For every
expectation
that he fulfilled there was another that
he destroyed.
he destroyed.
Oscar Wilde - Poetry
We must not be afraid of such a phrase.
Every single work of
art is the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every work of art is the
conversion of an idea into an image. Every single human being should be
the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every human being should be the
realisation of some ideal, either in the mind of God or in the mind of
man. Christ found the type and fixed it, and the dream of a Virgilian
poet, either at Jerusalem or at Babylon, became in the long progress of
the centuries incarnate in him for whom the world was waiting.
To me one of the things in history the most to be regretted is that the
Christ's own renaissance, which has produced the Cathedral at Chartres,
the Arthurian cycle of legends, the life of St. Francis of Assisi, the
art of Giotto, and Dante's _Divine Comedy_, was not allowed to develop on
its own lines, but was interrupted and spoiled by the dreary classical
Renaissance that gave us Petrarch, and Raphael's frescoes, and Palladian
architecture, and formal French tragedy, and St. Paul's Cathedral, and
Pope's poetry, and everything that is made from without and by dead
rules, and does not spring from within through some spirit informing it.
But wherever there is a romantic movement in art there somehow, and under
some form, is Christ, or the soul of Christ. He is in _Romeo and
Juliet_, in the _Winter's Tale_, in Provencal poetry, in the _Ancient
Mariner_, in _La Belle Dame sans merci_, and in Chatterton's _Ballad of
Charity_.
We owe to him the most diverse things and people. Hugo's _Les
Miserables_, Baudelaire's _Fleurs du Mal_, the note of pity in Russian
novels, Verlaine and Verlaine's poems, the stained glass and tapestries
and the quattro-cento work of Burne-Jones and Morris, belong to him no
less than the tower of Giotto, Lancelot and Guinevere, Tannhauser, the
troubled romantic marbles of Michael Angelo, pointed architecture, and
the love of children and flowers--for both of which, indeed, in classical
art there was but little place, hardly enough for them to grow or play
in, but which, from the twelfth century down to our own day, have been
continually making their appearances in art, under various modes and at
various times, coming fitfully and wilfully, as children, as flowers, are
apt to do: spring always seeming to one as if the flowers had been in
hiding, and only came out into the sun because they were afraid that
grown up people would grow tired of looking for them and give up the
search; and the life of a child being no more than an April day on which
there is both rain and sun for the narcissus.
It is the imaginative quality of Christ's own nature that makes him this
palpitating centre of romance. The strange figures of poetic drama and
ballad are made by the imagination of others, but out of his own
imagination entirely did Jesus of Nazareth create himself. The cry of
Isaiah had really no more to do with his coming than the song of the
nightingale has to do with the rising of the moon--no more, though
perhaps no less. He was the denial as well as the affirmation of
prophecy.
For every expectation that he fulfilled there was another that
he destroyed. 'In all beauty,' says Bacon, 'there is some strangeness of
proportion,' and of those who are born of the spirit--of those, that is
to say, who like himself are dynamic forces--Christ says that they are
like the wind that 'bloweth where it listeth, and no man can tell whence
it cometh and whither it goeth. ' That is why he is so fascinating to
artists. He has all the colour elements of life: mystery, strangeness,
pathos, suggestion, ecstasy, love. He appeals to the temper of wonder,
and creates that mood in which alone he can be understood.
And to me it is a joy to remember that if he is 'of imagination all
compact,' the world itself is of the same substance. I said in _Dorian
Gray_ that the great sins of the world take place in the brain: but it is
in the brain that everything takes place. We know now that we do not see
with the eyes or hear with the ears. They are really channels for the
transmission, adequate or inadequate, of sense impressions. It is in the
brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark
sings.
Of late I have been studying with diligence the four prose poems about
Christ. At Christmas I managed to get hold of a Greek Testament, and
every morning, after I had cleaned my cell and polished my tins, I read a
little of the Gospels, a dozen verses taken by chance anywhere. It is a
delightful way of opening the day. Every one, even in a turbulent, ill-
disciplined life, should do the same. Endless repetition, in and out of
season, has spoiled for us the freshness, the naivete, the simple
romantic charm of the Gospels. We hear them read far too often and far
too badly, and all repetition is anti-spiritual.
art is the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every work of art is the
conversion of an idea into an image. Every single human being should be
the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every human being should be the
realisation of some ideal, either in the mind of God or in the mind of
man. Christ found the type and fixed it, and the dream of a Virgilian
poet, either at Jerusalem or at Babylon, became in the long progress of
the centuries incarnate in him for whom the world was waiting.
To me one of the things in history the most to be regretted is that the
Christ's own renaissance, which has produced the Cathedral at Chartres,
the Arthurian cycle of legends, the life of St. Francis of Assisi, the
art of Giotto, and Dante's _Divine Comedy_, was not allowed to develop on
its own lines, but was interrupted and spoiled by the dreary classical
Renaissance that gave us Petrarch, and Raphael's frescoes, and Palladian
architecture, and formal French tragedy, and St. Paul's Cathedral, and
Pope's poetry, and everything that is made from without and by dead
rules, and does not spring from within through some spirit informing it.
But wherever there is a romantic movement in art there somehow, and under
some form, is Christ, or the soul of Christ. He is in _Romeo and
Juliet_, in the _Winter's Tale_, in Provencal poetry, in the _Ancient
Mariner_, in _La Belle Dame sans merci_, and in Chatterton's _Ballad of
Charity_.
We owe to him the most diverse things and people. Hugo's _Les
Miserables_, Baudelaire's _Fleurs du Mal_, the note of pity in Russian
novels, Verlaine and Verlaine's poems, the stained glass and tapestries
and the quattro-cento work of Burne-Jones and Morris, belong to him no
less than the tower of Giotto, Lancelot and Guinevere, Tannhauser, the
troubled romantic marbles of Michael Angelo, pointed architecture, and
the love of children and flowers--for both of which, indeed, in classical
art there was but little place, hardly enough for them to grow or play
in, but which, from the twelfth century down to our own day, have been
continually making their appearances in art, under various modes and at
various times, coming fitfully and wilfully, as children, as flowers, are
apt to do: spring always seeming to one as if the flowers had been in
hiding, and only came out into the sun because they were afraid that
grown up people would grow tired of looking for them and give up the
search; and the life of a child being no more than an April day on which
there is both rain and sun for the narcissus.
It is the imaginative quality of Christ's own nature that makes him this
palpitating centre of romance. The strange figures of poetic drama and
ballad are made by the imagination of others, but out of his own
imagination entirely did Jesus of Nazareth create himself. The cry of
Isaiah had really no more to do with his coming than the song of the
nightingale has to do with the rising of the moon--no more, though
perhaps no less. He was the denial as well as the affirmation of
prophecy.
For every expectation that he fulfilled there was another that
he destroyed. 'In all beauty,' says Bacon, 'there is some strangeness of
proportion,' and of those who are born of the spirit--of those, that is
to say, who like himself are dynamic forces--Christ says that they are
like the wind that 'bloweth where it listeth, and no man can tell whence
it cometh and whither it goeth. ' That is why he is so fascinating to
artists. He has all the colour elements of life: mystery, strangeness,
pathos, suggestion, ecstasy, love. He appeals to the temper of wonder,
and creates that mood in which alone he can be understood.
And to me it is a joy to remember that if he is 'of imagination all
compact,' the world itself is of the same substance. I said in _Dorian
Gray_ that the great sins of the world take place in the brain: but it is
in the brain that everything takes place. We know now that we do not see
with the eyes or hear with the ears. They are really channels for the
transmission, adequate or inadequate, of sense impressions. It is in the
brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark
sings.
Of late I have been studying with diligence the four prose poems about
Christ. At Christmas I managed to get hold of a Greek Testament, and
every morning, after I had cleaned my cell and polished my tins, I read a
little of the Gospels, a dozen verses taken by chance anywhere. It is a
delightful way of opening the day. Every one, even in a turbulent, ill-
disciplined life, should do the same. Endless repetition, in and out of
season, has spoiled for us the freshness, the naivete, the simple
romantic charm of the Gospels. We hear them read far too often and far
too badly, and all repetition is anti-spiritual.
