"I do not quite catch your meaning. Have we not an unerring standard to direct us here?"
"The letter of Scripture, no doubt?... Yes, you have that, but you have it surely without the spirit. Moreover, you have, so to say, dislocated yourselves from the family traditions of Christianity—from the memory of Christendom; and having lost this, and therewith all traditional intercourse with the past, you hopelessly seize upon our first written records, and in them alone have you any knowledge or faith. The living voice which from age to age has handed down every detail of the glory of Christ and His saints, is silent for you. You are strangers here, and these family records, which to us are so precious, are the objects of your suspicion, are even rejected by you as unworthy of belief; it is thus, I mean, that you are unable to seize all the speaking beauty depicted here."
"Would you have us then to accept as truth the wild fantasies of individual painters?... It is far too much."
"Most assuredly not; that would, I should say, be to fall into another snare like the very one which has already caught you. When I said that you can hardly seize all the beauty of il Beato's poem on our Lord, my meaning was, that having rejected the recognised sources of sacred Tradition, you can receive nothing but what is written; although, by the way, even there it is said that 'there are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they were written the whole world itself could not contain the books that should be written.' Think for a moment: if you so confine the works of art to the text of Scripture, how greatly you limit and narrow their field, and how many great pictures, which through ages Christendom has honoured as its family heirlooms, you will be forced to condemn as false. You object to the touching scene of Saint Veronica—to this exquisite painting of Jesus carrying His Cross and meeting His blessed Mother on her way to Calvary. Scripture does not say that He did meet her; therefore, to you it appears to be a deviation from truth; but these facts are household words in Christendom, resting upon the highest of all moral certainty—Christian Tradition. The spoken testimony of His chosen companions and the dogmas of our faith, in harmony with the loving memory of Christendom, hand down these family records to us with holy and unerring care. You would hardly believe how jealous we are of any mutilation of them. Numberless, however, would be the great pictures which must thus seem to you to be false or unintelligible, whilst to us they are rich in truth and supernatural meaning. I love Saint Paul's cry, 'Be ye enlarged!' You know not how much you lose even of Scripture itself;—the very parables of our Lord, which, you will remember, are not so to those 'to whom it is given to know,' are parables indeed, or at very best but beautiful histories, to you."
"You are too hard upon us. I grant you that the principle of limitation, in our sense, fully admitted and carried into practice, would go far to strip our galleries of their treasures, and leave us without connection with the past. I am a sincere lover of art, and I am old enough to have the courage to confess to you that the consequences of the proper application of such a principle terrify me. I frankly acknowledge that it would hardly leave a monument standing of more than a few centuries old, and how few, I fear even to say. I comfort myself by the hope that the great storm has already past, and there I rest, with the principle still in my belief, that you must not venture into the work of God—Scripture itself,—there all is holy, because all is Divine. The parables are far more to us—believe me—than beautiful histories."
"Let me explain what I have expressed with, I hope, pardonable enthusiasm. It is not a question, as you seem to suppose, of criticising the divine work, but of appreciating it in a greater or lesser degree. You will grant us, I think, the larger comprehension of what was intended to be, to some, simply parables or riddles. In the parable of the prodigal son, for instance, we learn how God receives repentant sinners. The young man leaves his father's house, and, in a far country, wastes his substance in wrong-doing; he soon feels the want of the spiritual life which he has squandered away, and of which there is a famine in that country. Still he cleaves to one of the chief citizens there, who sends him to feed swine; but his hunger is unappeased. At last he resolves to return to his father and confess his error and his sin. His father runs to meet him while he is yet a great way off, and falls upon his neck and kisses him. Then He says to His servants, 'Clothe him quickly with the robe of innocence, put the ring of adoption upon his finger, the shoes of safe direction upon his feet, offer the Holy Sacrifice, and feed him with the food of life, for this my son was dead and is alive again, he was lost and is found!' Here, we have Dogma, Tradition, and Scripture, harmoniously illustrating this, as indeed all the other parables. To us they are neither riddles nor beautiful histories, but sublime declarations and proofs of the divinity of our faith, since to us—by our Divine teaching—'it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God.' Now how would one of your painters portray this? Were he merely to represent it as Scripture relates it, it would be simply a riddle; or did he attempt a higher meaning, there would be evident discrepancy between the truth of Scripture and your belief and practice. So that should he aim at anything beyond drawing graceful figures and giving dramatic effect to his picture, he would be forced to abandon the subject altogether, or turn to us for its true illustration. So it is, and it is a very momentous fact that no country fallen away from Christian unity ever produces real artists; it may even outstrip all the rest in material discoveries and progress—'the children of this world,' you know, 'are wiser in their generation than the children of light'—but it has lost the Divine power of creation. Like Mirabeau to Barnave, we may indeed say to each of them, 'There is no divinity in thee!' You may find painters who can copy a dog to a hair, a blade of grass, a battle, anything that the eye of man can see and measure; but you will never find an Angelico where 'the evidence, the light, the splendour of unity' is no longer intact."
"I have listened to you with all the admiration of an artist, although with some patience, since I cannot admit your starting-point—namely, that you have an unerring source of tradition and knowledge. There are few subjects, however, in which I feel so wide an interest: so let us return to it again on another occasion. We have forgotten time: it is already one o'clock, and we ought to be with the Padre in half-an-hour, as that is the best time for seeing the convent; and I suppose you would not be willing to leave this gallery without having a look at the two pictures which you said you would keep for a 'bonne bouche?'"
"Certainly not. I must have a look, as you say—if nothing more. Let us go to them."
If Mr. Barkley was pleased with the "Last Judgment," which closes the "Life of our Lord," what must have been his delight with that later one, and with the "Descent from the Cross?"