THE CHRIST OF THE DEMOCRACY.
THE collection of pictures now exhibiting at the Grosvenor Gallery have brought home afresh to the mind of one of their spectators a fact which is enforced on our attention at the present day by almost all its popular art,—the new dimension that has been taken by the passion of pity. We might have foreseen it as a result of the new democracy; it is the outcome of all that is best in democratic feeling. Those who suffer are many ; those who achieve are few. Throughout the whole moral develop- ment of the race, the tendency has hitherto been towards sympathy with the few. But a new spirit has arisen in the world. Humanity has taken a new meaning, interest has died out of all that is partial, whatever excites enthusiasm must concern all. Hence human sorrow takes a new aspect. When once we have brought ourselves to look on the mass of toilers as the kernel of a nation, the suffering of the world takes the place hitherto occupied by the heroism of its exceptional spirits. The pain that all can feel haunts imagination and impresses Art. We turn with revulsion from the glitter of chivalry, we shudder at "the pomp and circumstance of gloriouil war." We welcome every device by which we may make our- selves feel in imagination that which our brethren feel in ex- perience; we seek a new solidarity of endurance with our kind. The aim is not without its dangers. We lose the efficacy with the gradation of sympathy. The attempt to feel for all equally is in result the failure to feel adequately for any. And perhaps we could not always keep the loyalty that is claimed by the nation, if we fixed our attention invariably on the individual suffering which is its cost. These pictures of war, with their confused, tedious dreariness, their tale of patient suffering, their suggestions of long, obscure, untended agony, tell a tale that we should never forget, but not invariably keep uppermost in our thoughts. When we read such novels as Tolstoi'e, and see such pictures as Verestchagin'a, we feel it hard to realise how war can be a permanent fact in history. How is it, we ask, that the many consent, at the command of the few, to endure every variety of suffering, from dreariness and dis- comfort to extreme agony, for objects which are none of theirs P Not, sorely, because they have never known their true interest; the life of a nation is worth even the tremendous cost of asserting it. Perhaps we should have to accuse M. Verestchagin of denying this truth, if we had to speak our whole mind about him. The picture in which a hero, on the morrow of a victory, gallops along the ranks of his enthusiastic army, while the foreground of the picture is occupied with the unburied dead, seems to suggest a certain scorn for that effervescence of triumphant enthusiasm, an attention averted from all that is inspiring in war, to dwell exclusively upon the sufferings of its forgotten victims, which would, if it stood alone, come near to imperil the existence of national life. There is no question of the importance and value of such representations. We would keep such pictures as these before the eyes of every monarch, every powerful Minister ; we would make their images familiar to all on whom lies the tremendous responsibility of bringing the miseries they depict upon mankind. But we would not have it supposed that when the side of war they give us is laid to heart, we have heard the last word about it which there is to hear. And the impression left by these pictures is that the painter does believe this.
Perhaps some of the lack of sympathy with fortitude which such a view of war suggests may be detected in the artist's view of that death which is associated with some of the grandest con- ceptions expressed in Art. But let us, for the moment, forget that lack, admitting that what we have here is the Christ of, not for, the democracy ; let us give ourselves up to sympathise with M. Verestchagin's version of " Crucifixion under the Romans." How many an image of glorious art recurs to the spectator's vision as he stands before this strange huddle of figures with the familiar three crosses in the background, and how perfectly distinct from any such is the impression it conveys to him ! Nothing that we ever saw is the least like it. The pictures respectively of death on the gallows, and by the Indian punishment of being blown from guns, which hang on each side of it, serve as a sort of expanded repetition of the two crosses, with their load of guilt and expiation, the propinquity of which, perchance, Christ foresaw when, in answer to the proud maternal claim that John and James might occupy a place "on his right hand and on his left," he gave the sad answer,—" Ye know not what ye ask." This was the place they coveted,—the ignominy and torture of the Cross ;—this was that entrance on his kingdom to which they looked forward with eager, childish, earthly hope. Something of the spirit of that answer seems to us to breathe from the canvas of M. Verest- chagin. They knew not what they asked, those ignorant, childish disciples, and we know not what we strive to recall and depict. The event associated with glorious art, carved in all precious material—that which is recalled to us by the diamond cross, the silver or ivory crucifix—here it is set before us by an art which strives to bring home to us that which it truly was. The artist sets it between two other forms of penal death, as Christ was set between the two thieves. The gun just ready to blow forth its deadly yet merciful breath, beneath the sapphire sky of Hin- dostan,—the gallows in its dread eminence bearing its prey, seen through a snowy atmosphere, which seems to typify the chill
horror of that death of ignominy,—each seems to enforce the lesson of the Cross ; to reproduce it with varying atmosphere of irony or sympathy, in a form where, nnblinded by familiarity, by a long tradition of reverence, we may revive the emotions of those who saw it the portion of their Messiah. It is a touch of real genius thus to reproduce the two fellow-sufferers of the Crucified in modern guise. Whether there does not mingle with it a part of that protest against all penal justice which characterises the democracy of the hour, we know not ; if that be the artist's intention, we should say that he as much weakens the lesson he wishes to convey, as he opposes all that con- stitutes the strength of a nation's life. Christ was "numbered with the transgressors." If we say that there is no such thing as transgression, we take away all the meaning of that sentence. If in the whole world of national justice there be no room for the gallows, there is very little left to account for the agony of that Cross.
Nevertheless, we recognise the highest value in this new vision of the initial drama of Christianity. It seems to us a vision especially fitted for the democracy of our day. All in this picture is democratic. The crowd is plebeian, ordinary; the figures that most attract our eyes are those of two peasant women who have no dignity, no poetry but that of over- whelming suffering, whose like we may see in any crowd. They are lifted into prominence only by that eight of horror which opens for them a door into the Infinite. The mother who bad been told at the birth of that son that a sword should pierce through her own heart, cannot endure to see the sight she could not refrain from seeing ; she clenches her hands before her eyelids as though they were stabbed with a piercing dart; her anguish withdraws the attention of her companion even from the awful sight,—her emotion of passionate pity is not for the fainting victim on the Cross, but for the sufferer by her side. We feel that the whole meaning of the picture, as in the celebrated representation of Agamemnon at the sacrifice of Iphigeneia, lies in that face we cannot see. The central figure affects us only through this double reflection ; if we turn our eyes to it, the charm is broken ; the complete lack of any dignity or interest there appears to indicate an intentional renunciation of any attempt to represent what could not be seen by the eyes of hate and acorn that surround it on every side. We do not feel this the fatal blank which perhaps we cannot but suggest in naming it. The foreground is so crowded, the interest there is so prominent, so obtrusive, insists so vehemently on our attention, that we can hardly pass through that barrier to the figures beyond. We are shut in with that huddle of common, low faces and gestures,—we watch the fierce yet awestruck satisfaction of a Pharisee at the punishment of a dangerous heretic ; we speculate on the meaning with which a Jew points out the mother to unsympathetic curiosity ; we hear the gibes and taunts of the Jews ; we observe the various animals bearing their riders—camel, and horse, and ass—as if the brute creation were summoned as witnesses of the great tragedy ; and our eye, occupied with these, averts itself from the Cross. M. Vereatchagin has shown elsewhere that it is not from want of power that he depicts that figure without dignity. In his representation of the early home at Nazareth, he has surrounded the Christ with an atmosphere of lonely, sublime patience. Recalling a tradition preserved by Justin Martyr, be shows us the seated figure busy at fashioning a yoke for oxen, and infuses into the downcast countenance an expression of profound thought, which the spectator interprets through the symbolism of that handiwork. But in the Crucifixion the artist seems determined that we shall see only a crowd come to witness an execution, and a heart-broken mother, crushed by the unparalleled anguish that succeeds an unparalleled hope.
The change that has come over the world's ideal is strikingly brought home to the mind in the new representation of that Divine Mother who once absorbed the reverence paid to an Isis or a Ceres, and embodied the ideal dignity seen in a Minerta or a Juno. In her place is a poor woman who has known toil and hardship, who has suffered herself and seen her dear ones suffer. The attention of the painter has followed the attention of the statesman ; it is the suffering of " the masses " now on which we cannot choose but look with pity, or else with fear. The Virgin is lost in the crowd; we single her out with difficulty, though when once found we cannot again lose her. Whenever we have seen that mother's anguish delineated before, it has been some- thing tragic and sublime, the woe of the Goddess-mother watching the eclipse of a divine career. Here we have such a shutting-off
of the divine element as lets the human element emerge into distinctness ; and not only the human element, but that human element which especially belongs to the democracy. We lose all that is exceptional, we torn to that which is, or may be, absolutely common to every eon of man. We see nothing but failure, disgrace, agony, and innocence. We see all in that central figure of the world's life that can be recognised there by those who have exchanged the passion of reverence for the passion of pity.
How imperfect is such a representation of the world's great tragedy, we need not point oat. Nevertheless, we welcome it as a sign that the Son of Man has his own special message for the men of our own day. To see our Lord as the bon sane-culotte Jesus, to be reminded that he was a working man, that he lived with the poor, and died with the robber,—this is to catch one aspect of his meaning for the ages, and perhaps the only one that can be received by the democracy of the hour. M. Verest- chagin seems to have forgotten the scene where the Tempter showed all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, and promised, "All these will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me;"—the lament over Jerusalem, "How often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings, and ye would not ;"—the response to Pilate, "Thou sayest " [truly] "that I am a king." Bat all these may be kept in the background in order to put something forward which is the special meaning of that life and death for a particular age. We can afford to blot out all that made its glory to the past, and yet gather up a meaning that is enough for us. This picture, we should say, conveys more of the effect of the scene that is narrated in the Gospels and mentioned by Tacitus, on the eyes of those who beheld it, more takes us back to the first moment of despair, more revives the associations of ignominy, than any picture of that event that ever was painted. All others have been suffused by the light of the Resurrection. We feel here no hint of that hope. We realise only that Christ died on the cross between two criminals, that the last aspect taken by that life to the eyes of the world was one of profound, hopeless failure. Is it well to realise this, and nothing more ? Yes, for a moment. The lesson that pity for suffering lies at the core of humanity, is a prepara- tion for finding it divine; the sense of a claim in what is most common, is a preparation for belief in the direct relation of every man to God.
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