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.
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
De Profundis
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