The Way of Martha and the Way of MaryGraham, Stephen
Religion
The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary
Graham, Stephen
National characteristics, Russian; Russia -- Religion
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss
... yet do not grieve;
She cannot fade ...
For ever wilt thou love and she be fair!
He sees the trees whose leaves will never fall, and the spring which is
an eternal spring.
A joy of art and of the eyes is the poising of a moment thus, and the
showing in a sculptured relief or a picture or a poem all that was
happening in the moment—the eternal life that the moment holds, the
moment which we think passes, but which in truth never passes but ever
is. We move past the landscape of Time and deceive ourselves that it is
Time which passes us. It is we who pass by Time. The Time we have passed
through remains. We can keep it in our view. We must go high into the
heaven to see All-Time—nearer to God, nearer to the central sun of
glory.
It is to take cognisance of the infinite breadth of Time, a richer
knowledge than that on which we pride ourselves, knowledge of the length
of Time. There is nothing more touching that one man can say to another
than the recounting of all that is happening at one and the same time in
the Universe. But speech and writing have one great lack. It is that we
must spend time to write and we must spend time to read. We must write
one word after another, must read one word after another. But, joy of
the artist! in a picture he can give an immediate impression of many
things happening at the same time. The gazer at beauty has not to follow
laboriously word by word and line by line and page by page to find out
what all was happening at one and the same time; he sees it at once and
takes it to himself at once in the painting. Especially in the fresco.
He sees the breadth of Time shown in the breadth of the picture, and the
multiplicity and variety in it.
So the sculptures and frescoes of the church touch the human soul. They
are fragments of the breadth of Time, fragments of the pictures which
Man writes on the breadth and surface of Time, fragments of the mystical
“Garment” of which Goethe speaks. They are fragments of universal
pictures, fragments of the picture of the Universe grouped about the
feet of God. They have a choric and processional aspect. No matter what
the figures in the fresco seem to be doing, they have the aspect of
praising God, of being part of a choric universe.
Have we not noticed this in Nature, of which Art is the mirror? A dead
man lying in an open coffin is like a piece of a fresco framed. The face
of a dead man is a picture of a man going through a great gate. It has a
grand processional look.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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