Là-bas | Page 4

he choked
back the cry which threatened to rend his quivering throat.
Ah, this coarse, tear-compelling Calvary was at the opposite pole from
those debonair Golgothas adopted by the Church ever since the
Renaissance. This lockjaw Christ was not the Christ of the rich, the
Adonis of Galilee, the exquisite dandy, the handsome youth with the
curly brown tresses, divided beard, and insipid doll-like features, whom
the faithful have adored for four centuries. This was the Christ of Justin,
Basil, Cyril, Tertullian, the Christ of the apostolic church, the vulgar
Christ, ugly with the assumption of the whole burden of our sins and
clothed, through humility, in the most abject of forms.
It was the Christ of the poor, the Christ incarnate in the image of the
most miserable of us He came to save; the Christ of the afflicted, of the
beggar, of all those on whose indigence and helplessness the greed of
their brother battens; the human Christ, frail of flesh, abandoned by the
Father until such time as no further torture was possible; the Christ with
no recourse but His Mother, to Whom--then powerless to aid Him--He
had, like every man in torment, cried out with an infant's cry.
In an unsparing humility, doubtless, He had willed to suffer the Passion
with all the suffering permitted to the human senses, and, obeying an
incomprehensible ordination, He, in the time of the scourging and of
the blows and of the insults spat in His face, had put off divinity, nor
had He resumed it when, after these preliminary mockeries, He entered
upon the unspeakable torment of the unceasing agony. Thus, dying like
a thief, like a dog, basely, vilely, physically, He had sunk himself to the
deepest depth of fallen humanity and had not spared Himself the last
ignominy of putrefaction.
Never before had naturalism transfigured itself by such a conception
and execution. Never before had a painter so charnally envisaged

divinity nor so brutally dipped his brush into the wounds and running
sores and bleeding nail holes of the Saviour. Grünewald had passed all
measure. He was the most uncompromising of realists, but his morgue
Redeemer, his sewer Deity, let the observer know that realism could be
truly transcendent. A divine light played about that ulcerated head, a
superhuman expression illuminated the fermenting skin of the epileptic
features. This crucified corpse was a very God, and, without aureole,
without nimbus, with none of the stock accoutrements except the
blood-sprinkled crown of thorns, Jesus appeared in His celestial
super-essence, between the stunned, grief-torn Virgin and a Saint John
whose calcined eyes were beyond the shedding of tears.
These faces, by nature vulgar, were resplendent, transfigured with the
expression of the sublime grief of those souls whose plaint is not heard.
Thief, pauper, and peasant had vanished and given place to
supraterrestial creatures in the presence of their God.
Grünewald was the most uncompromising of idealists. Never had artist
known such magnificent exaltation, none had ever so resolutely
bounded from the summit of spiritual altitude to the rapt orb of heaven.
He had gone to the two extremes. From the rankest weeds of the pit he
had extracted the finest essence of charity, the mordant liquor of tears.
In this canvas was revealed the masterpiece of an art obeying the
unopposable urge to render the tangible and the invisible, to make
manifest the crying impurity of the flesh and to make sublime the
infinite distress of the soul.
It was without its equivalent in literature. A few pages of Anne
Emmerich upon the Passion, though comparatively attenuated,
approached this ideal of supernatural realism and of veridic and
exsurrected life. Perhaps, too, certain effusions of Ruysbroeck, seeming
to spurt forth in twin jets of black and white flame, were worthy of
comparison with the divine befoulment of Grünewald. Hardly, either.
Grünewald's masterpiece remained unique. It was at the same time
infinite and of earth earthy.
"But," said Durtal to himself, rousing out of his revery, "if I am
consistent I shall have to come around to the Catholicism of the Middle

Ages, to mystic naturalism. Ah, no! I will not--and yet, perhaps I may!"
Here he was in the old dilemma. How often before now had he halted
on the threshold of Catholicism, sounding himself thoroughly and
finding always that he had no faith. Decidedly there had been no effort
on the part of God to reclaim him, and he himself had never possessed
the kind of will that permits one to let oneself go, trustingly, without
reserve, into the sheltering shadows of immutable dogma.
Momentarily at times when, after reading certain books, his disgust for
everyday life was accentuated, he longed for lenitive hours in a cloister,
where the monotonous chant of prayers in an incense-laden atmosphere
would bring on a