Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great | Page 2

failure to attend mass: he paints and you pray--it is really all the same thing. Good work and religion are one.
The busy and captious critics went away, but came back next day with the startling information that Raphael's pictures were more Pagan than Christian. Pope Leo heard the charge, and then with Lincoln- like wit said that Raphael was doing this on his order, as the desire of the Mother Church was to annex the Pagan art-world, in order to Christianize it.
The charges of Paganism and Infidelity are classic accusations. The gentle Burne-Jones was stoutly denounced by his enemies as a Pagan Greek. I think he rather gloried in the contumely, but fifty years earlier he might have been visited by a "lettre de cachet," instead of a knighthood; for we can not forget how, in Eighteen Hundred Fifteen, Parliament refused to pay for the Elgin Marbles because, as Lord Falmouth put it, "These relics will tend to prostitute England to the depth of unbelief that engulfed Pagan Greece." The attitude of Parliament on the question of Paganism finds voice occasionally even yet by Protestant England making darkness dense with the asseveration that Catholics idolatrously worship the pictures and statues in their churches.
The Romans tumbled the Athenian marbles from their pedestals, on the assumption that the statues represented gods that were idolatrously worshiped by the Greeks. And they continued their work of destruction until a certain Roman general (who surely was from County Cork) stopped the vandalism by issuing an order, coupled with the dire threat that any soldier who stole or destroyed a statue should replace it with another equally good.
Lord Elgin bankrupted himself in order to supply the British Museum its crowning glory, and for this he achieved the honor of getting himself poetically damned by Lord Byron. Monarchies, like republics, are ungrateful. Lord Elgin defended himself vigorously against the charge of Paganism, just as Raphael had done three hundred years before. But Burne-Jones was silent in the presence of his accusers, for the world of buyers besieged his doors with bank-notes in hand, demanding pictures. And now today we find Alma-Tadema openly and avowedly Pagan, and with a grace and loveliness that compel the glad acclaim of every lover of beautiful things.
We are making head. We have ceased to believe that Paganism is "bad." All the men and women who have ever lived and loved and hoped and died, were God's children, and we are no more. With the nations dead and turned to dust, we reach out through the darkness of forgotten days and touch friendly hands. Some of these people that existed two, three or four thousand years ago did things so marvelously grand and great that in presence of the broken fragments of their work we stand silent, o'erawed and abashed. We realize, too, that long before the nations lived that have left a meager and scattered history hewn in stone, lived still other men, possibly greater far than we; and no sign or signal comes to us from those whose history, like ours, is writ in water.
Yet we are one with them all. The same Power that brought them upon this stage of Time brought us. As we were called into existence without our consent, so are we being sent out of it, day by day, against our will. The destiny of all who live or have lived, is one; and no taunt of "paganism," "heathenism" or "infidelity" escapes our lips. With love and sympathy, we salute the eternity that lies behind, realizing that we ourselves are the oldest people that have tasted existence--the newest nation lingers away behind Assyria and Egypt, back of the Mayas, lost in continents sunken in shoreless seas that hold their secrets inviolate. Yes, we are brothers to all that have trod the earth; brothers and heirs to dust and shade-- mayhap to immortality!
In the story of "John Ball," William Morris pictured what to him was the Ideal Life. And Morris was certainly right in this: The Ideal Life is only the normal or natural life as we shall some day know it. The scene of Morris' story was essentially a Preraphaelite one. It was the great virtue (or limitation) of William Morris that the Dark Ages were to him a time of special light and illumination. Life then was simple. Men worked for the love of it, and if they wanted things they made them. "Every trade exclusively followed means a deformity," says Ruskin. Division of labor had not yet come, and men were skilled in many ways. There was neither poverty nor riches, and the idea of brotherhood was firmly fixed in the minds of men. The feverish desire for place, pelf and power was not upon them. The rise of the barons and an entailed