Twilight in Italy | Page 4

static patience and endurance is wistful. What is it that he secretly
yearns for, amid all the placidity of fate? 'To be, or not to be,' this may
be the question, but is it not a question for death to answer. It is not a
question of living or not-living. It is a question of being--to be or not to
be. To persist or not to persist, that is not the question; neither is it to
endure or not to endure. The issue, is it eternal not-being? If not, what,
then, is being? For overhead the eternal radiance of the snow gleams
unfailing, it receives the efflorescence of all life and is unchanged, the
issue is bright and immortal, the snowy not-being. What, then, is
being?
As one draws nearer to the turning-point of the Alps, towards the
culmination and the southern slope, the influence of the educated world
is felt once more. Bavaria is remote in spirit, as yet unattached. Its
crucifixes are old and grey and abstract, small like the kernel of the
truth. Further into Austria they become new, they are painted white,
they are larger, more obtrusive. They are the expressions of a later,

newer phase, more introspective and self-conscious. But still they are
genuine expressions of the people's soul.
Often one can distinguish the work of a particular artist here and there
in a district. In the Zemm valley, in the heart of the Tyrol, behind
Innsbruck, there are five or six crucifixes by one sculptor. He is no
longer a peasant working out an idea, conveying a dogma. He is an
artist, trained and conscious, probably working in Vienna. He is
consciously trying to convey a feeling, he is no longer striving
awkwardly to render a truth, a religious fact.
The chief of his crucifixes stands deep in the Klamm, in the dank gorge
where it is always half-night. The road runs under the rock and the trees,
half-way up the one side of the pass. Below, the stream rushes
ceaselessly, embroiled among great stones, making an endless loud
noise. The rock face opposite rises high overhead, with the sky far up.
So that one is walking in a half-night, an underworld. And just below
the path, where the pack-horses go climbing to the remote, infolded
villages, in the cold gloom of the pass hangs the large, pale Christ. He
is larger than life-size. He has fallen forward, just dead, and the weight
of the full-grown, mature body hangs on the nails of the hands. So the
dead, heavy body drops forward, sags, as if it would tear away and fall
under its own weight.
It is the end. The face is barren with a dead expression of weariness,
and brutalized with pain and bitterness. The rather ugly, passionate
mouth is set for ever in the disillusionment of death. Death is the
complete disillusionment, set like a seal over the whole body and being,
over the suffering and weariness and the bodily passion.
The pass is gloomy and damp, the water roars unceasingly, till it is
almost like a constant pain. The driver of the pack-horses, as he comes
up the narrow path in the side of the gorge, cringes his sturdy
cheerfulness as if to obliterate himself, drawing near to the large, pale
Christ, and he takes his hat off as he passes, though he does not look up,
but keeps his face averted from the crucifix. He hurries by in the gloom,
climbing the steep path after his horses, and the large white Christ
hangs extended above.

The driver of the pack-horses is afraid. The fear is always there in him,
in spite of his sturdy, healthy robustness. His soul is not sturdy. It is
blenched and whitened with fear. The mountains are dark overhead, the
water roars in the gloom below. His heart is ground between the
mill-stones of dread. When he passes the extended body of the dead
Christ he takes off his hat to the Lord of Death. Christ is the Deathly
One, He is Death incarnate.
And the driver of the pack-horses acknowledges this deathly Christ as
supreme Lord. The mountain peasant seems grounded upon fear, the
fear of death, of physical death. Beyond this he knows nothing. His
supreme sensation is in physical pain, and in its culmination. His great
climax, his consummation, is death. Therefore he worships it, bows
down before it, and is fascinated by it all the while. It is his fulfilment,
death, and his approach to fulfilment is through physical pain.
And so these monuments to physical death are found everywhere in the
valleys. By the same hand that carved the big Christ, a little further on,
at the end of a bridge, was another crucifix, a small one. This Christ
had a fair beard,