Florence founded statistical science, and if Sicily and South Italy have relapsed from the Arabic-Aristotelian stimulus administered by Frederick II—perhaps for fear of sharing the imperial Epicurean’s furnace in the Sixth Circle of the Inferno—North Italy has remained a pioneer of the modern. It is not by accident that Marconi was born in Bologna, or Lombroso in Verona—which is to hold his statue—or that the most learned exponent of the dismal science of our day has been Luigi Cossa, Professor of Political Economy in the Universities of Pavia and Milan. But even Naples and Palermo have remained faithful to astronomy and the mathematics. Far be it from me to say a word against Science as a magnified magical maid-of-all-work! But in so far as she pretends to set up in the parlour, ousting her old mistresses, Theology and Poetry, let me point out to her swains, the electro-plated youth of Lombardy, that the facts of Science, existing as they do outside autocosms, are as substantial to lean upon as the shadows of reeds. Of the need of a Scientia Scientiarum to put all these facts in their place, the average scientific specialist is as unconscious as a ploughboy of the calculus. For it follows from the doctrine of autocosms that a fact cannot exist as such till it has settled to which autocosm it belongs. It must be born into the world of meaning. The same raw material may go to form part of autocosms innumerable, as the same man may be the butler at a duke’s, the guest of honour at a grocer’s, and the chief dish at a cannibal banquet. The same fire that beacons a ship from destruction sucks a moth to its doom, and the same election figures scatter at once delight and despair. The “fact,” outside an autocosm, can only be regarded as a potentiality of entering into ratios; in other words, it is a “rational” possibility. But since there is a definite limit to its possibilities, and an election result cannot glut the cannibal appetite, nor a butler operate as a beacon-fire—except in the way of Ridley and Latimer—we are compelled to recognise an obstinate objective element fatal to the Pragmatic Philosophy. Potential facts are stubborn things. Pragmatism was a healthy reaction against the obsession of a world wholly gaugeable by Reason, like the reaction of Duns Scotus against Aquinas, but when it replaced Reason by Will, it fell into the other extreme of error. Both Reason and Will must enter into the Science of Sciences, and they must even be supplemented by Emotion. For the human consciousness, our sole instrument for apprehending the world, is trinitarian. I should say we have three antennÆ—Reason, Will, Emotion—wherewith to grope out into our environment, were it not that those antennÆ are triune, and no knowledge of the outer world ever comes to us save with all the three factors intertwined in varying proportions. Why then should we throw away all that Will and Emotion tell us, putting asunder what God has put together? To represent the Report of the bare intellectual faculty as the Report of the whole Commission is fraudulence. Will and Emotion have too meekly contented themselves with a Minority Report. It is time they insisted on their views colouring and fusing into the Report Proper. Even Kant, having reached spiritual bankruptcy by his “Critique of Pure Reason,” apologetically called in the Practical Reason to save the situation, thereby importing into his system an absurd dualism. Kant’s Practical Reason is simply Will and Emotion restored to their proper rank as conjoint antennÆ of apprehension. The effort to probe the universe with an isolated antenna was foredoomed to failure. The Practical Reason should have been called in, not after the bankruptcy as a sort of receiver to make the best of a bad estate, but before starting operations, as a partner with additional capital. A fact, then, to be a fact, must be born into an autocosm, must be caught up not only into intellectual perception, but into emotional and volitional relations. The so-called scientific fact is thus two-thirds unborn. It is not a fact, but a facet of a fact. ’Tis only by a shorthand convention, indeed, that anything can be treated as purely an object of intellectual discrimination. Every substantive in the dictionary is a shrivelled leaf which requires the sap and greenness of a living sentence to restore it to life. This is best seen in words with more than one meaning, like “bark,” which needs to be in a sentence to show whether it is canine or marine. But every word is in the same ambiguous case, and acquires its nuance from its relations with life. The molecule or structural unit of reality being thus triune, it is obvious that the isolated presentation of the material aspect of things in the shape of words under the name of Science can never be a presentation of Truth. It is a mere abstraction from the trinitarian wholeness of experience. Full life exists in three dimensions, Art in two, and Science in one, like a solid, a superficies, and a line, and the line as little reproduces the plenitude of being as the coast-line of a map the beetling cliffs and thundering seas. But the subject-matter of the sciences is not even the universe treated as a material whole, but the universe cut up into abstract ’ologies and ’onomies, each of which insidiously tends to swell into a full-seeming sphere of Truth, as when Political Economy, having proved that Free Trade produces the cheapest article, tends to assume that humanity is therefore bound to buy in the cheapest market; so that even the Tariff Reformer, under the same hypnosis, seeks to deny this economic law, instead of admitting and overriding it by considerations from supplementary spheres of Truth. Similar fallacies spring from pathology, psychology, physiology, criminology, and other methods of vivisecting our noble selves. We are parcelled out among the professors, each of them magnifying his office. “Hark, hark, the lark at Heaven’s gate sings!” says the beautiful song in Cymbeline. The sciences pounce upon that lark like hawks, and tear it to pieces between them. But the truth about the lark—is it in the unreal abstractions of the sciences, or is it in the poet’s perception of the lark in all the fulness, colour, and richness of actual existence? The little Gradgrinds, says Dickens, had cabinets in various departments of science. “They had a little chronological cabinet, and a little metallurgical cabinet, and a little mineralogical cabinet, and the specimens were all arranged and labelled, and the bits of stones and ore looked as though they might have been broken off from the parent substances by those tremendously hard instruments, their own names.” But it is only in the falsificatory museums of science that things exist in little cabinets, or that the butterfly is impaled on a pin and ranged in a glass case with other Lepidoptera. In the real universe it flutters alone amid the flowers. It is full of its own vivid life; it does not know it has been classified. This classification exists only in some student’s mind; the truth is in the fluttering butterfly. And Truth really flutters like a butterfly, free and joyous, winged with iridescent splendours and subtle shades. Truth is not a dead formula, but an airy aliveness. When I was a youth studying mathematics and the ’ologies, I became infected with the sense of superiority to the crowd which these pursuits bring: such cold, logical reasoning, such rare reaches of thought! To think that men eminent in these branches should remain unrewarded by popular fame, while every petty scribbler with a gift of invention commanded the applause of the mob! To be a novelist seemed a paltry affair; yet later on I came to recognise that the crowd is right, and that those who decry the predominance of the novel are wrong. All these sciences and speculations deal with human life, not in its living fulness, but with an abstractness which makes it dead, unreal, false. The world’s instinctive distrust of pedants and students and mathematicians is justified. They isolate one aspect of life, one thread of the tangled skein, one motif in the eternal symphony, and sometimes drawing from reality the merest shred of tune, execute upon it an enormous fantasia—as in the higher mathematics—which plays itself out inaudibly in vacuo. The cold perfection of mathematics is due to our having eliminated in advance all the accidents of reality, and even the supposed infallibility of the proposition that two and two are four shatters itself upon the futility of adding two elephants to two speeches on the Irish question. And yet in those callow days it was to Number that I, like Pythagoras, was fain to look for the key of the riddle. But that was under the glittering spell of the late Monsieur Taine, who well-nigh persuaded me that a Science was only truly Scientific when it passed from the qualitative to the quantitative stage. If you could only express everything by mathematical formulÆ, then at last you would catch that shy bird, Truth, by the tail. Strip away Truth’s feathers, then the flesh, then even the bones, till you get a meaningless world of imaginary atoms, and that, forsooth, is the ultimate Truth. “The universe,” said Taine triumphantly, “will one day be expressed in mathematical formulÆ.” In other words, strip away all there is to know, get rid of all that interests you, the colour and the form and the glow of life, and then you will really know the thing. The only way to know a thing is elaborately to prevent yourself from knowing it. That invaluable institution the Post Office annually provides us with statistics. So many billion letters are sent a year, so many postcards, so many packages, and of these so many are left open, and so many unaddressed or unstamped, and so many go astray. These figures have as much to do with the realities implied in this correspondence as the figures of the quantitative sciences with the realities they are drawn from. Even could it be proved that the ratio of unaddressed letters to addressed is constant over a given area, or that the percentage of postcards varies inversely with the status of the senders, how much nearer are we to the hot passions and wild despairs, the commercial greeds and the loving humours which are the actuality of the phenomena under calculation? Even the lines and angles of geometry, which have more body than statistics, are a poor substitute for the full, rich world, with its forests and skies. Mathematics may be indispensable to navigation, but on the sea of life we sail very well without it. Some of the most charming women I know count on their fingers. When “A Rosalind-face at the lattice shows, * * * And Sir Romeo sticks in his ear a rose,” it is indifferent to the situation that the rose is compact of chemical atoms dancing in complex figures, setting to partners, visiting and retreating. Biron in “Love’s Labour Lost,” professing to derive his learning from women’s eyes, which are “the ground, the books, the academes, From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire,” was, though the sentiment may be unpopular in this educational age, wiser than Faust in his study soliloquising on the curse of useless learning. Many of the statements of science are true for the abstract logical faculty; they are not actually conceivable. We laugh at the mediÆval controversies as to how many angels could dance on the point of a needle, but surely our modern theory of the atomic constitution of the needle-point justifies the question. One angel per atom would exhaust the angelic hosts. Perhaps the sparks emitted for years by one drop of bromide of radium on the point of a needle are really a dance of demons. Or take the undulatory theory of light—that to produce the varying colours of the spectrum the luminiferous ether must vibrate from 458 to 727 million of million times per second. It might as well have been a thousand billions or ten trillions for all the difference to our understanding. To give us such figures is like offering a million-pound note to an omnibus conductor and expecting change. The best scientists admit that these conceptions are but working hypotheses. Nay, I find a worthy German actually calling them “useful fictions.” Indeed, they cannot endure cross-examination, and if you want to see a scientific man as angry as a theologian of the Inquisition era, you will treat his mystic conceptions as Tom Paine treated the mysteries of religion. The world went very well ere we knew the fairy-tales of science and learned to dread death in every breath we took, every crumb we ate, every drop of non-alcoholic drink we drank. As if it were not tragic enough to read the newspapers, we are harassed with the life-histories of insects invisible to the naked eye, thirty generations or so of which live and die every day in a drop of ditch-water. At the same time such surface questions as why a man lives six times as long as a dog and a tortoise six times as long as a man are left in absolute darkness. Men of science are to be admired for their patient and fearless groping after knowledge, the only reward of which is the applause of that splendid international brotherhood of learning. But this knowledge of theirs is never more than raw material for the philosopher at the centre to weave into his synopsis. No doubt there are men of science who preserve their perspective, who do not view the universe as heaven-sent material for a series of text-books, but this part of their thinking is done, not as scientists, but as poets or philosophers. Classification is all that Science Proper can do, and when the pigeon-holing is complete to the last Z, the universe will remain as mysterious as before. When the astronomers have determined the size, weight, orbit, speed, and spectrum lines of all the four hundred millions of visible stars, we shall still look up and say, “Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are!” But this pigeon-holing of the universe by Science is conspicuously incomplete. For by a paradoxical modesty the man of science too often forgets to include himself in the inventory. In this way Herbert Spencer explained everything—except Herbert Spencer. Possibly the forgetfulness is wilful, because the existence of the man of science upsets so many of his explanations. “I find in the Universe no trace of Will or Reason,” protested one of them to me. “I see only the blind movement of forces, mechanical as billiard-balls.” “Naturally,” I retorted, “if you omit to look in the one direction where Reason and Will assuredly exist—in your own self.” On the physical plane we get movement without will, on the animal plane the will to live, on the human plane the will to live divinely. These three strata cannot be reduced to a lowest common denominator of blind force. And if they could, the miracle of their differentiation would still remain. That blind forces should rise to consciousness and write books about themselves is even more wonderful than an eternity of spirit. Reduce all the seventy odd elements to one, as Chemistry hopes, and instead of an explanation you will only get the new puzzle of how the one could contain the seeds of the many. Even the popular Evolution theory is but a juggling with time. You do not get rid of Creation by shifting the beginning back to a billion years last Tuesday. And with all my admiration for the fine qualities of the man of science I cannot away with his cocksureness, so curiously proof against the fact that scientific conceptions are always changing—witness the revolution wrought by radium. Even such a simple analysis as the composition of air has taken in many new and important constituents—argon, xenon, helium, krypton, neon, &c.—since the days when as a schoolboy I got full marks for stating them inaccurately. And yet to this day the scientist recounting the constituents of air forgets to wind up, “With power to add to their number.” As for those sciences which do not depend on intellectual conceptions and practical experiments, but on antiquarian research, those learned and dry-as-dust studies which academies delight to honour, they owe all their importance simply to antiquity’s lack of self-consciousness and its failure to provide for the curiosity of posterity. Had the first man who evolved from the ape drawn up a note upon his ancestor, or, better still, made a picture of his ancestral tree, what controversies we should have been spared! Had the builders of the Pyramids or the delvers of the Roman catacombs put up little tablets to explain their ideas, what scholarship would have been nipped in the bud! The reputation of the Egyptologists depends on the fact that the writers of hieroglyphics apparently left no dictionary. If one were to turn up, the reputation of these savants would be gone. At present they are able to translate the same text by “The King went a-hunting” or “My grandmother is dead” without ceasing to be taken seriously. But it is in the realm of Italian art-connoisseurship that the greatest havoc would be wrought did an official catalogue come to light, say in one of the recesses of the Vatican or in that wilderness of the Venetian archives. For the lordly neglect of the Old Masters to put their names to their pictures has flooded us with a tedious pedantry of rival attributions, and the thing of beauty, instead of being a joy for ever, is an eternal source of dulness. “Ass who attributes it to Mantegna,” I saw scribbled on a fresco, at Padua, of St. Antony admonishing Ezzelino, and connoisseurship is merely politer. As long ago as 1527 a quiz or a braggart of an artist, Zacchia da Vezzano, painted underneath a sacred picture of his, now in Lucca: “His operis visis hujus cognoscere quis sit Auctorem dempto nomine quisque potest.” As who should say, “Take away the name and anybody can tell the artist.” But experience proves the contrary. I do not say that the virtuosi would all be exposed, as by the pedigree of a Da Vinci bust, could we light on a source of certainty like the contemporary slatings in the Renaissance Review. Some of these sleuth-hounds might even be vindicated; and I opine that to you, amico mio, who of thirty-three Titians in a London exhibition pronounced no less than thirty-two to be hung on false evidence, the discovery of a set of Accademia catalogues would not be unwelcome. But your career as a connoisseur would close. Dead too would be the school of Morelli, collapsed the drapery students and ear-measurers, whose mathematics had, indeed, as little relation to Art as it has to life. The Sherlock Holmeses of Science and Art dig up old cities, reconstruct forgotten civilisations, redistribute famous pictures, and amend corrupt texts or corrupt them more hopelessly. It is but rarely that they have imaginative and historic insight. “Learning is but an adjunct to ourselves,” says Biron. Scholars are too often but an adjunct to learning. For men with real insight there are enough dead civilisations and forgotten customs still flourishing all about us. The taboo, the fetish, the totem, the oracle, and the myth are the very atmosphere of our being. Our generation will leave newspapers and museums—nay, gramophone records and the films of bioscopes; the ghosts of our shapes and voices will haunt our posterity, and the only chance for scholars will be to condense the too, too ample materials—there are four miles of novels already in the British Museum—or perhaps a few beneficent fires will give scholarship a new lease of life. At their best and richest antiquarian studies only help to make the past present again, but how does that help us in essential insight? The past of to-morrow is here to-day and we are no wiser. In the hundredth century the excavator may exhume London, but we see London even more clearly to-day, and how does that help us in the real problems? No; the only help for us lies in those elements of Truth which we draw from ourselves, not receive from without—in those emotional and volitional contacts with the essence of things which accompany all intellectual perception; in these motor aspects of reality which drive us along, these flashes of faith and spiritual intuition which, although they may vary from age to age under the spell of individual poets and prophets, and under the evolution of knowledge and civilisation, “Are yet a master-light of all our seeing.” They may have been intertwined with incorrect intellectual elements, but because one antenna of the apparatus of consciousness functions falsely we are not therefore justified in wholly rejecting the joint report. When we think of the vast number of contradictory truths by which men in all ages and countries have lived and died, we shall find consolation in the thought that the emotional and volitional elements of Truth are more important than its intellectual skeleton. But what a curious confusion that these emotional and volitional elements should themselves come to be treated as intellectual, and desiccated into dogmas! This is the result of their seeking expression in words, that unsuitable, impossible and fading medium. It is through their felicitous escape from words that verbally inarticulate artists and musicians paint and compose truer things than philosophers say, things that survive vicissitudes of thought and are as true to-morrow as yesterday. With the music of the Roman Catholic Church we all agree, and who shall contradict the Venus of Milo? Yes, a statue or a symphony is safe from syllogisms, at least until it gets into the hands of the art critic and the programme-concocter. But the truth airily embodied in words is at the mercy of system-builders and deduction-squeezers. Taken with the hard definiteness of coins—as if, indeed, even coins did not vary from day to day in purchasing power and according to the country of circulation,—the words are added together to yield a specific sum of truth. Flying prophetic phrases and wingÈd mystical raptures are shot down and stuffed for Church Catechisms and Athanasian Creeds. As if the emotional and volitional fringe of living words permitted them to be thus sterilised into scientific propositions! For just as facts are the skeletons of truths, so words are single bones, and the dictionary is a vast ossuary. Talk of the dead languages—all languages are dead unless spoken, and spoken with real feeling. A parrot always speaks a dead language. It is the folly of a universal language that it assumes the same vocabulary could be used over a vast area of varying conditions, its words never expanding nor contracting in meaning, nor ever changing in pronunciation or colour. As if Latin was not once universal in those countries which have gradually transformed it into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, ProvenÇal, Roumanian, and Rumonsch! Idiomatic expressions cannot be torn from the soil they grow in. MaÑana has not the same meaning outside Spain nor Kismet outside Islam. Language lays such traps for fools; the fools have always spoiled and fossilised what the men of genius have felt and thought. They have made logic out of poetry and have deadened worship and wonder into theology. “What do you read?” says Hamlet. “Words, words, words.” A truth, then, may be formulated, but it is not true till it is felt and acted on, and ceases to be true when it ceases to be felt and acted on. Nor does this canon apply only to inner truths. Without an element of feeling and volition, however shadowy, even the simple realities of the outer world have never been perceived, and the omission of these elements invalidates the total reality. If so many readers skip scenery in novels, ’tis because the scene is described as though it existed in itself. The dead chunk of landscape bores and depresses. The reader subconsciously feels that so impersonal a vision is untrue to the actualities of perception. Nobody has ever seen a landscape without some emotion, if only the traveller’s desire to be at the other end of it. A dozen persons—even omitting the colour-blind—would see it in as many different ways, each with different accompaniments of feeling, thought, and volition, potential or actual, just as every person in The Ring and the Book sees Pompilia differently. Let the novelist describe the scene, not for itself, but for its relation to the emotions and purposes of his personages, and it leaps into life. Similar is the case of Science, whose facts in divesting themselves of all emotion and individual error divest themselves likewise of reality. The dry scientific coldness with which the universe must be envisaged is an artificial method of vision. True, the scientist himself may be impelled by the most tingling curiosity. But the passion and thrill of his chase for truth does not appear in the quarry: that is a mere carcase. His report on his speciality is always carefully divested of emotion. But our emotional and volitional relations to the spectacle of existence are as much a part of the total truth of things as colour is of the visible world. The world is not complete without “The light that never was on sea or land, The consecration and the poet’s dream.” When Lear cries to the heavens that they too are old, or Lamartine calls on the lake to remember his happiness, Ruskin would tell us that this suffusion of Nature with our own emotions is the pathetic fallacy. On the contrary, its absence is the scientific fallacy. Science registers the world as the phonograph registers sound or the camera space—without any emotion of its own. As the former with equal phlegm records a song or a curse, or the latter a wedding or a funeral, so does Science register its impassive observations. For once admit such a shifting subjective factor as emotion, and what becomes of the glorious objectivity of Science? Away, therefore, with all but the frigid intellectual view of things! Since the other elements of Truth elude our grasp, let us boldly declare them irrelevant. The bankruptcy of Science, you see, comes not at the end of its operations. Science starts bankrupt. It has not sufficient capital to begin trading. Its methods and apparatus are entirely inadequate for the attainment of truth. A cat may look at a king—but its observation will not be very profound. And Science is as little equipped for observing the universe as the cat for observing the king. All it can perceive or establish is chains of causation, or rather recurring sequences of phenomena, in an unconscious continuum. It is a post-mortem investigation to ascertain, not the cause of death, but the cause of life. But the universe is not a quaint collection of dead things in a vacuum, not a museum of stuffed birds or transfixed butterflies, but a breathing, flying, singing, striving, and suffering process—an unfinished infinitude. This kinetic process cannot be expressed in terms of statics. “What is Truth?” says the jesting cosmos, and does not stay for an answer. But by an artificial abstraction parts of it can be expressed for the intellect in static ’ologies and ’onomies, on the understanding that the intellect never forgets to put back its results into the palpitating flux to which they belong and in which alone they have true significance. This understanding the intellect too frequently violates or forgets, and therefore for Truth we must go, not to the man of science, but to the poet, who registers his universe synthetically with soul as well as with brain. Tragedy, comedy, heroic drama, sombre suffering, majestic mystery, all these are in the flux—more surely than ether waves and dancing atoms—and the poet in painting the fulness of life with the fulness of his own emotion is giving us a fuller truth than any that Science can attain to. “We cannot really know the truth unless we love the truth,” said FÉnelon. “They who love well will know well.” This is not mysticism but common sense, and Goethe repeated it when he said that “No one can write about anything unless he writes about it with love.” “To see things in their beauty,” said Matthew Arnold, “is to see them in their truth.” It may be that the knowledge of things through pure intellect is pure delusion, that to pigeon-hole the universe is to make it into a cemetery. Instead of that “love is blind,” the truth may be that only love sees. There is a sense in which every mother’s babe is the most beautiful in the world. Knowledge, then, as a mere function of the intellect, is only the dead knowledge that appears in school-books. But who shall say that knowledge was meant to be only a function of the intellect, that we do not know with our heart and soul as well as with our brains? Nay, as if to mock at mere intellect, the universe absolutely refuses to yield up its secret to the intellect. Hence the antinomies of Kant or Mansel or Plato’s “Parmenides.” Follow up mere thought, however apparently clear, and it lands us in nonsense. Perhaps wisdom does not lie that way at all. Perhaps the fear of the Lord is really the beginning of wisdom. For if Science is Truth in one dimension and Art Truth in two dimensions, it is only when we complete emotional vision by volition that we arrive at Truth’s full-orbed reality. Even love cannot bring wisdom unless the love translates itself into action. In short, the meaning of Truth must be changed from a dead fact of the intellect into a live fact of the whole being. The Truth is also the Way and the Life. Aristotle in his “Metaphysics” tells us that Cratylus carried the scepticism of Heraclitus to such a degree that he at last was of opinion one ought to speak of nothing, but merely moved his finger. Aristotle does not see that in this moving of his finger Cratylus was asserting at least the volitional element of Truth and perhaps its most important. For the universe is not a museum, placarded “Look, but please do not touch.” It says, “Touch, and then you will really see. Live, work, love, fight, and then you will really know what the nature of your universe is.” The world of the physical sciences is only the stage-setting for the spiritual drama. Though there is a truth of dead things called Science, the real truth is of live things—a triple truth in which intellect, will, and emotion are one. Our sense of this truth—obtained as it is during emotional volition—is individual, irreducible to the simpler planes of Science and Art, and thus incommunicable. And the measure of our attainment of it will be the measure of our sympathetic insight and of the depth to which we have penetrated by action into the heart of the phenomena. Then what seemed a mass of dull facts may break into music like a Beethoven score under the baton of a master. The scientist who should say that a Beethoven symphony consisted of the atoms of the paper and ink which constitute the score, or even who expressed it mathematically as a sequence of complex air-vibrations made by strings and holes, would be talking truth; but as incomplete and irrelevant truth as the ignoramus who should say it was curious black strokes and dots on ruled paper, or the statistician who should count the semi-breves or fortissimo passages. The true truth of the symphony comes into being only when it is interpreted by the finest performers to souls whose life it enlarges. And so with the universe, which is not a dead, complete thing outside of us, but a palpitating spiritual potentiality, for the fullest truth about which the co-operation of our own souls is needed, our souls that create a part of the truth they perceive or aspire to. The universe, in short, is a magic storehouse from which we may draw—or into which put—what we will to the extent of our faith, our emotion, our sense of beauty our righteousness. “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” OF FACTS WITH ALIEN AUTOCOSMS: OR THE FUTILITY OF CULTUREWhen I betake me to a zoological garden, equipped with a pennyworth of popcorn, a food strangely popular even among the carnivora, I am touched by a prescience of all the pleasure and dumb gratitude to be evoked by those humble grains. And in truth how many eager caged creatures are destined to have a joyous thrill of sniffing suspense, followed by the due titillation of the palate! My proffering fingers shall meet the gentle nose of the deer, the sensitive arching trunk of the elephant, the kindly peck of parrots, the mischievous hands of monkeys, the soft snouts of strange beasts. Not otherwise is it when, faring forth to Italy, I provision myself with a bag of coin. Into what innumerable itching tentacles these gilded or cuprous grains are to drop: white-cuffed hands of waiters, horny digits of vetturini and facchini, gnarled fins of gondoliers and hookers, grimy paws of beggars, shrivelled stumps of cripples, dexterous toes of armless ancients, spluttering mouths of divers, rosy fingers of flower-throwing children, persuasive plates of serenading musicians, deceptive ticket-holes of dishonest railway clerks, plethoric pockets of hotel-keepers, greedy tills of bargaining shopkeepers, pious palms of monks and sacristans, charity-boxes of cathedrals, long-handled fishing-nets of little churches, musty laps of squatting, mumbling crones, greasy caps of guides, official pyxes of curators and janitors, clutching claws of unbidden cicerones. All these—and how many more!—photographers and painters and copyists and forgers, modellers and restorers and lecturers on ruins, landlords and cooks and critics—live by Italy’s ancient art. Great CÆsar dead—and turned to Show. The beauty of Italy is elemental fodder for the autochthones; yet how strange the existence of the Neapolitan swimmer whose mÉtier is to dive for coppers when the steamer sails for the witching cliffs of Sorrento, and to cry in enticing gurgles, “Money in the water!” the spluttering syllables flowing into one another as in the soft patois of Venice! Precisely when the Bay of Naples is a violet dancing flame, and Vesuvius, majestically couchant, sends her white incense to the blue, and you are tranced with beauty and sunshine, comes this monetary merman to drag you down to the depths. “Nutritive chains” the biologists name the inter-related organisms whose existence depends on one another, and another link of this chain you shall count the boatmen waiting to show you the blue grotto of Capri. Their skiffs dart upon you like creatures whose prey comes only at a fixed hour; like creatures, moreover, shaped in the struggle for existence to the only function by which they can survive, for they are fittest to pass under the low arch of the cerulean grotto (the occupant consenting to crouch like an antenna drawn in). That ardent water in the Capri cave—that lovely flame of light blue in a bluer burning spirit—sustains likewise the naked diver who stands poised on a rock, ready to show its chromatic effects upon flesh; the culminating moment of whose day—the feeding-time, as it were—comes when the tourists glide in. Apt symbol indeed of the tourist, that shallow skiff skimming over beauty with which the native is in deep elemental contact, from which, indeed, he wrests his living. Since Goethe with his gospel of culture spent those famous Wanderjahre in Italy, a swollen stream of pious art-pilgrims has been pouring over the land. And coming into Florence from Lucca and a sheaf of quiet cities on an afternoon of this spring, I had a horrid impression of modern bustling streets and motors and trams and a great press of people, and ten thousand parasites battening on the art and beauty of the city, and it was not till I had won my way to my beloved Ponte Vecchio, with its mediÆval stalls, that the city of the lily seemed to possess her soul again. Then as I saw her compose herself under her deep blue sky into a noble harmony, with her heights and her palaces and her river and her arches and arcades, and group herself round a tower, and brood in Venetian glamour over her water with her ancient rusty houses, and rise behind into a fantasy of quaint roofs and brick domes and steeples and belfries, all floating in a golden glory; and as I reflected on all she was and held within her narrow compass, how the names of great men and great days were written on every stone, and how every sort of art had been poured over her as prodigally as every sort of earth-beauty; and as I thought of the enchanting villages around and above her, where the cypress and the olive, the ilex and the pine slumbered in the sunshine, amid great rocks that shadowed cool glooming pools, and white roads went winding odorous with may and sweet with the song of thrush and blackbird, framing and arabesquing the faery city below in magic tangles of leafy boughs; and as I remembered that here to-day in this same city was not only spring, but Botticelli’s Spring—then it seemed to me that her flowers and her palaces, her frescoes and the curves of her hills were pushed up from the same deep elemental core of beauty, and that she lay like some great princess of Brobdingnag on whose body a colony of all the culture-snobs of the world had dumped its masses of raw building, run up its hundreds of hotels and pensions, piled its pyramids of handbooks, biographies, Dantes, histories, essays, landed its hordes of guides and interpreters, encamped its army of lecturers and art critics, installed its cohort of copyists, dragged up its heavy battery of professional photographers, supplemented by an amateur corps of Kodak snapshooters; but that, breathing lightly beneath all this mountainous cumber, unasphyxiated even by the works on the Renaissance, she could still rise radiant in her immortal strength and beauty, shaking off the Lilliputian creatures and their spawn of print, ungalled by that ceaseless fire of snapshots, imperturbable amid the lecturing, unimpaired even by all that immemorial admiration. The pioneers of this culture-colony blundered sometimes, as pioneers will, and even Goethe, one notes with malicious glee, spent himself upon the wrong pictures, gloating over Guercino, wrestling with Caracci, Guido and Domenichino, and passing Botticelli by, nay taking all Florence as an afternoon excursion. And Pater himself, the pontifical Pater, though he has the merit of a Botticelli pioneer, yet thought it necessary to apologise for criticising “a second-rate painter”: which is as though one should apologise for discussing Keats. Nor were Byron and Shelley more felicitous in their admirations. The Kunstforscher, that Being usually made in Germany, has been busy since their day. Amid the great movement of life, while men have been sowing and reaping, writing and painting, voyaging and making love, this spectacled creature has been peering at pictures and statues, scientifically analysing away their authenticity and often their charm. There is the Venus de’ Medici, which generations have raved over, which innumerable processions of tourists have journeyed to admire and found admirable. The connoisseurs have now pronounced her “spurious and meretricious,” and to-day nobody who respects himself would allow himself a thrill at the sight of her. Yet Childe Harold cried: “We gaze and turn away, and know not where, Dazzled and drunk with beauty, till the heart Reels with its fulness.” I must admit that after the Venus of Milo the beauty of the Medici Venus does appear a trivial prettiness. But even the Venus of Milo—though we are still permitted to admire her—is “late and eclectic.” The unhappy Byron also wrote to somebody: “The Venus is more for admiration than for love. What struck me most was the mistress of the Raphael portrait.” Alas! nobody believes now that the picture has anything to do with La Fornarina. As for Shelley, when in 1819 he saw at Florence the Medusa attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, he broke into lyric raptures, “Its horror and its beauty are divine, Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie Loveliness like a shadow, &c. &c. * * * “’Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror; For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare, Kindled by that inextricable error! ...” Kindled indeed by that inextricable error! For the Medusa is now given up by every connoisseur. It is a mere inartistic futility and to-day every lover of the arts must grow stony at the sight of it. That immortal line “the tempestuous loveliness of terror” is the only thing to its credit, though some might count, too, the passage in which Pater gloats over its beauty of conception. Then there is that little matter of Leonardo’s St. John in the Louvre. Michelet saw the whole Renaissance in it, and Pater alludes to it as “one of the few naked figures Leonardo painted,” and builds upon it a complex theory of Leonardo’s symbolic suggestive method, and is not surprised at the saint’s “strange likeness to the Bacchus which hangs near it, which set ThÉophile Gautier thinking of Heine’s notion of decayed gods, who, to maintain themselves after the fall of Paganism, took employment in the new religion.” And now the St. John turns out to have been a pupil’s or an imitator’s, and probably not even a St. John. The culture-pilgrims of to-day, armed with sacred text-books, verbally infallible, and canonical lists of authentic attributions, enjoy a suspicious superiority in Æsthetic judgment over the greatest creative artists. For Goethe and Byron and Shelley did at least create, and Pater’s interpretation of Mona Lisa is finer than the picture itself; whereas the pursuit of culture in the average pilgrim is a confession of sterility either in himself or in his own nation, which is not sufficiently vitalised to absorb his interests. “If the Romans had had to learn Latin,” said Heine, “they would never have conquered the world.” And were England free in thought and nobly artistic, there would be no need of this fervour for the preservation of Greek. Even Goethe, it is amazing to discover from his “ItaliÄnische Reise,” never saw the sea till he went to Italy. And his first glimpse of it was, of all places in the world, at the Lido in Venice! He with the German Ocean to draw from him, as it drew from Heine, the cry of “Thalassa!”; he who might have seen how “Die weissen Meerkinder Hoch aufspringen und jauchzen Uebermut-berauscht,” must fare forth to another land and behold a lazy, almost tideless lagoon lapping in shallow muddiness on the tamest and dullest shore in the world. Surely we have here an ironic image of the culture-pilgrim who sets out to see Art abroad before he has seen Nature at home. When the Goths besieged Rome, Belisarius hurled down upon them the statues of the Mausoleum of St. Angelo, and the tomb was turned to a citadel. But against the siege of Rome by the Goethes there is no known defence. A rain of statues would merely aggravate their zeal, and the more hopelessly the statues smashed, the more would their admiration solidify. So to-day the Goethes and the Huns alike are invited up to see the statues—for a fee—and every citadel of reality is turned to a mausoleum-museum. St. Angelo, that has stood the storms of eighteen centuries, is the perquisite of a facetious warder who gabbles automatically of Beatrice Cenci, “la piÙ bella ragazza d’ Italia,” as he points out her pitiful, if dubious, dungeon. In the stone cell of the Florentine monastery, on whose cold flags Savonarola wore his knees in fasting and prayer, a guide holds up a reflector to concentrate the light on the frescoes with which Fra Angelico glorified the rude walls. Where St. Catherine walked—in the footsteps of the Bridegroom—leaving the marks of her miraculous feet, a buxom native of Siena expects her obolus. Outside the pyramid-shadowed cemetery where Keats lies under his heart-broken epitaph, a Roman urchin turns supplicatory somersaults. Italia Bella, a paper published at Milan, adjured Arona to wake up and celebrate the tercentenary of the canonisation of its Saint Carlo, “if only because it pays.” History, with its blood and tears, becomes Æsthetics for the tourist and economics for the native. Of a truth quaint links concatenate CÆsar and the showman, the saint with the apple-woman who finds a profitable pitch for her stall at his church-corner. While we are fuming and strutting we are but providing popcorn for posterity. Buskined heroes of history, who walk the earth in tragic splendour, perchance your truest service to humanity has been done in affording occupation for the poor devil who expatiates upon the traces of your passing. This, at least, ye may be sure is good service; the rest of your work, who shall sever the good and evil strands of it? So much pother of prophets and politicians—and, lo! how poor a planet we still wander in. The culture-pilgrim, too, apart from this scattering of popcorn, is a futile being. Culture as a mere excursion from a solid home-reality may be vitalising, but whoso thinks to batten on alien arts and letters is filling his belly with the sirocco. There is no reality in the travel-world, be it the world of Art or the world of Nature, for we have no true volitional relations with it. ’Twas Schopenhauer who discovered this for Art—though his World has only the two dimensions of Will and Idea. But he did not, if I remember, point out that everything seen with aloofness from action partakes of this art-quality. The landscape from the observation-car is a mere picture to us, however real to the peasants working in the fields. The only “real” traveller is the commercial. We others, wandering through streets that our ancestors did not build, or sitting in alien apartments and gazing upon unhomely hills, are still spectators, not actors. We are not rooted in this soil, nor feel the deep intimacies that are the truest truth about it. I may partake in the annual festa of an Italian mountain village, hear the Mass, bear banner and taper in the procession, salute the saintly image, dance upon the plateau-piazza with a snooded peasant-girl, but how shall I feel the holiness and joy of this day of days?—I whose infant breath was not drawn amid these precipitous fastnesses, who have not lived in these human caves cut in the rock, who have not played in these steep stone streets, who know nothing of the dear narrowness, the vivid intensity that is born of cramped consciousness! There is in the very attitude of spectator something that stands between one and the object in its truth. This it is that makes the appreciations of cities by the school of Pater such hollow phantasy, such bastards of an accident by a temperament. This it was that begot Pierre Loti’s monumental misreading of Japan as a Lilliput of the pretty-pretty. To lose the artistic Ego in the inner life of the phenomenon—how rare the critic who is capable of that! Listening to these parasites upon alien autocosms, “Moving about in worlds not realised,” one would imagine that a civilisation or a city existed, that its remote founders had fevered and its burghers toiled and its architects built, to the mere end that centuries after they were dust some exquisite vibrations should be registered on a sensitive soul. Only less arrogant is it to place one’s soul in patronising “appreciation” before some great historic structure—a cathedral, a mosque, a palace, a library. These works of man so immensely transcend any man’s works that he fits into them almost as ludicrously as a mouse. A cathedral that represents the genius and labours and sacrifices of generations towers so immensely out of proportion to any individual that he can only recover a reasonable relation to it by fusing himself into the life and stature of the race. To be solely concerned with its impingement upon his own soul is an impertinence, to pass his life in contriving such impingements is to live by robbery, and to enjoy these secular products of human solidarity on the Paterian pretext that the only reality is the fleeting and isolated Ego, is peculiarly paradoxical. Pater himself would even go so far as to study men, e.g. Pico di Mirandola, for their Æsthetic flavours. This is, indeed, to live resolutely Im SchÖnen if not Im Ganzen, and it is, therefore, the more curious, that in citing Goethe’s maxim in his “Winckelmann” Pater should, like Carlyle, have unconsciously substituted Im Wahren for Im SchÖnen. The Æsthetic appreciation of Pico—as of most things—is a mere by-product. I do not deny that by-products are sometimes delightful. But let us not mistake them for central verities. And these churches, these pictures, these statues, these palaces, these monasteries which we see to-day in two dimensions, had once their third dimension of reality, nay often have it still to those who know them in their truth. How quaint that juxtaposition of Bibles and Baedekers in Italian churches! The image which, seen through tears, is soothing a worshipper’s pain, is at the same moment finding exact appreciation at the eyes of a connoisseur. Who can read without emotion of how in thirteenth-century Florence Cimabue’s Madonna, “the first Madonna the people could love,” was borne in triumph from the painter’s studio to its church by the whole population of the quarter, which henceforwards took the name of the Allegro Borgo! To-day the art-critic analyses its types and its composition, and it takes its place coldly in the history of painting as the link between the Byzantine and the Tuscan. But the citizens of the Joyous Quarter had the true flavour of the thing. Despite the doctrine of Art for Art’s sake it remains questionable if any maker of Art has ever escaped a desire to act—massively or diffusively—upon the life of his age. In vain he hides himself in the past, or flies to No-man’s-land, he vibrates throughout to the present, touches living interests with their myriad indirect relations to action, to the third dimension. Every art-product holds, however subtly, something of that topical quality which makes the portrait of a contemporary celebrity, wet from the painter’s brush, very different from the peaceful remoteness of an Old Master. No half-deciphered face of dim sweetness, charming us from the magic casement of some fading fresco by some forgotten artist, as with the very image of Art aloof and absolute, but was once wrought for a specific market and born into a specific atmosphere. The forlorn stumps and torsos that litter the moss-grown courts of museums were hailed, as they fell from the craftsman’s hand, by a definite clientÈle, rejoicing in their beauty, stimulated by their freshness. Nothing, alas! is so old, so corroded with time, but it was once brand new, the pleasant novelty of the day to beings looking back upon an immemorial antiquity, and now long since mouldered to dust. Every blurred inscription, every crumbling pillar and shattered fragment had once its life, its meaning, its public. The hand of time in eliminating the topical element and reducing a picture to pure Art—the inactive beauty that is its own end—removes from our perception the full reality of the art phenomenon as it fell from the artist’s hand into time and space. Some parts of this original plenitude were indeed better forgotten, for the Old Masters who were young once, young and impecunious, turned Renaissance art into a fancy dress ball of their patrons, the Magnificent Ones figuring as saints and patriarchs, Bethlehem shepherds and Magian kings, whom oblivious time has done well to mellow into a quasi-anonymity. But if the loss of such intellectual elements is a gain, I am less certain as to the evaporation of the emotional auras of works of art. Andrea Orcagna worked ten years at the marble Gothic Tabernacle that stands in the fuscous Or San Michele of Florence, and men of other races and faiths gaze perfunctorily upon its decorative jewelled marvels, its pictorial reliefs, wrought after the plague of 1348 from the pious legacies of the dead or the thank-offerings of the survivors. The marble gleams in the immortal inactive beauty that is its own end—but where are the hope and the faith, the mourning and the anguish that made the atmosphere in which its beauty had birth? Ebbed to the eternal silence, like that great wave of popular rejoicing on which Cimabue’s Madonna was carried to S. Maria Novella, or a picture of Duccio’s to its due church in Siena. Can it be that Art, launched thus upon a sea of emotion, is only its true self when stranded high and dry upon the beach? Is perhaps its most precious aspect precisely that by which it is related to life? And its least precious part that which remains over for the connoisseur of beauty? Oh but this is heresy, almost the philistinism of a Tolstoy or a Savonarola. But believe me, my dear Virtuosi, that flavour which the citizens of the Joyous Quarter tasted, that wild-strawberry flavour of living, that dog-rose aroma of reality which you miss by your wilful avoidance of volitional relations, by your gospel of Art for Art’s sake, is as exquisite as any of your hot-house flowers and fruitage. Are you rushing in pursuit of the new pleasure? Nay, it can only be captured by those who do not pursue it, who are even unaware that it exists. Mill’s eudÆmonistic paradox again, you see. Has any professional hunter of the Æsthetic ever, I wonder, had so exquisite a sense of the starry heaven as Garibaldi when he embarked from Quarto to redeem his country? “O night of the fifth of May, lit up with the fire of a thousand lamps with which the Omnipotent has adorned the Infinite! Beautiful, tranquil, solemn with that solemnity which swells the hearts of generous men when they go forth to free the slave!” “He never tampered with his sense of reality.” These words came to me as the epitaph of an old Jewish pedlar when I heard of his passing away in far-off Jerusalem. He too knew this joy of the Allegro Borgo (though in his autocosm the Madonna was an idol) and gleams of it sustained him through long years of poverty and pain, and through the shadows of his closing hour. Pictures, songs, histories—all had no existence for him outside his religion. All were but ministers of faith, to feed its sacred flame. There was not in his whole life a moment of divorce between reality and consciousness. In such simplicity, what a unity, what a giant strength! Pitiful ye seem in comparison, ye unshelled Æsthetes, wandering in search of an autocosm or yearning to inhabit every one in turn. Imagine it, to live the years of the Patriarch in our complex tortured era, and never to have had an art-emotion, never—save perhaps in childhood—to have known make-believe, never to have sundered vision and idea from actuality! Think of it, ye who have played such tricks with your souls as would make the angels weep, whose pious emotion has as much relation to religion as the enjoyment of a painted ocean to a struggle in the blind waters. You, Monsieur Loti of the AcadÉmie FranÇaise, with your vain literary vigil at the Holy Sepulchre, will you not envy this high seriousness which found an exaltation in forty fasts a year, without bite or sup, and drew a salty vitalisation from the tear of penitence? And you, sophisters of religion, who cling to your creed because it is good for the poor, or a beautiful tradition, or a branch of respectability; and above all, you, amateurs of “la voluptÉ dans la dÉvotion,” after the recipe of BarrÈs; you, neo-Catholics who mistake masturbation for adoration, bow your heads before one who worshipped God as naÏvely as a dog adores his master, who did not even know that he believed, who was belief; who went to Jerusalem not because he was a Zionist but because it was Zion, whose tears at the Wailing Wall were tinctured with never a thought of the wonder and picturesqueness of weeping over a Zion lost eighteen hundred years before he was born! Poor Parsifal! Poor pure fool! Gone is thy restful simplicity. Persiflage is now our wisdom. But because I have been privileged to see this sancta simplicitas of the old Jewish pedlar, I feel I know my Middle Ages better than the Protestant connoisseur whose learning flattens me out, or the pseudo-Catholic in search of sensations. I understand the Allegro Borgo, I say, and I am not appalled by the terrible list of Christian forgeries and legends, the apocryphal Gospels, the pseudo-Epistles, the hagiologies, for I know that ’tis the dry light of literary history that is false—like every other science—and that in life all these figments may have been the harmless nutriment of saintly souls. In this old Jew’s autocosm, too, there were no physical impossibilities, no incredible miracles, no monsters or leviathans so strange but their names in Hebrew letters were a certificate of pedigree; the centuries were fused for him as by a cosmic cinematograph, the patriarchs and saints hovering over him in immortal synchrony. So am I not taken aback to see the Bambino still in his mother’s lap by the time the Visconti present the Certosa to the Madonna, nor does it disconcert me to behold all the abbots and bishops of Christendom in attendance at the Crucifixion with consoling models of their churches. And as for the Madonna being an Italian grande dame dressed in Venetian silks or Florentine brocades, how else, pray, are we to preserve religion? True local colour and true Jerusalem costuming would have brought relativity into the absoluteness of belief, would have been a reminder that the Madonna was a foreigner. The truer truth is that she is Our Lady. Art, you see, had in its palmy days to be a full-orbed reality, carrying conviction as well as beauty to the guileless beholder. To us too ’tis only the masterpiece attuned to our own macrocosm that can give us this plenary satisfaction. Even “Paradise Lost” is for us merely a magnificent banquet of words, the virgin bloom of Paradise truly lost with our faith in the groundwork of the epic. Tolstoy’s attack on Art fails to differentiate between the Art of alien autocosms, the Culture Art which divides our soul against itself, and the real vitalising Art of our own epoch. For though we say, “Blessed are the simple, who live in the Absolute,” ’tis no necessary converse to cry damnation on the complex. Art, we know, is in a sense a playing with life, an outcome, as Schiller said, of the play-impulse, the exuberance of energies not exhausted in the struggle for existence. This is what Carlyle felt when he denounced mere rhymesters and canvas-colourers; it was the secret of his “imperfect sympathies” (in Elia’s phrase) with Shakespeare himself. ’Tis Hebraism versus Hellenism—the earnestness of the writers of the Bible, whose Art is an unconscious enhancement, a by-product struck off at white heat, versus the self-conscious manipulation of themes by Æschylus or Sophocles. A sense of futility and superfluity, if not of positive pravity, lies behind the eternal distrust of the Puritan for the make-believe of Art, his suspicion of the theatre and the nudities of Pagan sculpture. A prick of atavistic Calvinism caused the writer with the profoundest instinct for make-believe our generation has seen—Robert Louis Stevenson—suddenly to declare that the artist was no better than a fille de joie. But this was because the bulk of Stevenson’s fiction—unlike his essays and his poetry—is Art in its anecdotage, without serious relation to the spirit. And there are moods in which a jejune elegance or an empty exhilaration is as unsatisfying as a lady’s boudoir; and the artist, as a maker of beautiful toys, must sink into the same place as the contriver of perfumes and cushions. In Japan, where every workman is an artist, Art is in its proper place, and there is neither cant nor confusion. But besides the little Art of decorative line and melodious tinkle and romantic falsification of life there is the greater Art which has in it the unrest of the ocean and the silence of the starry night. Art, if in some instances it has sprung direct from the play-impulse, has largely come to us by way of religion, and where it is merely play for play’s sake—as in rococo Art—it is doomed to sterility. Although Art represents, yet, as photography came to prove, representation is not the aim of Art. The aim of Art is creation—creation that stimulates the soul. The artist has not to reproduce his model, but to create something new, living, and stimulating by help of it. He adds new creations to Nature. He marries her facts to his passion and pain, and the offspring is Art—Nature crossed by Man. The great odes of Keats and Wordsworth, the symphonies of Beethoven, the pictures of Bellini, the statues of Michelangelo, transmit to us the artists’ spiritual exaltations, their ideals of beauty and energy. It boots not to point out that the artist is often selfish and licentious, irritable and vain. It is the greatnesses of his soul, not its pettinesses, which he puts into his art; his emotions and ideals into its content, his sincerity into its craftsmanship. And by greatnesses I do not mean only moral greatnesses, for life is larger than morality. It is his own temperament with which the artist crosses Nature. And that is why schools of Art can never yield more than craft: new creations can only be got by new crossings. I would grant the Puritan, to whom all Art is of Satan, as I would grant his strange ally, Plato, that Æsthetics may be abused, especially when divorced from life. There are young ladies who consume a novel a day, Sundays not omitted, by which process half their waking life is passed in a species of opium-eating. There are amateurs of music whose life is a surfeit of sweet sounds, and picture-lovers whose day is an orgy of line and colour. But when Tolstoy, perceiving what a sensual sty of Fine Art we may wallow in, ranged himself with the old Puritan iconoclasts, and launched his famous Platonic encyclical against music divorced from public psalmody, song sundered from harvest-festivity, or poetry that was not a marching song to the Millennium, he overlooked that even a healthy soul may have a surplusage of play-energy—nay, that this is the very child-soul—and that even from a Puritan point of view Fine Art may purify for fine Action, though it lack the direct nexus with Action. Tolstoy’s tracts on religion may even be less vitalising for our age than “Anna Karenina” operating by way of the Aristotelian katharsis. And the relation of so-called fiction to truth may be even closer than its nexus with Action. For it follows from our analysis of Science that novels and plays have the great initial veracity of reproducing the fulness of life as compared with the segregative sciences with their one-sided abstractions, which are to actuality as the conjugations in a Greek grammar are to a conversation with Helen of Troy. While the artificial selection of Science breaks a whole into parts, the artificial selection of Art can make a part truly represent the whole. And the greater the artist-soul the less will it play with its moods by the artificial and conscious refraction of Art for Art’s sake. None should know better than Tolstoy that the highest Art is only Truth seen as Beauty. The great artist’s registration and reflection of the universe in tone or colour, line or word, is, indeed, the highest form of Science at our command, fact and flower in one. “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.” Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dante, Michelangelo, Beethoven, Milton, Browning, were not playing with life. The world of Art may not be the world of Science, but it is the world we live in, the human world furnished with faith and emotion, no less “real” than the naked universe of physical law. To accept Art for Art’s sake, to divorce it from life, would be to pigeon-hole our souls, as most people put their religion into Sundays. The deepest analysis seems to conduct us back to a recognition that Art and Reality, though they have no necessary relation, do actually tend to approach each other in the greatest Art. The greatest writers—a Shakespeare or a TourgÉnieff—in that selection from life which constitutes Art, select so as to give a sense of the whole, avoiding the one-sided selection which gives us on the one hand the disproportionate sexualities of the Palais-Royal farce or of the elegant bawdy-book, on the other the disproportionate sentimentalisms of goody-goody fiction. In painting, too, the Art which seizes the essence of places and people is the greatest, and I believe the greatest music seizes the essence of moods. Moreover, it is only by their relations to human realities that imaginative creations like Goethe’s Mephistopheles or Swift’s Lilliputians, the Prometheus of Æschylus, the Caliban of Shakespeare or the Jungle-Beasts of Kipling, have power to hold us. It may give us a useful distinction between Imagination and Fancy to connect the one with invention along the lines of life and born of insight into its essence—as in the creation of Hamlet; the other with artificial invention—as in the creation of Alice’s Wonderland. Whether Hamlet existed or not, or that Prince Hal did exist, is irrelevant to Art. The transient reality has been replaced by the permanent creation. Per contra, what was meant as Truth may survive only as Art, like the mythological parts of the “Iliad,” “Macbeth,” “Paradise Lost,” or the “Divina Commedia.” Yet, as I have just pointed out, even these great artistic creations lose their hold in proportion as they cease to seem in correspondence with external realities. And if the supreme test of plastic and literary Art is its communication of a sense of life, is it not Truth we are really worshipping, Truth under another name? For lifelikeness, if it does not necessarily mean likeness to particular individuals, does necessarily mean likeness to universals. And Selection, though it omits portions of the truth, does not omit the whole truth—nay, sometimes reveals the whole truth by cutting away the obscuring details. Reality is the inexhaustible fons et origo of all great Art; apart from which there is no life in Art, but a rootless, sapless, soulless simulacrum. So that with the supreme artist, the Puritan antithesis of Truth and Art, Reality and Make-believe, Hebraism and Hellenism, disappears. A Sophocles is as earnest as a Socrates, a Michelangelo as a Savonarola, a Shakespeare as a Luther, a Beethoven as a Darwin. As earnest, but not as limited. The biggest souls have never been able to express their sense of the multiform flowingness of things in neat packets of propositions; they have expressed it through the infinitude of Art. And Art, having once in human history been the medium of the spirit, must never sink back into a soulless toy. The Art of the future must vivify Science and take it up into Life; it must touch Truth with emotion and exalt it into Religion. “Ludibria rerum humanarum cunctis in negotiis.” Tacitus. |
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