Poor Hilda, however, in her gloomiest moments, was never guilty of the
high treason suggested in the above remarks against her beloved and
honored Raphael. She had a faculty (which, fortunately for themselves,
pure women often have) of ignoring all moral blotches in a character
that won her admiration. She purified the objects; of her regard by the
mere act of turning such spotless eyes upon them.
Hilda's despondency, nevertheless, while it dulled her perceptions in
one respect, had deepened them in another; she saw beauty less vividly,
but felt truth, or the lack of it, more profoundly. She began to suspect
that some, at least, of her venerated painters, had left an inevitable
hollowness in their works, because, in the most renowned of them, they
essayed to express to the world what they had not in their own souls.
They deified their light and Wandering affections, and were continually
playing off the tremendous jest, alluded to above, of offering the
features of some venal beauty to be enshrined in the holiest places. A
deficiency of earnestness and absolute truth is generally discoverable
in Italian pictures, after the art had become consummate. When you
demand what is deepest, these painters have not wherewithal to respond.
They substituted a keen intellectual perception, and a marvellous knack
of external arrangement, instead of the live sympathy and sentiment
which should have been their inspiration. And hence it happens, that
shallow and worldly men are among the best critics of their works; a
taste for pictorial art is often no more than a polish upon the hard
enamel of an artificial character. Hilda had lavished her whole heart
upon it, and found (just as if she had lavished it upon a human idol)
that the greater part was thrown away.
For some of the earlier painters, however, she still retained much
of her former reverence. Fra Angelico, she felt, must have breathed a
humble aspiration between every two touches of his brush, in order to
have made the finished picture such a visible prayer as we behold it, in
the guise of a prim angel, or a saint without the human nature. Through
all these dusky centuries, his works may still help a struggling heart
to pray. Perugino was evidently a devout man; and the Virgin, therefore,
revealed herself to him in loftier and sweeter faces of celestial
womanhood, and yet with a kind of homeliness in their human mould, than
even the genius of Raphael could imagine. Sodoma, beyond a question,
both prayed and wept, while painting his fresco, at Siena, of Christ
bound to a pillar.
In her present need and hunger for a spiritual revelation, Hilda felt a
vast and weary longing to see this last-mentioned picture once again. It
is inexpressibly touching. So weary is the Saviour and utterly worn out
with agony, that his lips have fallen apart from mere exhaustion; his
eyes seem to be set; he tries to lean his head against the pillar, but
is kept from sinking down upon the ground only by the cords that
bind him. One of the most striking effects produced is the sense of
loneliness. You behold Christ deserted both in heaven and earth; that
despair is in him which wrung forth the saddest utterance man ever made,
"Why hast Thou forsaken me?" Even in this extremity, however, he is
still divine. The great and reverent painter has not suffered the Son of
God to be merely an object of pity, though depicting him in a state so
profoundly pitiful. He is rescued from it, we know not how,--by nothing
less than miracle,--by a celestial majesty and beauty, and some quality
of which these are the outward garniture. He is as much, and as visibly,
our Redeemer, there bound, there fainting, and bleeding from the
scourge, with the cross in view, as if he sat on his throne of glory in
the heavens! Sodoma, in this matchless picture, has done more towards
reconciling the incongruity of Divine Omnipotence and outraged,
suffering Humanity, combined in one person, than the theologians ever
did.