Whom are we all praising? It is Some One or Something that has been praised for all time, and that will be praised for ever. Any narrow conception is necessarily wrong. It does not matter that many a worshipper has a low or superstitious idea of the God he worships. We are all comparatively narrow—even the widest-eyed of us. It does not matter that many deny intellectually that they are praising at all. We at least know by what we have heard, by bursts of universal praising borne in upon our ears, that all there is, is praising. That is one of the reasons why frescoes touch the soul, they remind us of a truth we know in ourselves that the face of every human being, good or evil, is turned towards God, as the flowers turn their blossoms to the sun.
Russia has her modern frescoes, for she has rediscovered the art of painting on wet plaster. She has also her ancient Byzantine frescoes—the expression of the early Church. There is something in them all that expresses the idea of choric praise, “the same yesterday, to-day and for ever.”
Rozanof very suggestively remarks that archaeologists are poets, in that they turn their backs on present-day reality and go to live with a time a thousand or two thousand years ago, holding that time to be as great a reality as the present day. They realise that the Past lives. We make a mistake when we talk of the dead past. It is a great religious truth that all that has ever lived lives for ever.
We are provincial dwellers in Time; we are, few of us, explorers, and many who do explore Time, explore it as moles do a field. We do not scan the vast stretch of Time from aloft. We are patient plodders, crawling on hands and knees and peering and poring over little plots of eternity. Few, very few of us, have the poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling. But if we had the poet’s eye and the poet’s point of view we could see the time-that-was existent now, we could see it glowing and breathing and singing. We could see every event and circumstance in history—in living action, discharging itself and yet not getting discharged, rampant.
Keats, looking at the bas-relief on a Grecian urn, had the true poetic vision. He realised the ever-living quality of a moment of life poised in a picture. So he looked at the living groups on the ancient urn and sang:—
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
He looked at the Greek shepherds with their pipes and heard the liquid melody float away, and he cried:—
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard