In an unsparing humility, doubtless, He had willed to suffer the Passion with all the suffering permitted to the human senses, and, obeying an incomprehensible ordination, He, in the time of the scourging and of the blows and of the insults spat in His face, had put off divinity, nor had He resumed it when, after these preliminary mockeries, He entered upon the unspeakable torment of the unceasing agony.  Thus, dying like a thief, like a dog, basely, vilely, physically, He had sunk himself to the deepest depth of fallen humanity and had not spared Himself the last ignominy of putrefaction.

Never before had naturalism transfigured itself by such a conception and execution.  Never before had a painter so charnally envisaged divinity nor so brutally dipped his brush into the wounds and running sores and bleeding nail holes of the Saviour.  Gruenewald had passed all measure.  He was the most uncompromising of realists, but his morgue Redeemer, his sewer Deity, let the observer know that realism could be truly transcendent.  A divine light played about that ulcerated head, a superhuman expression illuminated the fermenting skin of the epileptic features.  This crucified corpse was a very God, and, without aureole, without nimbus, with none of the stock accoutrements except the blood-sprinkled crown of thorns, Jesus appeared in His celestial super-essence, between the stunned, grief-torn Virgin and a Saint John whose calcined eyes were beyond the shedding of tears.

These faces, by nature vulgar, were resplendent, transfigured with the expression of the sublime grief of those souls whose plaint is not heard.  Thief, pauper, and peasant had vanished and given place to supraterrestial creatures in the presence of their God.

Gruenewald was the most uncompromising of idealists.  Never had artist known such magnificent exaltation, none had ever so resolutely bounded from the summit of spiritual altitude to the rapt orb of heaven.  He had gone to the two extremes.  From the rankest weeds of the pit he had extracted the finest essence of charity, the mordant liquor of tears.  In this canvas was revealed the masterpiece of an art obeying the unopposable urge to render the tangible and the invisible, to make manifest the crying impurity of the flesh and to make sublime the infinite distress of the soul.

It was without its equivalent in literature.  A few pages of Anne Emmerich upon the Passion, though comparatively attenuated, approached this ideal of supernatural realism and of veridic and exsurrected life.  Perhaps, too, certain effusions of Ruysbroeck, seeming to spurt forth in twin jets of black and white flame, were worthy of comparison with the divine befoulment of Gruenewald.  Hardly, either.  Gruenewald’s masterpiece remained unique.  It was at the same time infinite and of earth earthy.

“But,” said Durtal to himself, rousing out of his revery, “if I am consistent I shall have to come around to the Catholicism of the Middle Ages, to mystic naturalism.  Ah, no!  I will not—­and yet, perhaps I may!”