doctrinal treatise on the "Book of Jonah" by the Archbishop of Canterbury cannot compare with the sensuous studies of these esthetes for bringing alive in my imagination the heat and fragrance of the Palestinian spring.
Gabriel Miro's "Figures of the Passion of Our Lord," though not published in Spain till 1917, and only now translated into English, belongs in spirit to the period of fervently esthetic interpretation, and is more impressive as a work of creative imagination than as a work of piety. Its author is of Jesuit upbringing, enamored of landscape and mountain scenery, and temperamentally enriched with the æsthetic melancholy of the later romanticists. His imagination is passionate, colorful, sensuous, with a touch of Latin morbidezza.
In painting the scenes and telling the stories of the Passion, he seizes, like Flaubert, in his Carthaginian picture, upon all its exotic possibilities, its luxury, its cruelty—like the merciless painters of the early Renaissance, he counts the blood drops under the lash. He revels in the Herodian pomp and the sumptuous softness of the Roman procurator's palace and in the subtle degeneration of his mind. Not in isolation and in little companies does he see the protagonist moving toward his doom, but with his pitiful broken humanity poignant against the riotous springtime, drenched in odors of tropical fruits, winding toward Calvary against the buzz and brilliance of Oriental bazaars, and all the scent and hum and murmur of the Roman East.
As a specimen of his quality, consider this passage in which Claudia, the wife of Pilate, her hips partially thrust forward from the bedstead of marble and lemonwood, tells of her warning dream:
