rn life, because they have listened to one of Chopin's nocturnes, or
handled Greek things, or read the story of the passion of some dead man
for some dead woman whose hair was like threads of fine gold, and whose
mouth was as a pomegranate. But the sympathy of the artistic temperament
is necessarily with what has found expression. In words or in colours,
in music or in marble, behind the painted masks of an AEschylean play, or
through some Sicilian shepherds' pierced and jointed reeds, the man and
his message must have been revealed.

To the artist, expression is the only mode under which he can conceive
life at all. To him what is dumb is dead. But to Christ it was not so.
With a width and wonder of imagination that fills one almost with awe, he
took the entire world of the inarticulate, the voiceless world of pain,
as his kingdom, and made of himself its eternal mouthpiece. Those of
whom I have spoken, who are dumb under oppression, and 'whose silence is
heard only of God,' he chose as his brothers. He sought to become eyes
to the blind, ears to the deaf, and a cry in the lips of those whose
tongues had been tied. His desire was to be to the myriads who had found
no utterance a very trumpet through which they might call to heaven. And
feeling, with the artistic nature of one to whom suffering and sorrow
were modes through which he could realise his conception of the
beautiful, that an idea is of no value till it becomes incarnate and is
made an image, he made of himself the image of the Man of Sorrows, and as
such has fascinated and dominated art as no Greek god ever succeeded in
doing.

For the Greek gods, in spite of the white and red of their fair fleet
limbs, were not really what they appeared to be. The curved brow of
Apollo was like the sun's disc crescent over a hill at dawn, and his feet
were as the wings of the morning, but he himself had been cruel to
Marsyas and had made Niobe childless. In the steel shields of Athena's
eyes there had been no pity for Arachne; the pomp and peacocks of Hera
were all that was really noble about her; and the Father of the Gods
himself had been too fond of the daughters of men. The two most deeply
suggestive figures of Greek Mythology were, for religion, Demeter, an
Earth Goddess, not one of the Olympians, and for art, Dionysus, the son
of a mortal woman to whom the moment of his birth had proved also the
moment of her death.

But Life itself from its lowliest and