III

No object in the Naples Museum fascinates the philosophic mind more than Salpion’s vase. Who was Salpion? I know not, though his once living hand signed his work, in bold sprawling letters,

An Athenian made you, then, I muse, gazing upon its beautiful marble impassivity, and studying the alto-relievo of Mercury with his dancing train giving over the infant Bacchus to a seated nymph of Nysa. He who conceived you made you for sacrifices to Bacchus, lived among those white temples which the Greeks built for the adoration of their gods, but which remain for our adoration. He mounted that hill agleam with the marble pillars of immortal shrines, he passed the Areopagus, and the altar “to the unknown God”; he entered the Propylæa and gazed through the columns of the Acropolis upon the blue Ægean. He sat in that marmoreal amphitheatre and saw the mimes in sock and buskin take the proscenium to the sound of lyres and flutes. Perchance ’twas while seeing the Mercury fable treated in a choric dance in the sanded orchestra that he composed this grouping. Perhaps he but copied it from some play lost to us, for the Greek theatre, with its long declamations, had more analogy with sculpture than with our agitated drama of to-day. The legend itself is in Lucian and Apollonius. But Salpion is not the beginning of this vase’s story. For the artist himself belonged to the Renaissance, the scholars say; not our Renaissance, but a neo-Attic. Salpion did but deftly reproduce the archaic traditions of the first great period of Greek sculpture. Even in those days men’s thoughts turned yearningly to a nobler past, and the young prix de Rome who should find inspiration in Salpion would be but imitating an imitation. Nor is Athenian all the history this fair Attic shape has held. Much more we know, yet much is dim. In what palace or private atrium did it pass its first years? How did it travel to Italy? Was it exported thither by a Greek merchant to adorn the house of some rich provincial, or—more probably—the country seat of a noble Roman? For the ruins of Formiæ were the place of its discovery, and mayhap Cicero himself—the baths of whose villa some think to trace in the grounds of the Villa Caposele—was its whilom proprietor.

But, once recovered from the wrack of the antique world, it falls into indignity, more grievous than its long inhumation through the rise and fall of the mediæval world. It drifts, across fields of asphodel, to the neighbouring Gaeta—the Gibraltar of Italy, the ancient Portus Caeta, itself a town-republic of as many mutations and glories—and there, stuck in the harbour mud, performs the function of a post to which boats are fastened. Stalwart fishermen, wearing gold earrings, push off from it with swarthy hands; bronzed women, with silver bodkins pinning in their black hair with long coils of many-coloured linen, throw their ropes over its pedestal. Year after year it lies in its ooze while the sun rises and sets in glory on the promontory of Gaeta: it reeks of tar and the smell of fishing-nets; brine encrusts its high-reliefs. The clatter of the port drowns the hollow cry of memory that comes when it is struck by an oar: there is the noise of shipping bales; the crews of forth-faring argosies heave anchor with their ancient chant; the sails of the galleons flap; the windlasses creak. Perchance a galley-slave, flayed and fretted by chain and lash, draws up with grappled boat-hook, and his blood flows over into Salpion’s vase.

And then a tide of happier fortune—perhaps the same that bore the Sardinians to the conquest of Gaeta and the end of the war for Italian independence—washes the vase from its harbour mud and deposits it in the cathedral of Gaeta. The altar of Bacchus returns to sacerdotal uses: only now it is a font, and brown Italian babies are soused in it, while nurses in gilt coronets with trailing orange ribbons stand by, radiant. Doubtless the priests and the simple alike read an angel into Mercury, the infant Jesus into the child of Jupiter and Semele, and into the nymph of Nysa the Madonna whose Immaculate Conception Pio Nono proclaimed from this very Gaeta.

Its Bacchantes are now joyous saints, divinely uplifted. And why not? Is not the Church of Santa Costanza at Rome the very Temple of Bacchus, its Bacchic processions in mosaic and fresco unchanged? Did not the early Church make the Bacchic rites symbolic of the vineyard of the faith, and turn to angels the sportive genii? Assuredly Salpion’s vase is as Christian as the toe of Jupiter in St. Peter’s, as the Roman basilicæ where altars have usurped the ancient judgment-seat, as the Pantheon wrested from the gods by the saints. Nay, its Bacchic relief might have been the very design of a Cinquecento artist for a papal patron, the figures serving for saints, even as the Venetian ladies in all their debonair beauty supplied Tintoretto and Titian with martyrs and holy virgins, or as the beautiful, solemn-robed, venerable-bearded Bacchus on another ancient vase, which stands in the Campo Santo of Pisa, served Niccolo Pisano for the High Priest of his pulpit reliefs.

Outside Or San Michele in Florence you may admire the Four Holy Craftsmen, early Roman Christians martyred for refusing to make Pagan deities. They had not yet learned to baptize them by other names.

And now Salpion’s vase has reached the Museum, that cynosure of wandering tourists. But it belongs not truly to the world of glass cases: it has not yet reached museum-point. It is of the Exhibition: not of the Museum proper, which should be a collection of antiquities. Other adventures await it, dignified or sordid. For museums themselves die and are broken up. Proteus had to change his shape; Salpion’s vase has no need of external transformations. Will it fume with incense to some yet unknown divinity in the United States of Africa, or serve as a spittoon for the Fifth President of the Third World-Republic?

O the passing, the mutations, the lapse, the decay and fall, and the tears of things! Yet Salpion’s vase remains as beautiful for baptism as for Pagan ritual; symbol of art which persists, stable and sure as the sky, while thoughts and faiths pass and re-form, like clouds on the blue.

And out of this flux man has dared to make a legend of changelessness, when at most he may one day determine the law of the flux.

Everything changes but change. Yet man’s heart demands perfections—I had almost said petrifactions—perfect laws, perfect truths, dogmas beyond obsolescence, flawless leaders, unsullied saints, knights without fear or reproach; throws over its idols for the least speck of clay, and loses all sense of sanctity in a truth whose absoluteness for all time and place is surrendered.

Yet is there something touching and significant in this clinging of man to Platonic ideals: the ruder and simpler he, the more indefectible his blessed vision, the more shining his imaged grail. And so in this shifting world of eternal flux his greatest emotions and cravings have gathered round that ideal of eternal persistence that is named God.

IV

There are two torrents that amaze me to consider—the one is Niagara, and the other the stream of prayer falling perpetually in the Roman Catholic Church. What with masses and the circulating exposition of the Host, there is no day nor moment of the day in which the praises of God are not being sung somewhere: in noble churches, in dim crypts and underground chapels, in cells and oratories. I have been in a great cathedral, sole congregant, and, lo! the tall wax candles were lit, the carven stalls were full of robed choristers, the organ rolled out its sonorous phrases, the priests chaunted, marching and bowing, the censer swung its incense, the bell tinkled. Niagara is indifferent to spectators, and so the ever-falling stream of prayer. As steadfastly and unremittingly as God sustains the universe, so steadfastly and unremittingly is He acknowledged, the human antiphony answering the divine strophe. There be those who cannot bear that Niagara should fall and thunder in mere sublimity, but only to such will this falling thunder of prayer seem waste.

Yet as I go through these innumerable dark churches of Italy, these heavy, airless glooms, heavier with the sense of faded frescoes and worm-eaten pictures, and vaults and crypts, and mouldering frippery and mildewed relics, and saintly bones mocked by jewelled shroudings, and dim-burning oil-lamps—the blue sky of Italy shut out as in a pious perversity—and more, when I see the subjects of the paintings and gravings, these Crucifixions and Entombments and Descents from the Cross, varied by the mimetic martyrdoms of the first believers, it is borne in on me depressingly how the secret of Jesus has been darkened, and a doctrine of life—“Walk while ye have the light . . . that ye may be the children of light”—has been turned to a doctrine of death. St. Sebastian with his arrows, St. Lawrence with his gridiron, are, no doubt, sublime spectacles; but had not the martyr’s life been noble, and had he not died for the right to live it, his death would have been merely ignominious. The death of Socrates owes its value to the life of Socrates. Many a murderer dies as staunchly, not to speak of the noble experimenters with Röntgen rays, or the explorers who perish in polar wastes, recording with freezing fingers the latitude of their death.

Painting half obeyed, half fostered this concentration on the Passion, with its strong lights and shadows. Indeed, the artistic strength of the mere story is so tremendous that it has wiped out the message of the Master and thrown Christianity quite out of perspective. Tintoretto’s frescoes in San Rocco—indeed, most sacred pictures—are like a picture-book for the primitive. (Picturæ sunt idiotarum libri.) The anecdotal Christ alone survives. And the painters were the journalists, the diffusers and interpreters of ideas.

The true Christ was crucified afresh in the interests of romance and the pictorial nude. Crivelli painted with unction the fine wood and the decorative nails of the Cross; even the winding-sheet is treated by Giulio Clovio for its decorative value. Where in all these galleries and legends shall we find the living Christ, the Christ of the parables and the paradoxes, the caustic satirist, the prophet of righteousness, the lover of little children? The living Christ was overcast by the livid light of the tomb. He was buried in the Latin of the Church, while every chapel and cloister taught in glaring colour the superficial dramatic elements, and Calvaries were built to accentuate it, and men fought for the Cross and swore by the Holy Rood, and collected the sacred nails and fragments of the wood and thorns of the crown.

The Sacro Catino of Genoa Cathedral once held drops of the blood; a chapel of marble and gold at Turin still preserves in the glow of ever-burning lamps the Santo Sudario, or Holy Winding-sheet. Strange mementoes of the plein air Prophet who drew his parables and metaphors from the vineyard and the sheepfold! The Santo Volto for which pilgrims stream to Lucca is not the holy face of loving righteousness, but a crucifix miraculously migrated from the Holy Land and preserved in a toy tempietto. Of the fifteen mysteries of the Roman Catholic Rosary, five are of Birth, five of Death, five of Glory. But none are of Life. There are also the rosaries of the Five Wounds and the Seven Dolors.

No doubt the majestic and sombre symbolism of the Cross owed its power over gross minds to its very repudiation of the joy of life, but the soul cannot healthily concentrate on death, nor can “Holy Dying” replace “Holy Living.” Those early purple and gold mosaics of the Master with His hand on the Book of Life, placed over altars—as in the cathedral of Pisa—taught, for all their naïveté, the deeper lesson: “Ego sum lux mundi.” The rude stone sculptures on the portals of Parma Baptistery depict a Christ grotesque in a skull-cap, yet active in works and words of love, and Duccio’s panels on that reredos in Siena in the dawn of Italian art equally emphasise the life of Christ, and not its mere ending. In fact, the earlier the art the less the insistence on darkness and death. The Christians of the Catacombs, for whom death and darkness were daily realities, turned all their thoughts to light and life. They enjoyed their crypts more than the Christians of to-day enjoy their cathedrals. “The Acts of the Apostles,” says Renan in his St. Paul, “are a book of joy.” It was the later ages, which found the battle won, that took an artistic and morbid pleasure in depicting martyrdoms and created those pictorial concepts that tend to caricature Christianity. It is worth remarking that Tempesta, who brought pictorial martyrology to its disgusting climax in S. Stefano Rotondo at Rome, came so late that he lived to see the eighteenth century in. A pity that temporary necessities of martyrdom among the early Christians lent colour to the misconception of Christianity as a religion of death. Toleration or triumph robbed the saint of his stake, and left to him a subtler and severer imitatio Christi. Buried so long beneath his own Cross, the true Christ will rise again—to the cry of “Ecce Homo!”

On that day the teaching of Arius as to the originate nature of Christ, or the modal trinitarianism of Sabellius by which the same God manifested Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, may cease to be a heresy, or Joachim of Flora’s expectation of a Super-Gospel of the Spirit may find transformed fulfilment. For if Christianity has a future, that future belongs, not to its dogmas, but to its heresies, the thought of the great souls who, instead of receiving it passively, wrestled for themselves with its metaphysical and spiritual problems, and passed through the white fires and deep waters of the cosmic mystery. There is scarcely a heresy but will better repay study than the acrid certainties of St. Bernard or the word-spinnings of Athanasius triumphant contra mundum.

Art is, indeed, not sparing of the resurrected Christ who rules in glory, such as He whose majestic figure dominates and pervades St. Mark’s; but this Christ who presides in so many pictures at the Last Judgment, His foot on the earth-ball, His angel-legions round Him, and who, indeed, in some is actually represented as creating Adam or giving Moses the Law; this Christ who—by a paradoxical reversion to the Pagan need for a human God—has superseded His Father with even retrospective rights, is still further removed than the crucified Christ from the Christ of life.

This apotheosis, how inferior in grandeur to his true presidence over the centuries that followed his death! And this death, how infinitely more tragic than the conventional theory of it! Naught that man has suffered or man imagined, no Dantesque torture nor Promethean agony, can equal the blackness of that ninth hour when “Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” Where be the twelve legions of angels, where the seat for the Son of Man at the right hand of power? Why this mockery, this excruciation?

Purblind must be the dry-as-dust who can read this passage and doubt that Jesus was an historical person. As if, despite Psalm xxii, the writers of Matthew and Mark could have invented so wonderful a touch, or would, had they understood its full import, have inserted so flagrant a contradiction of the Christian concept—a contradiction that can only be counteracted by an elaborate theory of kenosis. The dying cry of Jesus stamps him with authenticity, as the complaints of the Israelites against their leader guarantee Moses and the Exodus.

What a colossal theme—Ormuzd broken by Ahriman, the incarnation of light and love agonising beneath the heel of the powers of darkness and goaded into the supreme cry: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” I have seen only one Crucifixion that adequately renders this dreadful moment—the supreme loneliness, the unrayed blackness—for most Crucifixions are populated and bustling, like Tintoretto’s or Altichieri’s or Foppa’s or Spinello Aretino’s, or that congested canvas of the brothers San Severino, when they are not also like Michele da Verona’s, a translation of the tragedy into a Carpaccio romance of trumpeters and horsemen and dogs and lovely towered cities and mountain bridges, not to mention the arms of the magnificent Conte di Pitigliano. But what painter it is who has caught the true essence and quiddity of the Crucifixion I cannot remember, nor haply if I saw his picture in Spain and not in Italy, nor even if I dreamed it.

Lucas Van der Leyden and Van Dyck give us the lonely figure, but in Italian art before our own day I can only recall it in an obscure picture of the Parmese school, and in a small painting of the eighteenth-century Venetian, Piazzetta. Tura’s impressive, sombre study is only a fragment of a stigmata picture. Guido Reni suggests the loneliness, but he leaves the head haloed and melodramatic, besides sketching in shadowy accessories. A nineteenth-century Italian, Giocondo Viglioli, places the lonely Christ against the shadowy background of the roofs and towers of Jerusalem. But the picture I have in my mind is Rembrandtesque, the blacks heaviest at the figure in the centre, who, unillumined even by a halo, uncompanioned even of thieves, hangs nailed upon a lonely cross in a vast deserted landscape. For Jesus at this tremendous moment is alone—however vast the crowd—alone against the universe, and this universe has turned into a darkness that can be felt; felt as a torment of body as well as a shattering of the spirit.

When I looked upon the myth of Psyche in the Villa Farnesina at Rome as designed by Raphael, it was borne in on me how the primitive Greek, penetrated by the certainty and beauty of his body, had made the world and the gods in its image. But the race of Jesus, evolved to a higher thought, had demanded that the universe should answer to its soul. “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” asks Abraham severely of God in another epochal passage of the Bible. And now here is a scion of Abraham who has staked his all upon the innermost nature of things being one with his own, upon a universe aflame with love and righteousness and pity, and lo! in this awful hour it seems to reveal itself as a universe full of mocking forces, grim, imperturbable, alien. It is an epic moment—the tragedy not only of Jesus, but of man soaring upwards from the slime⁠—

—and finding in the cosmos no correspondence with his vision. Nor could Jesus, who had outgrown the notion of a heavenly despot, even find the satisfaction of the Prometheus of Æschylus:

Yet in a sense the despair of Jesus was unwarranted. The universe had not forsaken him; it contained, on the contrary, the media for his eternal influence. On the physical plane, indeed, it could do nothing for him; crucifixion must kill or the cosmos must change to chaos. But on the spiritual plane he could neither be killed nor forsaken. Infinitely less tragic his death than that of Napoleon, of whom we might say, in the words of Sannazaro,

It was Moses who more voluntarily than Jesus offered his life that the equilibrium of this righteous universe should not be shaken. “Ye have sinned a great sin; and now I will go up unto the Lord; peradventure I shall make an atonement for your sin.” And the atonement offered ran: “Blot me, I pray Thee, out of Thy book which Thou hast written.” Here, then, in the Old Testament, and not in the New, first appears the notion of vicarious atonement. But the Old Testament sternly rejects it; “Whoever hath sinned against Me, him will I blot out of My book.” Beside which trenchant repudiation the Christian reading of the Old Testament as a mere prolegomenon to the Crucifixion, an avenue to Calvary strewn with textual finger-posts, appears a more than usually futile word-play of the theological mind. One might, indeed, more easily discover the germ of the atonement idea in Iphigenia. And that the Greek mind had spiritualised itself—even before it contributed the logos to Christianity—is obvious not only from its literature and its Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries, but from its art. For the Hellenic art of Raphael was, after all, only the Renaissance view of Hellas, and the Greek myths in his hands were merely a charming Pagan poetry, no truer to the Hellenism of the great period than was the “Endymion” or “Hyperion” of Keats. How can I look at the statue of Apollo in this same Museum of Naples and not see that the very type of Christ had been pre-figured? I mean the Christ with the haunting eyes and the long ringlets, for this Apollo is a nobler figure by far than the Christ of the Byzantine mosaics. And I am not the first to remember that Apollo is the Son of Zeus the Father.

It is very strange. The Greeks, beginning with a Nature-religion, come in the course of the centuries to find it inadequate and to yearn for something beyond—

The Nature-religion, therefore, gradually replaces itself by a Jewish heresy, expounded in Greek, largely influenced by Greek Alexandrian philosophy, and organised by a Greek-speaking tent-maker of Jerusalem named Saul or Paul, who, shutting out infinity with a tent, after the fashion of his craft, left a Church where he had found a Christ. Some fourteen centuries later old Greek thought is rediscovered, and operates as the great liberator of the mind from the constriction of this Church which has obscured and overgloomed Nature. But only subconscious of itself, this movement back to Nature, this renewed joie de vivre, finds its expression in the adornment of altars for the worship of sorrow, and under the ribs of death a new soul of loveliness is created that can vie with the art of the Greeks. And finally this new Nature-worship grows conscious again of its inadequacy to the soul of man, there is a Reformation and a Counter-Reformation, and then both are outgrown and humanity stands to-day where the old Greeks stood at the dawn of Christianity. The wheel has come full circle. And meantime the original Mosaic cult stands unmoved by these two millenniums of heresy, unbroken by the persecution, still patiently awaiting the day when “God shall be One and His Name One.” What are the fantasies of literature to the freaks and paradoxes of the World-Spirit?

V

It is as the Bambino that Christ chiefly lives in Art, and at this extreme, too, we miss his true inwardness. Yet the tenderness of the conception of the Christ-babe makes atonement. What can be more touching than Gentile da Fabriano’s enchanting altar-piece of the Adoration of the Magi, in which—even as the glamorous procession of the Three Kings resteeps the earth in the freshness and dew of the morning—the dominance of holy innocence seems to bathe the tired world in a wistful tenderness that links the naïve ox and ass with the human soul and all the great chain of divine life.

The Christ-child, held in his mother’s arms, lays his hand upon the kneeling Magi’s head, yet not as with conscious divinity: ’tis merely the errant touch of baby fingers groping out towards the feel of things. No lesson could be more emollient to rude ages, none could better serve to break the pride and harshness of the lords of the earth. “A slave might be elder, priest, or bishop while his master was catechumen,” says Hausrath of the early days of Christianity. Yet this delicious and yearning vision of a sanctified and unified cosmos remains a dream; futile as a Christmas carol that breaks sweetly on the ear and dies away, leaving the cry of the world’s pain undispossessed. It was precisely in Christian Rome that slavery endured after all the other Great Powers of Europe had abolished it.

Nay, were the dream fulfilled it could not undo the centuries of harsh reality. Here in Naples, under the providence of a kindly English society, the wretched breed of horses, whose backs were full of sores, whose ribs were numerable, have been replaced by a sleek stock, themselves perhaps soon to be replaced by the unsentient motor. But what Motor Millennium can wipe out the ages of equine agony?

And despite the Christ-child and the Christ crucified, nowhere does the triumph of life run higher than in this sunny land of religious gloom, Mantegna’s conversion of the babe into a young Cæsar being a true if unconscious symbol of what happened to the infant. Flourishing the forged Donation of Constantine to prove its claim to the things that were Cæsar’s, it grew up into that “Terrible Pontiff” whose bronze effigy by Michelangelo was so aptly cast into a cannon, and whose Christian countenance you may see in the Doria Gallery at Rome; or into that Borgian monster who was to bombard a fortress on Christmas Day, and who, crying joyfully, “We are Pope and Vicar of Christ,” hastened to don the habit of white taffeta, the embroidered crimson stola, the shoes of ermine and crimson velvet. God might choose to be born in the poorest and worst-dressed circles of the most unpopular People, but the lesson was lost. His worshippers insisted on thrusting Magnificence back upon Him. Or perhaps it was their own Magnificence that they were protecting against His insidious teaching. Consider their cathedrals, built less in humility than in urban emulation—the Duomo of Florence to be worthy of the greatness, not of God, but of the Florentines; S. Petronio to eclipse it to the greater glory of Bologna; Milan Cathedral to surpass all the churches in Christendom, as Giangaleazzo’s palace surpassed all its princely dwellings. In whose honour did the Pisans encircle their cathedral with a silver girdle, or the Venetians offer ten thousand ducats for the seamless coat? Poor Babe, vainly didst thou preach to Italy’s great families, when in humble adoration of thee they had themselves painted in thy blessed society, the Medici even posing to Botticelli as the Three Magi, and thrusting their magnificence into thy very manger.

And in our own northern land the ox, companion of the manger, for whose fattening at Christmastide St. Francis said he would beg for an imperial edict, is fattened indeed, but merely for the Christmas market, stands with the same pathetic eye outside the butcher’s shop, labelled “Choose your Christmas joint,” and the clown and pantaloon come tumbling on to crown the sacred birthday.

Alas! history knows no miracles of transformation. Evolution, not revolution, is the law of human life. In Santa Claus’s stocking what you shall truly find is traces of earlier feasts. The Christian festival took over, if it transformed to higher import, the Saturnalia of earlier religions and natural celebrations of the winter solstice. Holly does not grow in Palestine; the snowy landscapes of our Christmas cards are scarcely known of Nazareth or Bethlehem; mince-pie was not on the menu of the Magian kings; and the Christmas tree has its roots in Teutonic soil. But even as the painters of each race conceived Christ in their own image, so does each nation unthinkingly figure his activities in its own climatic setting. And perhaps in thus universalising the Master the peoples obeyed a true instinct, for no race is able to receive lessons from “foreigners.” The message, as well as the man, must be translated into native terms—a psychological fact which missionaries should understand.

Nor is it in the Palestine of to-day that the true environment of the Gospels can best be recovered, for, though one may still meet the shepherd leading his flock, the merchant dangling sideways from his ass, or Rebeccah carrying her pitcher on her shoulder, that is not the Palestine of the Apostolic period, but the Palestine of the patriarchs, reproduced by decay and desolation. The Palestine through which the Galilæan peasant wandered was a developed kingdom of thriving cities and opulent citizens, of Roman roads and Roman pomp. Upon those bleak hill-sides, where to-day only the terraces survive—the funereal monuments of fertility—the tangled branchery of olive groves lent magic to the air. That sea of Galilee, down which I have sailed in one of the only two smacks, was alive with a fleet of fishing vessels. Yes, in the palimpsest of Palestine ’tis an earlier writing than the Christian that has been revealed by the fading of the later inscriptions of her civilisation. And even where, in some mountain village, the rainbow-hued crowd may still preserve for us the chronology of Christ, a bazaar of mother-o’-pearl mementoes will jerk us rudely back into our own era. But—saddest of all!—the hands of Philistine piety have raised churches over all the spots of sacred story. Even Jacob’s well is roofed over with ecclesiastic plaster; incongruous images of camels getting through church porches to drink confuse the historic imagination. Churches are after all a way of shutting out the heavens, and the great open-air story of the Gospels seems rather to suffer asphyxiation, overlaid by these countless chapels and convents. Is it, perhaps, allegorical of the perversion of the Christ-teaching?

The humanitarian turn given to Yuletide by the genius of Dickens was at bottom a return from the caricature to the true concept. Dickens converted Christmas to Christianity. But over large stretches of the planet and of history it is Christianity that has been converted to Paganism, as the condition of its existence. Russia was baptized a thousand years ago, but she seems to have a duck’s back for holy water. And even in the rest of Europe upon what parlous terms the Church still holds its tenure of nominal power! What parson dares speak out in a crisis, what bishop dares flourish the logia of Christ in the face of a heathen world? The old gods still govern—if they do not rule. Thor and Odin, Mars and Venus—who knows that they do not dream of a return to their ancient thrones, if, indeed, they are aware of their exile. Their shrines still await them in the forests and glades; every rock still holds an altar. And do they demand their human temples, lo! the Pantheon stands stable in Rome, the Temple of Minerva in Assisi, Paestum holds the Temples of Ceres and Minerva, and on the hill of Athens the Parthenon shines in immortal marble. Their statues are still in adoration, and how should a poor outmoded deity understand that we worship him as art, not as divinity? It does but add to his confusion that now and anon prayers ascend to him as of yore, for can a poor Olympian, whose toe has been faith-bitten, comprehend that he has been catalogued as pope or saint? Perchance some drowsing Druid god, as he perceives our scrupulous ritual of holly and fir-branch, imagines his worship unchanged, and glads to see the vestal led under the mistletoe by his officiating priest. Perchance in the blaze of snapdragon some purblind deity beholds his old fire-offerings, and the savour of turkey mounts as incense to his Norse nostrils. Shall we rudely arouse him from his dream of dominion, shall we tell him that he and his gross ideas were banished two millenniums ago, and that the world is now under the sway of gentleness and love? Nay, let him dream his happy dream; let sleeping gods lie. For who knows how vigorously his old lustfulness and blood-thirst might revive; who knows what new victims he might claim at his pyres, were he clearly to behold his power still unusurped, his empire still the kingdom of the world?

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 Bœthusians 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 rendering עלמה as παρθένος, or “virgin,” instead of “maiden,” but this did not interest them, as they knew no Greek. The room took a more cheerful air when the mother lit the Sabbath candles with a blessing almost as inaudible as her welcome to me, and soon my host began the Haggadah service by holding his hands over the wine-goblet. But Yehudah asked the ritual question, “Why does this night differ from all other nights?” with a touch of sarcasm, and interrupted himself to cry passionately: “How can we celebrate our deliverance from Egypt when the Roman Eagle hangs at the very door of our Temple?” At this the little mother turned yet paler, and every eye glanced uneasily towards the stranger.