ember saying once to Andre Gide,
as we sat together in some Paris _cafe_, that while meta-physics had but
little real interest for me, and morality absolutely none, there was
nothing that either Plato or Christ had said that could not be
transferred immediately into the sphere of Art and there find its
complete fulfilment.

Nor is it merely that we can discern in Christ that close union of
personality with perfection which forms the real distinction between the
classical and romantic movement in life, but the very basis of his nature
was the same as that of the nature of the artist--an intense and
flamelike imagination. He realised in the entire sphere of human
relations that imaginative sympathy which in the sphere of Art is the
sole secret of creation. He understood the leprosy of the leper, the
darkness of the blind, the fierce misery of those who live for pleasure,
the strange poverty of the rich. Some one wrote to me in trouble, 'When
you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting.' How remote was
the writer from what Matthew Arnold calls 'the Secret of Jesus.' Either
would have taught him that whatever happens to another happens to
oneself, and if you want an inscription to read at dawn and at
night-time, and for pleasure or for pain, write up on the walls of your
house in letters for the sun to gild and the moon to silver, 'Whatever
happens to oneself happens to another.'

Christ's place indeed is with the poets. His whole conception of
Humanity sprang right out of the imagination and can only be realised by
it. What God was to the pantheist, man was to Him. He was the first to
conceive the divided races as a unity. Before his time there had been
gods and men, and, feeling through the mysticism of sympathy that in
himself each had been made incarnate, he calls himself the Son of the one
or the Son of the other, according to his mood. More than any one else
in history he wakes in us that temper of wonder to which romance always
appeals. There is still something to me almost incredible in the idea of
a young Galilean peasant imagining that he could bear on his own
shoulders the burden of the entire world; all that had already been done
and suffered, and all that was yet to be done and suffered: the sins of
Nero, of Caesar Borgia, of Alexander VI., and of him who was Emperor of
Rome and Priest of the Sun: the sufferings of those whose names are
legion and whose dwelling is among the tombs: oppresse