English Paper Read and Answer Six Questions

Crucifix Across the Mountains -- from DH Lawrence’s Twilight in Italy (1916)

The imperial road to Italy goes from Munich across the Tyrol, through Innsbruck and

Bozen to Verona, over the mountains. Here the great processions passed as the emperors

went South, or came home again from rosy Italy to their own Germany.

And how much has that old imperial vanity clung to the German soul? Did not the

German kings inherit the empire of bygone Rome? It was not a very real empire, perhaps,

but the sound was high and splendid.

Maybe a certain Groessenwahn is inherent in the German nature. If only nations would

realize that they have certain natural characteristics, if only they could understand and

agree to each other's particular nature, how much simpler it would all be.

The imperial procession no longer crosses the mountains, going South. That is almost

forgotten, the road has almost passed out of mind. But still it is there, and its signs are

standing.

The crucifixes are there, not mere attributes of the road, yet still having something to do

with it. The imperial processions, blessed by the Pope and accompanied by the great

bishops, must have planted the holy idol like a new plant among the mountains, there

where it multiplied and grew according to the soil, and the race that received it.

As one goes among the Bavarian uplands and foothills, soon one realizes here is another

land, a strange religion. It is a strange country, remote, out of contact. Perhaps it belongs

to the forgotten, imperial processions.

Coming along the clear, open roads that lead to the mountains, one scarcely notices the

crucifixes and the shrines. Perhaps one's interest is dead. The crucifix itself is nothing, a

factory-made piece of sentimentalism. The soul ignores it.

But gradually, one after another looming shadowily under their hoods, the crucifixes

seem to create a new atmosphere over the whole of the countryside, a darkness, a weight

in the air that is so unnaturally bright and rare with the reflection from the snows above, a

darkness hovering just over the earth. So rare and unearthly the light is, from the

mountains, full of strange radiance. Then every now and again recurs the crucifix, at the

turning of an open, grassy road, holding a shadow and a mystery under its pointed hood.

I was startled into consciousness one evening, going alone over a marshy place at the foot

of the mountains, when the sky was pale and unearthly, invisible, and the hills were

nearly black. At a meeting of the tracks was a crucifix, and between the feet of the Christ

a handful of withered poppies. It was the poppies I saw, then the Christ.

It was an old shrine, the wood-sculpture of a Bavarian peasant. The Christ was a peasant

of the foot of the Alps. He had broad cheekbones and sturdy limbs. His plain,

rudimentary face stared fixedly at the hills, his neck was stiffened, as if in resistance to

the fact of the nails and the cross, which he could not escape. It was a man nailed down in

spirit, but set stubbornly against the bondage and the disgrace. He was a man of middle

age, plain, crude, with some of the meanness of the peasant, but also with a kind of

dogged nobility that does not yield its soul to the circumstance. Plain, almost blank in his

soul, the middle-aged peasant of the crucifix resisted unmoving the misery of his

position. He did not yield. His soul was set, his will was fixed. He was himself, let his

circumstances be what they would, his life fixed down.

Across the marsh was a tiny square of orange-coloured light, from the farm-house with

the low, spreading roof. I remembered how the man and his wife and the children worked

on till dark, silent and intent, carrying the hay in their arms out of the streaming

thunder-rain into the shed, working silent in the soaking rain.

The body bent forward towards the earth, closing round on itself; the arms clasped full of

hay, clasped round the hay that presses soft and close to the breast and the body, that

pricks heat into the arms and the skin of the breast, and fills the lungs with the sleepy

scent of dried herbs: the rain that falls heavily and wets the shoulders, so that the shirt

clings to the hot, firm skin and the rain comes with heavy, pleasant coldness on the active

flesh, running in a trickle down towards the loins, secretly; this is the peasant, this hot

welter of physical sensation. And it is all intoxicating. It is intoxicating almost like a

soporific, like a sensuous drug, to gather the burden to one's body in the rain, to stumble

across the living grass to the shed, to relieve one's arms of the weight, to throw down the

hay on to the heap, to feel light and free in the dry shed, then to return again into the chill,

hard rain, to stoop again under the rain, and rise to return again with the burden.

It is this, this endless heat and rousedness of physical sensation which keeps the body full

and potent, and flushes the mind with a blood heat, a blood sleep. And this sleep, this

heat of physical experience, becomes at length a bondage, at last a crucifixion. It is the

life and the fulfilment of the peasant, this flow of sensuous experience. But at last it

drives him almost mad, because he cannot escape.

For overhead there is always the strange radiance of the mountains, there is the mystery

of the icy river rushing through its pink shoals into the darkness of the pine-woods, there

is always the faint tang of ice on the air, and the rush of hoarse-sounding water.

And the ice and the upper radiance of snow are brilliant with timeless immunity from the

flux and the warmth of life. Overhead they transcend all life, all the soft, moist fire of the

blood. So that a man must needs live under the radiance of his own negation.

There is a strange, clear beauty of form about the men of the Bavarian highlands, about

both men and women. They are large and clear and handsome in form, with blue eyes

very keen, the pupil small, tightened, the iris keen, like sharp light shining on blue ice.

Their large, full-moulded limbs and erect bodies are distinct, separate, as if they were

perfectly chiselled out of the stuff of life, static, cut off. Where they are everything is set

back, as in a clear frosty air.

Their beauty is almost this, this strange, clean-cut isolation, as if each one of them would

isolate himself still further and for ever from the rest of his fellows.

Yet they are convivial, they are almost the only race with the souls of artists. Still they act

the mystery plays with instinctive fullness of interpretation, they sing strangely in the

mountain fields, they love make-belief and mummery, their processions and religious

festivals are profoundly impressive, solemn, and rapt.

It is a race that moves on the poles of mystic sensual delight. Every gesture is a gesture

from the blood, every expression is a symbolic utterance.

For learning there is sensuous experience, for thought there is myth and drama and

dancing and singing. Everything is of the blood, of the senses. There is no mind. The

mind is a suffusion of physical heat, it is not separated, it is kept submerged.

At the same time, always, overhead, there is the eternal, negative radiance of the snows.

Beneath is life, the hot jet of the blood playing elaborately. But above is the radiance of

changeless not-being. And life passes away into this changeless radiance. Summer and

the prolific blue-and-white flowering of the earth goes by, with the labour and the ecstasy

of man, disappears, and is gone into brilliance that hovers overhead, the radiant cold

which waits to receive back again all that which has passed for the moment into being.

The issue is too much revealed. It leaves the peasant no choice. The fate gleams

transcendent above him, the brightness of eternal, unthinkable not-being. And this our

life, this admixture of labour and of warm experience in the flesh, all the time it is

steaming up to the changeless brilliance above, the light of the everlasting snows. This is

the eternal issue.

Whether it is singing or dancing or play-acting or physical transport of love, or

vengeance or cruelty, or whether it is work or sorrow or religion, the issue is always the

same at last, into the radiant negation of eternity. Hence the beauty and completeness, the

finality of the highland peasant. His figure, his limbs, his face, his motion, it is all formed

in beauty, and it is all completed. There is no flux nor hope nor becoming, all is, once and

for all. The issue is eternal, timeless, and changeless. All being and all passing away is

part of the issue, which is eternal and changeless. Therefore there is no becoming and no

passing away. Everything is, now and for ever. Hence the strange beauty and finality and

isolation of the Bavarian peasant.

It is plain in the crucifixes. Here is the essence rendered in sculpture of wood. The face is

blank and stiff, almost expressionless. One realizes with a start how unchanging and

conventionalized is the face of the living man and woman of these parts, handsome, but

motionless as pure form. There is also an underlying meanness, secretive, cruel. It is all

part of the beauty, the pure, plastic beauty. The body also of the Christus is stiff and

conventionalized, yet curiously beautiful in proportion, and in the static tension which

makes it unified into one clear thing. There is no movement, no possible movement. The

being is fixed, finally. The whole body is locked in one knowledge, beautiful, complete.

It is one with the nails. Not that it is languishing or dead. It is stubborn, knowing its own

undeniable being, sure of the absolute reality of the sensuous experience. Though he is

nailed down upon an irrevocable fate, yet, within that fate he has the power and the

delight of all sensuous experience. So he accepts the fate and the mystic delight of the

senses with one will, he is complete and final. His sensuous experience is supreme, a

consummation of life and death at once.

It is the same at all times, whether it is moving with the scythe on the hill-slopes, or

hewing the timber, or steering the raft down the river which is all effervescent with ice;

whether it is drinking in the Gasthaus, or making love, or playing some mummer's part,

or hating steadily and cruelly, or whether it is kneeling in spellbound subjection in the

incense-filled church, or walking in the strange, dark, subject-procession to bless the

fields, or cutting the young birch-trees for the feast of Frohenleichnam, it is always the

same, the dark, powerful mystic, sensuous experience is the whole of him, he is mindless

and bound within the absoluteness of the issue, the unchangeability of the great icy

not-being which holds good for ever, and is supreme.

Passing further away, towards Austria, travelling up the Isar, till the stream becomes

smaller and whiter and the air is colder, the full glamour of the northern hills, which are

so marvellously luminous and gleaming with flowers, wanes and gives way to a darkness,

a sense of ominousness. Up there I saw another little Christ, who seemed the very soul of

the place. The road went beside the river, that was seething with snowy ice-bubbles,

under the rocks and the high, wolf-like pine-trees, between the pinkish shoals. The air

was cold and hard and high, everything was cold and separate. And in a little glass case

beside the road sat a small, hewn Christ, the head resting on the hand; and he meditates,

half-wearily, doggedly, the eyebrows lifted in strange abstraction, the elbow resting on

the knee. Detached, he sits and dreams and broods, wearing his little golden crown of

thorns, and his little cloak of red flannel that some peasant woman has stitched for him.

No doubt he still sits there, the small, blank-faced Christ in the cloak of red flannel,

dreaming, brooding, enduring, persisting. There is a wistfulness about him, as if he knew

that the whole of things was too much for him. There was no solution, either, in death.

Death did not give the answer to the soul's anxiety. That which is, is. It does not cease to

be when it is cut. Death cannot create nor destroy. What is, is.

The little brooding Christ knows this. What is he brooding, then? His static patience and

endurance is wistful. What is it that he secretly yearns for, amid all the placidity of fate?

'To be, or not to be,' this may be the question, but is it not a question for death to answer.

It is not a question of living or not-living. It is a question of being--to be or not to be. To

persist or not to persist, that is not the question; neither is it to endure or not to endure.

The issue, is it eternal not-being? If not, what, then, is being? For overhead the eternal

radiance of the snow gleams unfailing, it receives the efflorescence of all life and is

unchanged, the issue is bright and immortal, the snowy not-being. What, then, is being?

As one draws nearer to the turning-point of the Alps, towards the culmination and the

southern slope, the influence of the educated world is felt once more. Bavaria is remote in

spirit, as yet unattached. Its crucifixes are old and grey and abstract, small like the kernel

of the truth. Further into Austria they become new, they are painted white, they are

larger, more obtrusive. They are the expressions of a later, newer phase, more

introspective and self-conscious. But still they are genuine expressions of the people's

soul.

Often one can distinguish the work of a particular artist here and there in a district. In the

Zemm valley, in the heart of the Tyrol, behind Innsbruck, there are five or six crucifixes

by one sculptor. He is no longer a peasant working out an idea, conveying a dogma. He is

an artist, trained and conscious, probably working in Vienna. He is consciously trying to

convey a feeling, he is no longer striving awkwardly to render a truth, a religious fact.

The chief of his crucifixes stands deep in the Klamm, in the dank gorge where it is

always half-night. The road runs under the rock and the trees, half-way up the one side of

the pass. Below, the stream rushes ceaselessly, embroiled among great stones, making an

endless loud noise. The rock face opposite rises high overhead, with the sky far up. So

that one is walking in a half-night, an underworld. And just below the path, where the

pack-horses go climbing to the remote, infolded villages, in the cold gloom of the pass

hangs the large, pale Christ. He is larger than life-size. He has fallen forward, just dead,

and the weight of the full-grown, mature body hangs on the nails of the hands. So the

dead, heavy body drops forward, sags, as if it would tear away and fall under its own

weight.

It is the end. The face is barren with a dead expression of weariness, and brutalized with

pain and bitterness. The rather ugly, passionate mouth is set for ever in the

disillusionment of death. Death is the complete disillusionment, set like a seal over the

whole body and being, over the suffering and weariness and the bodily passion.

The pass is gloomy and damp, the water roars unceasingly, till it is almost like a constant

pain. The driver of the pack-horses, as he comes up the narrow path in the side of the

gorge, cringes his sturdy cheerfulness as if to obliterate himself, drawing near to the

large, pale Christ, and he takes his hat off as he passes, though he does not look up, but

keeps his face averted from the crucifix. He hurries by in the gloom, climbing the steep

path after his horses, and the large white Christ hangs extended above.

The driver of the pack-horses is afraid. The fear is always there in him, in spite of his

sturdy, healthy robustness. His soul is not sturdy. It is blenched and whitened with fear.

The mountains are dark overhead, the water roars in the gloom below. His heart is ground

between the mill-stones of dread. When he passes the extended body of the dead Christ

he takes off his hat to the Lord of Death. Christ is the Deathly One, He is Death

incarnate.

And the driver of the pack-horses acknowledges this deathly Christ as supreme Lord. The

mountain peasant seems grounded upon fear, the fear of death, of physical death. Beyond

this he knows nothing. His supreme sensation is in physical pain, and in its culmination.

His great climax, his consummation, is death. Therefore he worships it, bows down

before it, and is fascinated by it all the while. It is his fulfilment, death, and his approach

to fulfilment is through physical pain.

And so these monuments to physical death are found everywhere in the valleys. By the

same hand that carved the big Christ, a little further on, at the end of a bridge, was

another crucifix, a small one. This Christ had a fair beard, and was thin, and his body was

hanging almost lightly, whereas the other Christ was large and dark and handsome. But in

this, as well as in the other, was the same neutral triumph of death, complete, negative

death, so complete as to be abstract, beyond cynicism in its completeness of leaving off.

Everywhere is the same obsession with the fact of physical pain, accident, and sudden

death. Wherever a misfortune has befallen a man, there is nailed up a little memorial of

the event, in propitiation of the God of hurt and death. A man is standing up to his waist

in water, drowning in full stream, his arms in the air. The little painting in its wooden

frame is nailed to the tree, the spot is sacred to the accident. Again, another little crude

picture fastened to a rock: a tree, falling on a man's leg, smashes it like a stalk, while the

blood flies up. Always there is the strange ejaculation of anguish and fear, perpetuated in

the little paintings nailed up in the place of the disaster.

This is the worship, then, the worship of death and the approaches to death, physical

violence, and pain. There is something crude and sinister about it, almost like depravity, a

form of reverting, turning back along the course of blood by which we have come.

Turning the ridge on the great road to the south, the imperial road to Rome, a decisive

change takes place. The Christs have been taking on various different characters, all of

them more or less realistically conveyed. One Christus is very elegant, combed and

brushed and foppish on his cross, as Gabriele D'Annunzio's son posing as a martyred

saint. The martyrdom of this Christ is according to the most polite convention. The

elegance is very important, and very Austrian. One might almost imagine the young man

had taken up this striking and original position to create a delightful sensation among the

ladies. It is quite in the Viennese spirit. There is something brave and keen in it, too. The

individual pride of body triumphs over every difficulty in the situation. The pride and

satisfaction in the clean, elegant form, the perfectly trimmed hair, the exquisite bearing,

are more important than the fact of death or pain. This may be foolish, it is at the same

time admirable.

But the tendency of the crucifix, as it nears the ridge to the south, is to become weak and

sentimental. The carved Christs turn up their faces and roll back their eyes very piteously,

in the approved Guido Reni fashion. They are overdoing the pathetic turn. They are

looking to heaven and thinking about themselves, in self-commiseration. Others again are

beautiful as elegies. It is dead Hyacinth lifted and extended to view, in all his beautiful,

dead youth. The young, male body droops forward on the cross, like a dead flower. It

looks as if its only true nature were to be dead. How lovely is death, how poignant, real,

satisfying! It is the true elegiac spirit.

Then there are the ordinary, factory-made Christs, which are not very significant. They

are as null as the Christs we see represented in England, just vulgar nothingness. But

these figures have gashes of red, a red paint of blood, which is sensational.

Beyond the Brenner, I have only seen vulgar or sensational crucifixes. There are great

gashes on the breast and the knees of the Christ-figure, and the scarlet flows out and

trickles down, till the crucified body has become a ghastly striped thing of red and white,

just a sickly thing of striped red.

They paint the rocks at the corners of the tracks, among the mountains; a blue and white

ring for the road to Ginzling, a red smear for the way to St Jakob. So one follows the blue

and white ring, or the three stripes of blue and white, or the red smear, as the case may

be. And the red on the rocks, the dabs of red paint, are of just the same colour as the red

upon the crucifixes; so that the red upon the crucifixes is paint, and the signs on the rocks

are sensational, like blood.

I remember the little brooding Christ of the Isar, in his little cloak of red flannel and his

crown of gilded thorns, and he remains real and dear to me, among all this violence of

representation.

'Couvre-toi de gloire, Tartarin--couvre-toi de flanelle.' Why should it please me so that

his cloak is of red flannel?

In a valley near St Jakob, just over the ridge, a long way from the railway, there is a very

big, important shrine by the roadside. It is a chapel built in the baroque manner, florid

pink and cream outside, with opulent small arches. And inside is the most startling

sensational Christus I have ever seen. He is a big, powerful man, seated after the

crucifixion, perhaps after the resurrection, sitting by the grave. He sits sideways, as if the

extremity were over, finished, the agitation done with, only the result of the experience

remaining. There is some blood on his powerful, naked, defeated body, that sits rather

hulked. But it is the face which is so terrifying. It is slightly turned over the hulked,

crucified shoulder, to look. And the look of this face, of which the body has been killed,

is beyond all expectation horrible. The eyes look at one, yet have no seeing in them, they

seem to see only their own blood. For they are bloodshot till the whites are scarlet, the

iris is purpled. These red, bloody eyes with their stained pupils, glancing awfully at all

who enter the shrine, looking as if to see through the blood of the late brutal death, are

terrible. The naked, strong body has known death, and sits in utter dejection, finished,

hulked, a weight of shame. And what remains of life is in the face, whose expression is

sinister and gruesome, like that of an unrelenting criminal violated by torture. The

criminal look of misery and hatred on the fixed, violated face and in the bloodshot eyes is

almost impossible. He is conquered, beaten, broken, his body is a mass of torture, an

unthinkable shame. Yet his will remains obstinate and ugly, integral with utter hatred.

It is a great shock to find this figure sitting in a handsome, baroque, pink-washed shrine

in one of those Alpine valleys which to our thinking are all flowers and romance, like the

picture in the Tate Gallery. 'Spring in the Austrian Tyrol' is to our minds a vision of

pristine loveliness. It contains also this Christ of the heavy body defiled by torture and

death, the strong, virile life overcome by physical violence, the eyes still looking back

bloodshot in consummate hate and misery.

The shrine was well kept and evidently much used. It was hung with ex-voto limbs and

with many gifts. It was a centre of worship, of a sort of almost obscene worship.

Afterwards the black pine-trees and the river of that valley seemed unclean, as if an

unclean spirit lived there. The very flowers seemed unnatural, and the white gleam on the

mountain-tops was a glisten of supreme, cynical horror.

After this, in the populous valleys, all the crucifixes were more or less tainted and vulgar.

Only high up, where the crucifix becomes smaller and smaller, is there left any of the old

beauty and religion. Higher and higher, the monument becomes smaller and smaller, till

in the snows it stands out like a post, or a thick arrow stuck barb upwards. The crucifix

itself is a small thing under the pointed hood, the barb of the arrow. The snow blows

under the tiny shed, upon the little, exposed Christ. All round is the solid whiteness of

snow, the awful curves and concaves of pure whiteness of the mountain top, the hollow

whiteness between the peaks, where the path crosses the high, extreme ridge of the pass.

And here stands the last crucifix, half buried, small and tufted with snow. The guides

tramp slowly, heavily past, not observing the presence of the symbol, making no salute.

Further down, every mountain peasant lifted his hat. But the guide tramps by without

concern. His is a professional importance now.

On a small mountain track on the Jaufen, not far from Meran, was a fallen Christus. I was

hurrying downhill to escape from an icy wind which almost took away my consciousness,

and I was looking up at the gleaming, unchanging snow-peaks all round. They seemed

like blades immortal in the sky. So I almost ran into a very old Martertafel. It leaned on

the cold, stony hillside surrounded by the white peaks in the upper air.

The wooden hood was silver-grey with age, and covered, on the top, with a thicket of

lichen, which stuck up in hoary tufts. But on the rock at the foot of the post was the fallen

Christ, armless, who had tumbled down and lay in an unnatural posture, the naked,

ancient wooden sculpture of the body on the naked, living rock. It was one of the old

uncouth Christs hewn out of bare wood, having the long, wedge-shaped limbs and thin

flat legs that are significant of the true spirit, the desire to convey a religious truth, not a

sensational experience.

The arms of the fallen Christ had broken off at the shoulders, and they hung on their

nails, as ex-voto limbs hang in the shrines. But these arms dangled from the palms, one at

each end of the cross, the muscles, carved sparely in the old wood, looking all wrong,

upside down. And the icy wind blew them backwards and forwards, so that they gave a

painful impression, there in the stark, sterile place of rock and cold. Yet I dared not touch

the fallen body of the Christ, that lay on its back in so grotesque a posture at the foot of

the post. I wondered who would come and take the broken thing away, and for what

purpose.