issance art, so also
with the narrative or dramatic; it belongs not to the original, real,
or at all events primitive Christianity of the time when the Man Jesus
walked on earth in the body, but to that day when He arose once more, no
less a Christ, be sure, in the soul of those men of the Middle Ages.
The Evangelists had never felt--why should they, good, fervent Jewish
laymen?--the magic of the baby Christ as it was felt by those mediaeval
ascetics, suddenly reawakened to human feeling. There is neither
tenderness nor reverence in the Gospels for the mother of the Lord;
some rather rough words on her motherhood; and that mention in St. John,
intended so evidently to bring the Evangelist, or supposed Evangelist,
into closer communion with Christ, not to draw attention to Christ's
mother. Yet out of those slight, and perhaps almost contemptuous
indications, the Middle Ages have made three or four perfect and wonderful
types of glorified womanhood: the Mother in adoration, the crowned,
enthroned Virgin, the Mater Gloriosa; the broken-hearted Mother, Mater
Dolorosa, as found at the foot of the cross or fainting at the deposition
therefrom; types more complete and more immortal than that of any Greek
divinity; above all, perhaps, the mere young mother holding the child
for kindly, reverent folk to look at, for the little St. John to play
with, or alone, looking at it, thinking of it in solitude and silence:
the whole lovingness of all creatures rising in a clear flame to heaven.
Nay, is not the suffering Christ a fresh creation of the Middle Ages,
made really to bear the sorrows of a world more sorrowful than that of
Judea? That strange Christ of the Resurrection, as painted occasionally
by Angelico, by Pier della Francesca, particularly in a wonderful small
panel by Botticelli; the Christ not yet triumphant at Easter, but risen
waist-high in the sepulchre, sometimes languidly seated on its rim, stark,
bloodless, with scarce seeing eyes, and the motionless agony of one
recovering from a swoon, enduring the worst of all his martyrdom, the
return to life in that chill, bleak landscape, where the sparse trees
bend in the dawn wind; returning from death to a new, an endless series
of sufferings, even as that legend made him answer the wayfaring Peter,
_returning to be crucified once more--iterum crucifigi_.

All this is the lyric side, on which, in art as in poetry, there are as
many variations as there are individual temperame