Page:The way of Martha and the way of Mary (1915).djvu/104

82 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.

The roll of history itself is a long strip of fresco. It is only too narrow a strip. It is in the breadth of history that the beauty lies. If we could only