368 ST. MARK’S REST

very beautiful, but utterly careless of what is going on, and evidently no more fit to be a cardinal than a young calf would be. The stiffness of his white dress, standing up under his chin as if he had only put it on that day, draws special attention to him.

The one opposite to him also, without this piece of white dress, seems to be a mere man of the world. But the others have all grave and refined faces. That of the Pope himself is quite exquisite in its purity, simple-heartedness, and joyful wonder at the sight of the child kneeling at his feet, in whom he recognizes one whom he is himself to learn of, and follow.

205. The more I looked at this picture, the more I became wonderstruck at the way the faith of the Christian Church has been delivered to us through a series of fables, which, partly meant as such, are over-ruled into expressions of truth-but how much truth, it is only by our own virtuous life that we can know. Only remember always in criticizing such a picture, that it no more means to tell you as a fact* that St. Ursula led this long procession from the sea and knelt thus before the Pope, than Mantegna’s St. Sebastian means that the saint ever stood quietly and happily, stuck full of arrows.¹ It is as much a mythic symbol as the circles and crosses of the Carita;² but only Carpaccio carries out his symbol into delighted realization, so that it begins to be absurd to us in the perceived impossibility. But it only signifies the essential truth of joy in the Holy Ghost filling the whole body of the Christian Church with visible inspiration,³ sometimes in old men, sometimes in children; yet never breaking the laws of

* If it had been a fact, of course he would have liked it all the better, as in the picture of St. Stephen; but though only an idea, it must be realized to the full.

¹ [As in the picture at Vienna (see Plate 15 in Maud Cruttwell’s Mantegna).]

² [The reference is to the symbols carved outside the Accademia (the Scuola della Carità): see above, pp. 174-175.]

³ [On this subject, compare Bible of Amiens, ch. iii. § 48.]

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