Twilight in Italy | Page 3

to receive back again all that
which has passed for the moment into being.
The issue is too much revealed. It leaves the peasant no choice. The
fate gleams transcendent above him, the brightness of eternal,
unthinkable not-being. And this our life, this admixture of labour and
of warm experience in the flesh, all the time it is steaming up to the
changeless brilliance above, the light of the everlasting snows. This is
the eternal issue.
Whether it is singing or dancing or play-acting or physical transport of
love, or vengeance or cruelty, or whether it is work or sorrow or
religion, the issue is always the same at last, into the radiant negation of
eternity. Hence the beauty and completeness, the finality of the
highland peasant. His figure, his limbs, his face, his motion, it is all
formed in beauty, and it is all completed. There is no flux nor hope nor
becoming, all is, once and for all. The issue is eternal, timeless, and
changeless. All being and all passing away is part of the issue, which is
eternal and changeless. Therefore there is no becoming and no passing

away. Everything is, now and for ever. Hence the strange beauty and
finality and isolation of the Bavarian peasant.
It is plain in the crucifixes. Here is the essence rendered in sculpture of
wood. The face is blank and stiff, almost expressionless. One realizes
with a start how unchanging and conventionalized is the face of the
living man and woman of these parts, handsome, but motionless as
pure form. There is also an underlying meanness, secretive, cruel. It is
all part of the beauty, the pure, plastic beauty. The body also of the
Christus is stiff and conventionalized, yet curiously beautiful in
proportion, and in the static tension which makes it unified into one
clear thing. There is no movement, no possible movement. The being is
fixed, finally. The whole body is locked in one knowledge, beautiful,
complete. It is one with the nails. Not that it is languishing or dead. It is
stubborn, knowing its own undeniable being, sure of the absolute
reality of the sensuous experience. Though he is nailed down upon an
irrevocable fate, yet, within that fate he has the power and the delight of
all sensuous experience. So he accepts the fate and the mystic delight of
the senses with one will, he is complete and final. His sensuous
experience is supreme, a consummation of life and death at once.
It is the same at all times, whether it is moving with the scythe on the
hill-slopes, or hewing the timber, or steering the raft down the river
which is all effervescent with ice; whether it is drinking in the Gasthaus,
or making love, or playing some mummer's part, or hating steadily and
cruelly, or whether it is kneeling in spellbound subjection in the
incense-filled church, or walking in the strange, dark,
subject-procession to bless the fields, or cutting the young birch-trees
for the feast of Frohenleichnam, it is always the same, the dark,
powerful mystic, sensuous experience is the whole of him, he is
mindless and bound within the absoluteness of the issue, the
unchangeability of the great icy not-being which holds good for ever,
and is supreme.
Passing further away, towards Austria, travelling up the Isar, till the
stream becomes smaller and whiter and the air is colder, the full
glamour of the northern hills, which are so marvellously luminous and

gleaming with flowers, wanes and gives way to a darkness, a sense of
ominousness. Up there I saw another little Christ, who seemed the very
soul of the place. The road went beside the river, that was seething with
snowy ice-bubbles, under the rocks and the high, wolf-like pine-trees,
between the pinkish shoals. The air was cold and hard and high,
everything was cold and separate. And in a little glass case beside the
road sat a small, hewn Christ, the head resting on the hand; and he
meditates, half-wearily, doggedly, the eyebrows lifted in strange
abstraction, the elbow resting on the knee. Detached, he sits and dreams
and broods, wearing his little golden crown of thorns, and his little
cloak of red flannel that some peasant woman has stitched for him.
No doubt he still sits there, the small, blank-faced Christ in the cloak of
red flannel, dreaming, brooding, enduring, persisting. There is a
wistfulness about him, as if he knew that the whole of things was too
much for him. There was no solution, either, in death. Death did not
give the answer to the soul's anxiety. That which is, is. It does not cease
to be when it is cut. Death cannot create nor destroy. What is, is.
The little brooding Christ knows this. What is he brooding, then? His