No More Learning

Since his coming the history of each separate individual is, or can be
made, the history of the world. Of course, culture has intensified the
personality of man. Art has made us myriad-minded. Those who have the
artistic temperament go into exile with Dante and learn how salt is the
bread of others, and how steep their stairs; they catch for a moment the
serenity and calm of Goethe, and yet know but too well that Baudelaire
cried to God--

'O Seigneur, donnez moi la force et le courage
De contempler mon corps et mon coeur sans degout. '

Out of Shakespeare's sonnets they draw, to their own hurt it may be, the
secret of his love and make it their own; they look with new eyes on
modern life, because they have listened to one of Chopin's nocturnes, or
handled Greek things, or read the story of the passion of some dead man
for some dead woman whose hair was like threads of fine gold, and whose
mouth was as a pomegranate. But the sympathy of the artistic temperament
is necessarily with what has found expression. In words or in colours,
in music or in marble, behind the painted masks of an AEschylean play, or
through some Sicilian shepherds' pierced and jointed reeds, the man and
his message must have been revealed.

To the artist, expression is the only mode under which he can conceive
life at all. To him what is dumb is dead. But to Christ it was not so.
With a width and wonder of imagination that fills one almost with awe, he
took the entire world of the inarticulate, the voiceless world of pain,
as his kingdom, and made of himself its eternal mouthpiece. Those of
whom I have spoken, who are dumb under oppression, and 'whose silence is
heard only of God,' he chose as his brothers. He sought to become eyes
to the blind, ears to the deaf, and a cry in the lips of those whose
tongues had been tied. His desire was to be to the myriads who had found
no utterance a very trumpet through which they might call to heaven. And
feeling, with the artistic nature of one to whom suffering and sorrow
were modes through which he could realise his conception of the
beautiful, that an idea is of no value till it becomes incarnate and is
made an image, he made of himself the image of the Man of Sorrows, and as
such has fascinated and dominated art as no Greek god ever succeeded in
doing.
For the Greek gods, in spite of the white and red of their fair fleet
limbs, were not really what they appeared to be. The curved brow of
Apollo was like the sun's disc crescent over a hill at dawn, and his feet
were as the wings of the morning, but he himself had been cruel to
Marsyas and had made Niobe childless. In the steel shields of Athena's
eyes there had been no pity for Arachne; the pomp and peacocks of Hera
were all that was really noble about her; and the Father of the Gods
himself had been too fond of the daughters of men. The two most deeply
suggestive figures of Greek Mythology were, for religion, Demeter, an
Earth Goddess, not one of the Olympians, and for art, Dionysus, the son
of a mortal woman to whom the moment of his birth had proved also the
moment of her death.

But Life itself from its lowliest and most humble sphere produced one far
more marvellous than the mother of Proserpina or the son of Semele. Out
of the Carpenter's shop at Nazareth had come a personality infinitely
greater than any made by myth and legend, and one, strangely enough,
destined to reveal to the world the mystical meaning of wine and the real
beauties of the lilies of the field as none, either on Cithaeron or at
Enna, had ever done.

The song of Isaiah, 'He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows
and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him,' had
seemed to him to prefigure himself, and in him the prophecy was
fulfilled. 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_.