most humble sphere produced one far
more marvellous than the mother of Proserpina or the son of Semele. Out
of the Carpenter's shop at Nazareth had come a personality infinitely
greater than any made by myth and legend, and one, strangely enough,
destined to reveal to the world the mystical meaning of wine and the real
beauties of the lilies of the field as none, either on Cithaeron or at
Enna, had ever done.

The song of Isaiah, 'He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows
and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him,' had
seemed to him to prefigure himself, and in him the prophecy was
fulfilled. We must not be afraid of such a phrase. Every single work of
art is the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every work of art is the
conversion of an idea into an image. Every single human being should be
the fulfilment of a prophecy: for every human being should be the
realisation of some ideal, either in the mind of God or in the mind of
man. Christ found the type and fixed it, and the dream of a Virgilian
poet, either at Jerusalem or at Babylon, became in the long progress of
the centuries incarnate in him for whom the world was waiting.

To me one of the things in history the most to be regretted is that the
Christ's own renaissance, which has produced the Cathedral at Chartres,
the Arthurian cycle of legends, the life of St. Francis of Assisi, the
art of Giotto, and Dante's _Divine Comedy_, was not allowed to develop on
its own lines, but was interrupted and spoiled by the dreary classical
Renaissance that gave us Petrarch, and Raphael's frescoes, and Palladian
architecture, and formal French tragedy, and St. Paul's Cathedral, and
Pope's poetry, and everything that is made from without and by dead
rules, and does not spring from within through some spirit informing it.
But wherever there is a romantic movement in art there somehow, and under
some form, is Christ, or the soul of Christ. He is in _Romeo and
Juliet_, in the _Winter's Tale_, in Provencal poetry, in the _Ancient
Mariner_, in _La Belle Dame sans merci_, and in Chatterton's _Ballad of
Charity_.

We owe to him the most diverse things and people. Hugo's _Les
Miserables_, Baudelaire's _Fleurs du Mal_, the note of pity in Russian
novels, Verlaine and Verlaine's poems, the stained glass and tapestries
and the quattro-cento work of Burne-Jones and Morris, belong to him no
less than the tower of Giotto, Lancelot and Guinevere, Tannhau