Prince of the Elect who lies naked among the prickly hay. He
lies naked and without covering; the angels shout in the heights. And
they wonder greatly that to such lowliness the Divine Verb should have
stooped. The Divine Verb, which is highest knowledge, this day seems as
if He knew nothing of anything (_il verbo divino che e sommo sapiente,
in questo di par che non sappia niente!_). Look at him on the hay, crying
and kicking (_che gambetta piangente_), as if He were not at all a divine
man...." Meanwhile, other angels, as in Benozzo's frescoes, are busy
"picking rarest flowers in the garden." In the garden! Why He Himself
is a fragrant garden; Jesus is a garden of many sweet odours; and "what
they are those can tell who are the lovers of this sweet little brother
of ours."

_Di Questo nostro dolce fratellino_: it is such expressions as these,
Bambolino, Piccolino, Garzolino, "el magno Jesulino," these caressing,
ever-varied diminutives, which make us understand the monk's passionate
pleasure in the child; and which, by the emotion they testify to and
re-awaken, draw more into relief, make visible and tangible the little
kicking limbs on the straw, the dimpled baby's body.

And then there are the choruses of angels. "O new song," writes Jacopone,
"which has killed the weeping of sick mankind! Its melody, methinks,
begins upon the high _Fa_, descending gently on the _Fa_ below, which
the _Verb_ sounds. The singers, jubilating, forming the choir, are the
holy angels, singing songs in that hostelry, before the little babe, who
is the Incarnate Word. On lamb's parchment, behold! the divine note is
written, and God is the scribe, Who has opened His hand, and has taught
the song."

Have we not here, in this odd earliest allegory of music and theology,
this earliest precursor of the organ-playing of Abt Vogler, one of those
choirs, clusters of singing childish heads--clusters, you might almost
say, of sweet treble notes, tied like nosegays by the score held
scrollwise across them, which are among the sweetest inventions of
Italian art, from Luca della Robbia to Raphael, "cantatori, guibilatori,
che tengon il coro?"

And this is the place for a remark which, in the present uncertainty
of all aesthetic psychology, I put forward as a mere suggestion, but
a suggestion less wide of the truth than certain theories now almost
unquestioned: the theories which arbitrarily assume that art is the
immediate and exact expression of c