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The unsatisfied need for the supernatural was
driving people, in default of something loftier, to spiritism and the
occult.
Now his thoughts carried him away from his dissatisfaction with
literature to the satisfaction he had found in another art, in painting. His
ideal was completely realized by the Primitives. These men, in Italy,
Germany, and especially in Flanders, had manifested the amplitude and
purity of vision which are the property of saintliness. In authentic and
patiently accurate settings they pictured beings whose postures were
caught from life itself, and the illusion was compelling and sure. From
these heads, common enough, many of them, and these physiognomies,
often ugly but powerfully evocative, emanated celestial joy or acute
anguish, spiritual calm or turmoil. The effect was of matter transformed,
by being distended or compressed, to afford an escape from the senses
into remote infinity.
Durtal's introduction to this naturalism had come as a revelation the
year before, although he had not then been so weary as now of fin de
siècle silliness. In Germany, before a Crucifixion by Matthæus
Grünewald, he had found what he was seeking.
He shuddered in his armchair and closed his eyes as if in pain. With
extraordinary lucidity he revisualized the picture, and the cry of
admiration wrung from him when he had entered the little room of the
Cassel museum was reechoing in his mind as here, in his study, the
Christ rose before him, formidable, on a rude cross of barky wood, the
arm an untrimmed branch bending like a bow under the weight of the
body.
This branch seemed about to spring back and mercifully hurl afar from
our cruel, sinful world the suffering flesh held to earth by the enormous
spike piercing the feet. Dislocated, almost ripped out of their sockets,
the arms of the Christ seemed trammelled by the knotty cords of the
straining muscles. The laboured tendons of the armpits seemed ready to
snap. The fingers, wide apart, were contorted in an arrested gesture in
which were supplication and reproach but also benediction. The

trembling thighs were greasy with sweat. The ribs were like staves, or
like the bars of a cage, the flesh swollen, blue, mottled with flea-bites,
specked as with pin-pricks by spines broken off from the rods of the
scourging and now festering beneath the skin where they had
penetrated.
Purulence was at hand. The fluvial wound in the side dripped thickly,
inundating the thigh with blood that was like congealing mulberry juice.
Milky pus, which yet was somewhat reddish, something like the colour
of grey Moselle, oozed from the chest and ran down over the abdomen
and the loin cloth. The knees had been forced together and the rotulæ
touched, but the lower legs were held wide apart, though the feet were
placed one on top of the other. These, beginning to putrefy, were
turning green beneath a river of blood. Spongy and blistered, they were
horrible, the flesh tumefied, swollen over the head of the spike, and the
gripping toes, with the horny blue nails, contradicted the imploring
gesture of the hands, turning that benediction into a curse; and as the
hands pointed heavenward, so the feet seemed to cling to earth, to that
ochre ground, ferruginous like the purple soil of Thuringia.
Above this eruptive cadaver, the head, tumultuous, enormous, encircled
by a disordered crown of thorns, hung down lifeless. One lacklustre eye
half opened as a shudder of terror or of sorrow traversed the expiring
figure. The face was furrowed, the brow seamed, the cheeks blanched;
all the drooping features wept, while the mouth, unnerved, its under
jaw racked by tetanic contractions, laughed atrociously.
The torture had been terrific, and the agony had frightened the mocking
executioners into flight.
Against a dark blue night-sky the cross seemed to bow down, almost to
touch the ground with its tip, while two figures, one on each side, kept
watch over the Christ. One was the Virgin, wearing a hood the colour
of mucous blood over a robe of wan blue. Her face was pale and
swollen with weeping, and she stood rigid, as one who buries his
fingernails deep into his palms and sobs. The other figure was that of
Saint John, like a gipsy or sunburnt Swabian peasant, very tall, his
beard matted and tangled, his robe of a scarlet stuff cut in wide strips

like slabs of bark. His mantle was a chamois yellow; the lining, caught
up at the sleeves, showed a feverish yellow as of unripe lemons. Spent
with weeping, but possessed of more endurance than Mary, who was
yet erect but broken and exhausted, he had joined his hands and in an
access of outraged loyalty had drawn himself up before the corpse,
which he contemplated with his red and smoky eyes while