a red paint of blood, which is sensational.
Beyond the Brenner, I have only seen vulgar or sensational crucifixes.
There are great gashes on the breast and the knees of the Christ-figure,
and the scarlet flows out and trickles down, till the crucified body has
become a ghastly striped thing of red and white, just a sickly thing of
striped red.
They paint the rocks at the corners of the tracks, among the mountains;
a blue and white ring for the road to Ginzling, a red smear for the way
to St Jakob. So one follows the blue and white ring, or the three
stripes of blue and white, or the red smear, as the case may be. And the
red on the rocks, the dabs of red paint, are of just the same colour as
the red upon the crucifixes; so that the red upon the crucifixes is
paint, and the signs on the rocks are sensational, like blood.
I remember the little brooding Christ of the Isar, in his little cloak
of red flannel and his crown of gilded thorns, and he remains real and
dear to me, among all this violence of representation.
'_Couvre-toi de gloire, Tartarin--couvre-toi de flanelle._' Why should
it please me so that his cloak is of red flannel?
In a valley near St Jakob, just over the ridge, a long way from the
railway, there is a very big, important shrine by the roadside. It is a
chapel built in the baroque manner, florid pink and cream outside, with
opulent small arches. And inside is the most startling sensational
Christus I have ever seen. He is a big, powerful man, seated after the
crucifixion, perhaps after the resurrection, sitting by the grave. He
sits sideways, as if the extremity were over, finished, the agitation
done with, only the result of the experience remaining. There is some
blood on his powerful, naked, defeated body, that sits rather hulked.
But it is the face which is so terrifying. It is slightly turned over
the hulked, crucified shoulder, to look. And the look of this face, of
which the body has been killed, is beyond all expectation horrible. The
eyes look at one, yet have no seeing in them, they seem to see only
their own blood. For they are bloodshot till the whites are scarlet, the
iris is purpled. These red, bloody eyes with their stained pupils,
glancing awfully at all who enter the shrine, looking as if to see
through the blood of the late brutal death, are terrible. The naked,
strong body has known death, and sits in utter dejection, finished,
hulked, a weight of shame. And what remains of life is in the face,
whose expression is sinister and gruesome, like that of an unrelenting
criminal violated by torture. The criminal look of misery and hatred on
the fixed, violated face and in the bloodshot eyes is almost impossible.
He is conquered, beaten, broken, his body is a mass of torture, an
unthinkable shame. Yet his will remains obstinate and ugly, integral
with utter hatred.
It is a great shock to find this figure sitting in a handsome, baroque,
pink-washed shrine in one of those Alpine valleys which to our thinking
are all flowers and romance, like the picture in the Tate Gallery.
'Spring in the Austrian Tyrol' is to our minds a vision of pristine
loveliness. It contains also this Christ of the heavy body defiled by
torture and death, the strong, virile life overcome by physical
violence, the eyes still looking back bloodshot in consummate hate
and misery.
The shrine was well kept and evidently much used. It was hung with
ex-voto limbs and with many gifts. It was a centre of worship, of a sort
of almost obscene worship. Afterwards the black pine-trees and the river
of that valley seemed unclean, as if an unclean spirit lived there. The
very flowers seemed unnatural, and the white gleam on the mountain-tops
was a glisten of supreme, cynical horror.
After this, in the populous valleys, all the crucifixes were more or
less tainted and vulgar. Only high up, where the crucifix becomes
smaller and smaller, is there left any of the old beauty and religion.
Higher and higher, the monument becomes smaller and smaller, till in the
<<BackPagesTo menuForward>>