GOOD FRIDAY AND EASTER.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XL, Issue 12242, 11 April 1903, Page 1 (Supplement)

GOOD FRIDAY AND EASTER.

[by touting a.] Laugh and your friends laugh with you, weep and., you weep alone," , says Ella Wheeler Wilcox, whose double-barrelled name indicates her American . nationality, and whose rhymings equally indicate the American^ philosophy. "American" being .modern," the quoted lines may account for the much greater hold that Eastertide has upon the modern man than lias Good Friday. We keep the festival with all our hearts, but the days of mourning and sorrow we hardly wot of. Yet even the very heathen have bewailed with tears and sadness, the time set apart, for .the annual remembrance of the mystery that the godlike must die so that man may live, that only, through supreme sacrifice can the world be redeemed and humanity made, whole. , , To tell the truth, the Anglo-Saxon is almost as callous to symb.ollism as the Chinaman to harmonious sounds. It is true that the Scottish branch alone lias set itself sternly against the symbolic, and that the English branch has nationally endeavoured to, preserve the Christian Year and to keep intact a modified form of the great Latin ritual. But when all is said and done, not one Englishman in a. thousand cares tuppence for th'e .Eastward Position, and not one in a hundred is appealed to by the sign of the cross, unless it is that ascribed to St. George of Cappadocia, which smells more of sulphur and saltpeter than of frankincense and myrrh. How hopelessly, the poor Englishman struggles with the symbolic he has unwittingly told us in the Pre-Raphael-ite movement. For was there ever a more hopeless, helpless, despairing manifestation of Philistinism than in the art which reached its high-water mark in Holman Hunt's "Shadow of Death?" Do you not- know the " Shadow of Death'?" It is very large, and took four years to complete, and is so carefully worked out that with a magnifying glass you can . see the grain on the shavings which have fallen from the antique plane of Jesus, the Jewish carpenter. In the corner is Mary, looking up, startled, from an examination of the gifts of the Wise Men from the East', and staring at the shadow which the setting sun throws from her aim-.stretching son. upon a tool rack.. It is truthful, .oh, so truthful. Every tool and every garment and every colour is of Palestine and Mary and- her Son are of Semetic race evidently, and would never be expected to work on (Saturday or to object to Sunday trams. And England said "how great! how solemn! how. instructive!" And Holmaiii Hunt, patient man, lpoked.sorrowfully down from the pinnacle of "Truth" upon the wretched .Continental painters, who had made Dutch and Italian and Spanish Madonnas and Cliilds, into which they had breathed the symbollism which the true-born Englishman knows nothing of. •• • We are a funny people, with this one redeeming grace that we know how to laugh at ourselves—and the foreigner who ventures to laugh with us had better look out. We look at a representation of the Madonna and Child, into which Latin love and faith and reverence has breathed inspiration, which typifies Maternity, .unshadowed by the physical impulses that in cur unregeuerate world make that estate fall short of the ideal, and Childhood untainted by the inherent weaknesses which, in after life make us what we become, and we have a vague feeling that the. whole thing is rather blasphemous and a more defined feeling that it is ridiculous to paint a buxom Italian, peasant, girl like that. We cannot help it. We do, not realise and cannot realise that the painter may and does perceive and typify to us that the Madonna is above time and place and race and colour, and that the Infant Christ is neither of Jerusalem nor of Samaria but of every city and country where the Christian creed is faithfully believed. Our Holman Hunt's set themselves to give us the true Virgin and the true Jesus, uut'i ing in four years to get the right " colour" and the correct " types." And we do not smile. We are rather proud of poor Holman Hunt, and quote approvingly that genius is the capacity for taking infinite pains.

In this matter of symbollism the Catholics are wiser than we are, just as in the matter of harmony we are wiser than the Chinese. We cannot help it. • Judah hud its once exaggerated love of the symbollic beaten out of it, but we never seem to have had any such affection to worry over. We .have been Goths from, the beginning, and rather proud of it. Even now we cannot see the, symbollic.in religion without an unreasoning But : instinctive craving -to . smash it with hammers or to salute it with a half-brick as something that confuses, bewilders, and misleads us. We do not know what it means to the Brazilian negro to see imaged 011 the cross a. Negro-Christ, suffering there for the world's sins,- or what it means to the, Latin to see symbollised in the Mass the same unceasing sacrifice. We cry with Holman Hunt: " Give us the truth, ■ nothing -but the truth!" ■ As though any man yet lived who could -answer the question with which the Christ dumbed Pilate nearly nineteen, hundred years ago. - • ■ ' • Nevertheless, speaking of'symbols, if we denounce and'refuse or doubtfully tolerate the graven and minted and ritualed symbol which we cannot - understand or . appreciate or sympathise with, we make amends by our passion for the worded symbols which 1 are in the manner born to a people whose language is their only rational form of expression. • We may find a supreme sense and a supreme use of the symbollic wording on the Christ-Sacrifice not' merely in the great Anglican hymns and in the passionate Evangelical exhortations and in the stern Calonistic arguments, but in the national poetry of our Anglo-Saxon race. Was it not the. Puritanic Lowell — the', double-barrelled James Russell Lowell—who wove the Divine Tragedy into a bugle call that rallied a nation to arms, and helped precipitate the greatest civil wai that lias ever solved a political problem? As thus: By the light of burning heretics Christ's bleeding - feet we track ". _ - Toil ins -up new Calvaries, ever with the cross that turns not back.. ... , Truth for ever on the scanoia. ' "Wrong for ever" on the Throne. ' - Yet the scaffold swavs the -Future, and, Deside the dim Unknown, . . ; Standeth God. within the shadow, keeping watch upon His own. - , , . And if you think it.over, you will, see that Lowell caught and drove home a conception of the lesson of Calvarv, of the eternal symbollism of,the Divine Tragedy, which painters and" sculptors and ritualists had- never managed to make ttos evident to AngloSaxon; men, - 'He. not only nerceived^ the endless-chain.of.'sacrifice 'for others, without which the sacrifice of Christ failed indeed, but- he used, .to convey ;that perception to others, not the- n,rt that depends upon marble or paint-or, ordered movement, but the art that .we. drink ;in our- mothers milk, the art whose stronghold lies in our matchless knglishr^pngiie.- c K . V ; ■v- - «.;?•% v \ And though we may not pay that national regard which would-be due and seemly to the accented anniversary of a<. DaT ,which_ is of all davs the most solemn and memorable, to a Christian people,. Good .Friday, and.though we make of Easter Monday-, a gorgeous holiday for- sheer .love .- of having a good-.time, the lesson of the day may not. therefore /be lost - For o« Lowell declared «. the scafMd -the future.•: Pilate ,* gone Cfesar.-has- none .to do, t him.: reverence, the cry. of the muezzin calls 'the Moslem to prayer in the-sacred city.. and- the arm f Britain upholds law where the th" hatred of was carried for shelter from tl) . Herod. but,.the Sermon on the Mount -st speaks to the world, M sacrifice on, Calvary is to-day "as it ever was. --