to
supraterrestial creatures in the presence of their God.

Gruenewald was the most uncompromising of idealists. Never had artist
known such magnificent exaltation, none had ever so resolutely bounded
from the summit of spiritual altitude to the rapt orb of heaven. He had
gone to the two extremes. From the rankest weeds of the pit he had
extracted the finest essence of charity, the mordant liquor of tears. In
this canvas was revealed the masterpiece of an art obeying the
unopposable urge to render the tangible and the invisible, to make
manifest the crying impurity of the flesh and to make sublime the
infinite distress of the soul.

It was without its equivalent in literature. A few pages of Anne
Emmerich upon the Passion, though comparatively attenuated, approached
this ideal of supernatural realism and of veridic and exsurrected life.
Perhaps, too, certain effusions of Ruysbroeck, seeming to spurt forth in
twin jets of black and white flame, were worthy of comparison with the
divine befoulment of Gruenewald. Hardly, either. Gruenewald's masterpiece
remained unique. It was at the same time infinite and of earth earthy.

"But," said Durtal to himself, rousing out of his revery, "if I am
consistent I shall have to come around to the Catholicism of the Middle
Ages, to _mystic_ naturalism. Ah, no! I will not--and yet, perhaps I
may!"

Here he was in the old dilemma. How often before now had he halted on
the threshold of Catholicism, sounding himself thoroughly and finding
always that he had no faith. Decidedly there had been no effort on the
part of God to reclaim him, and he himself had never possessed the kind
of will that permits one to let oneself go, trustingly, without reserve,
into the sheltering shadows of immutable dogma.

Momentarily at times when, after reading certain books, his disgust for
everyday life was accentuated, he longed for lenitive hours in a
cloister, where the monotonous chant of prayers in an incense-laden
atmosphere would bring on a somnolence, a dreamy rapture of mystical
ideas. But only a simple soul, on which life's wear and tear had left no
mark, was capable of savouring the delights of such a self-abandon, and
his own soul was battered and torn with earthly conflict. He must admit
that the momentary desire to believe, to take refuge in the timeless,
proceeded from a multitude of ignoble motives: from lassitude with the
petty and repeated annoyances of existence, quarrels with the laund