The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, April 23, 1905, Page 10

PRING had begun to creep up out of the valley. The day was breathful "of scents not yet quite ripe enough for perfume. It was as a youth, delightful in promises. In the courthouse yard, in the county town, beneath the locust trees, there sat the County Judge, several old law- yers, the oldest man in the village and Limuel Jucklin. In the spring, when we see the remewal of nature’s pur- poses, we talk of opportunity. We feel that we are to have one more chance. The old man’s blood, the reminiscent sap of a declining life, is quicker. “Op- portunity js ever present,” said Juck- Iin. “It is one of the staples in life’s storehouse. Man doesn’t need to make opportunity. It's here anyhow. He can’t make it. He can sometimes ar- range combinations, but he doesn't have to ereate the material. Opportu- nity throws its light into the eye of the young feliow. It's like the glow worm. He can’t help seein’ it, more or less. It is the old feller. that needs to have opportunity pointed out to him. His sight has failed him and he can’t see the light. Youth don't need encouragement. It's own swift blood encourages it. What we ought to do is to encourage age.” “Then you think the old man cught to have a chance?” said the County Judge. “That’s exactly what I think. And the yourg chap ought to be interested, since if he lives he is soon to be old. It won't be half as long a-comin’ as he thinks it will, lookin’ forward. We are too much inclined to compliment the old folks for what they have done. and then politely, and sometimes even im- politely, tell them to stand aside to keep from being ruh over by the pro-. cession. It is true that the old man ain’t supple encugh for a drum major, but he can beat a bass drum a long time after some people think he can't; [ AALEZOD; LO GlH and out of the fife he may get a mighty sweet tune. But of course the proces- sion is in a hurry and can't be expected to wait on him. I don’t say it should wait. Hewever, it ought not to tread on the old man simply because it is in a hurry.” “A feller came in one of drivin’ a horse over me the other day,” said an old man, too literal to see a spiritual inference. “And I yelled at him, I did, and told him that if I could call back about twenty years I'd give him a thrashin’. That’s what I told him.” “And right there was where you were dein’ yourself an injustice,” Lim replied. “You were makin' yourself older. You went back into the past. It would have heen better if you had told him'’ that if he were twenty years older you would thrash him. Never go back to where you were, but bring things te where you now stand. Remember one thing—that it is mind instead of physical activity that has made this world great, and that as long as a man feeds his mind it will grow. One of the greatest of men that lived away before the Savior said that age ai- ways has youth enough left to learn. And as loog as we learn wé grow. If we forget old things let us learn new ones. The egotist. gets old quicker than anybody else for the reason that he thinks he knows it all. Ignorance is always old; wisdom is always young. Many years ago there lived a man named Louis Canaro. At 40 he thought himself cold enough to die. His health was bad. He had worn him- €elf out. But he had sense enough not to believe that he knew it all. So he began to diet himself. He ate just as much as was good for him. He discov- ered that his appetite was treacherous and called for more food than was necessarv. Then he took up a system of reading. He made it a point to learn somethin” out of a book or out of nature every day. Well, at 90 he -wrote ‘a -book, and it was a good one, too. It was, filled. with the keen- L CALL BICK Fy e A THEA THE SAN FRANCISCO SUNDAY “CALL. L = S L ” - ZS/7Y est sense. No one that has ever writ- ten on life has beaten it. - Then he waited ten years dnd wrote another book, just to se= if he could. The book was strong, full of fun—a smile. And it -tickled him so that he laughed for three yedrs before he died. He never did anything until he was old. The yourgsters could thrust aside hig body, but his mind wouldn’t be thrust. He kept it active with learnin’ things.” “But,” said the County Judge, “don't y]ndu’ believe that a man's brain grows old?” 4 “Oh, ves; . and so does his hair, if he keeps it; and so does his house. But the brain isn’t the mind and the house is not his life. If the brain were the mind, the . man with the heaviest brain would have the great- est- mind. Webster had a heavy brain, and these fellers that make much of that sort of thing raised a great ‘to-do over it; but while they were in the midst of their wonder a negro was hanged for murder. They INCE Christ lived and moved up- on the earth men have wied to vicualize him with their inner eyes; since there has been a Christian church at all there has been an ideal of Christ. And by the ideal of Christ we do not mean only the spiritual ideal, not the material, not merely the soul, not the body. Who can read the tender and terrible record of the Galilean peasant without won- dering whet he looked like—in what 8uise he appeared tc Mary and Martha and the disciples who loved him and to Pilate who judged him? In his manger doubtless he looked like other babies—we like to think so. And we may even fancy him while he grew up to be a slender boy, with the wis- dom of many worlds shining in his eyes as he taught the doctors in the temple. But what manner of man was he wha bent above the Magdalen with divinest pity and raised Lazarus from the dead? What was the face.that the adoring disciples saw at the Last Supper, that, in its godlike patience, broke the heart of his mother as she looked up into it upon " the cross—that tortured the memory of Judas so that “he went and hanged himself”? We all know the ‘“conventional Christ,” ‘which has been ccpied and re- created through the centuries. We clothe the vision of our inspirations in the form and likeness of this type, hav- ing nu other, and being able to picture no nobler fdeal. Yet we ask ourselves sometimes, “Is this indeed the Christ of Gaiilee, the Christ of Jerusalem, the Christ of Calvary? Why,” we question, “should the pictures resemble him— these paintings by men who were born centuries after he died?” But now comes the artist, a thinker and a rarely devout follower of Christ, who asscrts that these are not imagin- ary likenesses, built up by artists upon a conventional ideal, but solemn "wit- nesses of an indestructible tradition— uncharging reproductions of cne divine, never to be forgotten Face—that they one and all are based upon a likeness which, by easy. burden of proof, may be hailed as authentic—the portrait of Chnist. 3 The man who has undertaken to prove this..to. the ‘world is Sir Wyke Bayliss, K. B, F., 8. A., president of the Royal Society of British Artists. He has written several valuable books up- on art and its history, but the volume in which he has presented the surpris- ing” and- intercsting theory which we arc at present considering is called “Rex Regum, a Pain:er's Study of the Likeness of Christ from the Time of the Apostles to the Present Day.” Sir Wyke Bayliss is an enthusiast and s alsc a logician of the idealist type. He is possessed of a fine fervor of con- viction himself, and seems anxious to communicate it to a doubting and un- certaiti world. While admitting that no article of the creed. and no essential ‘priniciple of the church ‘hangs upon the truth or falsity of the likeness of Christ, s . matter: or his inheritance is disputed. wejghed his brain and found that it was a third heavier than Webster's. He was not only a murderer, but was little short of bein' an idiot. No, sir; the mind isn’t physical. It doesn't have much ¢f kinship with the body. Alexander - Stephens was almost a dwarf. The poet Byron wore a six and a guarter hat. But old Bill San- derson thgg lives out here hasn't more than gen: enough to drive up the calves and he can’t get a hat in town big enough for him.. A man is use- ful as Jong as he can think. He thinks as long as he learns. When he gives up his mind, why, his mind gives him wup. Old men talk too much and read too little. ~The mind needs food. - And this mind food ‘is not to be raked up out of the past— of, your own life. The past is worih nothin' excent as it serves as a light for the: future. This has been said more than once,-but that doesn’t make it less true. An old man dreams that he is young. It is rare that he dreams of bein” older.- And in his dream of youth great ideas sometimes come to him. He awakes younger, but his disappointment at findin’ himself still old robs his mind of the freshness it drew from the dream. Sometimes a' suddenly awakened will make a man younger. There was-old Buck Jamieson. - He was not only shoved aside, but ' jammed he seems to feel that the face of the Master should be a reality to every Christian; that a knowledge of what he looked like as a man has a deep rooted value in the worship of him as. a god. The fact, too, that this matter has been the object of s¢ much discussion and conjecture in the past has strength- ened his determination to establish the facts forever. To do this'he has in the course of some two hundred odd papers forged a chain, of which some links are of gold, some iron and some, as he ad- mits, of wire-like fragility—a chain of testimony. He has met with great opposition, even with a storm of protest, the Ag- nostic Journal in Engiand taking a particularly keen pleasure in deriding his theories, but he has also received the appreciation of numbers of great and gcod, wise :nd witty men, as well as awakened the interest of the world at large. . ° This theory of his is of importance, or should be, not only to churchmen but to al! who are interested in the Serip- tures from a historical - or literary standpoint, and artists all over the world will read attentively the testi- mecny of countless generations of reli- gious painters. The painters are Sir Wyke Bayliss’ chief witpesses, “for,” he says, quoting the great frarrar, “‘Art cannot deceive.'” Sir Wyke tells of a certain “venerable minister” who protested against his theory on the ground that he could never beiieve that the Holy Spirit could have permitted an artist to paint the face of Christ. “It does not seem to have occurred tc this clergyman,” remarks Sir Wyke. ‘‘that the Holy Spirit has permitted the face of Christ to be painted. * * * and that the only question at issue is whether the representations thus per- mitted are true or false!” He also adds that in other questions the Holy Spirit is ' generally considered to be on the side of truth! ¢ A certain Epglish Bishop, who was a “professor of archaeology as well, says that the artist “has a power of seeing reseniblances and detecting a prevalent type” which he is quite without. He adds that he is willing to trust Sir ‘Wyke's esthetic perceptions in the Most persons, as a matter of fact, are able to trace the similarities ‘perceived by Sir Wyke, if not by the Bishop, and a perusal of ‘'Rex Regum” leaves the most skeptical in a frame of mind closely bordering upon cunvic- tion—a -conviction which may have in it, of course, as much enthusiasm as reasen. . Sir Wyke's argument is carricd on along the following lines: “A man bora ard educated in a Christian country is in the position of c¢ne who inherits his father’s house—a maasicn bullt centuries ago, containing many rooms, in the chief of which, and ‘occupying - the place. of honor, hangs & beautiful picture- which from his childhood he has believed to be the portrait of the founder of his family. ‘This portrait is an heirloom of price- less value and goes with the title deeds of his estate. “But a day comes when the man finds that he has outgrown his est::_;;e e determination * against the fence. Well, one day he got into a row with a feller young than himself—forgot his age and whipped him. Then he went home and caught his horse and put th: plow gear on him. “ ‘Why, Buck,’ said his wife, ‘what on earth are you goin’ to do?’ ““I'm goin’ out in.the field to riow. That bottom ffeld is mightil:: in the grass.’ ‘Why, Buck,’ says she, ‘you can't plow.’, “:Cin’'t? ‘Who said so?" ut you're too old." “‘Is that so? sald Buck: #nd with that he went on out into the fic d and plowed. The neighbors were astonished, but Buck kept on a nlowin’ ard I reck on if he hadrn't béen Killed tryin" to break a colt he would have b_en plow- in' till yet.” “Tried ta break a Judge. “That shows that age went tou far.” “Yes, but it showed also that age colt,” said the was young again or it wouldn't have gone too far. Nothin’ is a better proof of youth than to go too far. And that brings us down to an important peint. Youth goes too far and age doesn’t go far enough as a general thing. It is when a man strikes a compromise be- tween the two that he has reached his best. But his best lasts longer than some folks suppose. It is said that the house is appraised and with it the por- trait. Then arises the question of its authenticity. ‘It is naught, it is naught.” saith the buyer, as he has al- ways been saying since the days of the wise king. The picture was painted so long ago that nobody living has ever seen the painter or the face which it represents. Perhaps it was manufac- tured in Wardour street for the purpose of giving a semblance of reality to a doubtful pedigree, as they say the like- ness of Christ was made up in the dark ages for the purpose of giving sub- stance to the story of the divine life on earth. Perhaps it is the fictitious substitute for an original long ago lost or stolen or sold by the family, or de- stroyed by fire. “It may even be the very painting mentioned in the title deeds, and yet so decayed by time or changed by so called restoration as to have become worthless as a picture and unrecog- nizable as a likeness. “Mow shall any certainty be attained as to the value or the.authenticity of this portrait? The folowing questions are asked and have tc be answered. T place them side by side with similar questions touching the likeness of Christ. In either case reasonable an- swers should carry conviction: “I—The tradition of the family—How far is it to be trustcd? The witness of the church—how far is it to e believed? “ITI—Portraits, said to be Of the same man, are possessed by other branches «f the family—do they bear a common resemblance? Likenesses, believed to be of Christ, are regarded as authentic by different churches—do they bear a com- mon similitude? II[—Were the artists of the period when this man lived capable of paint- ing such a picture? Were the artists of the first century capable of paint- ing the likeness of Christ? “IV—Is there any reason to think that the heir had any interest in con- cealing or in falsifying this man's like- ness? 1Is there any reason for suppos- ing that the early Christlans desired the face of Christ to be unknown or to be forgotten? . S “V—Is it a question between this por- trait and another, or is it betwedn this and nofie? Is it a question between this-and some other likeness, or is it between this and none? “VI—What is the opinion of acknowl- edged experts in the art of portraiture? How was the likeness of Christ regard- ed by the masters of the Renaissance? . II—Here is a miniature. It has been hidden away- in a secret drawer, and is inscribed with the man’s initials, Is it the same likeness? Here are some portraits from the graves of the first Christian martyrs. They are insgribed with Christ’s initials. Is the liReness the same? © “VIII—Is there any theory to ae- count for the portrait except that it is a likeéness? Is there any theory to ac- -count for- the likeness except that it Is a portrait?” One by one Sir Wyke answers the foregoing questions in such a way -as to leave them no longer open. He proves that for twenty centuries all Christian churches and Christian peoples have préserved the one tradition. as to Christ’s likeness; that its history integral - part of the histcry of most of the poetry is written by young men. I reckon this is true. But the most of the poetry isn't worth readin’ aud doesn’t live much longer than it takes them to write it. The most valuable writin' comes out of experi- ence, which is wisdom: and without age there can be no very great experi- ence.. 1 reckon the best prizefighters are. between 20 and 30, certainly not much more than 30; but the world coula manage to get along without hters. Old Oliver Cromwell was somethin' of a fighter, but he was un- knowa until he was gettin’ old. I have noticed that a~e makes a bigger liar of u Har. As long as a liar can grow he is improvin’ and if a lie can grow it seems,to me that wisdom can man- age to move up a few pegs as we go aton Let the old man take his mind off his ailments and put it on a be Ard the first thing he knows his min will be bigger and his ailments less. Yonder comes old Jerry Dabs. Now Jerry is nearing 80 and nobody ever caught him in a truth. And suppose he should make an effort now and tell the truth. Wouldn't that be an im- provement? Wouldn't it _show an ad- vance even at his age? T want to tell you, gentlemen, we've all got an oppor- tunity to do somethin’. We can at least go home and tell our wives that business detained us.” (Cc pyrighted, 1905, by Opie Read.) church, and that from first to last through all the whirl and clash changing creeds and warring dogmas no man has ever been able to change the accepted ideal of the Nazaren From the beginning, when the word Christ was not yet a world-wide essen- tial of civilization and fact of life, the, likeness was mevertheless recognized, whether daubed upon a fresco or wrought curiously in fine metal For the question, often put and by many persons, as to whether the artists of the first century were capable painting a portrait of @hrist there seems to be such an overwhelming cloud of affirmative answers that one hardly knows where to begin in the enumeraticn of them. As a matter of fact, the era of Christ was an era of Do mean artistic production. Polydorus sculptured his celebrated Laocoon at tiie .very time that the apostles were preaching in the Catacombs. Indeed, Roman art never reached a higher point than during the first centuries. And in one direction particularly was Roman art - pre-eminently fine—that was in portraiture. The picture of the Roman youth to which some versons have tried to af- fix the title of Christ is palpably that of Dionysius. In the basilicas, limned in time dulled mosaic, we see the great likeniess—in the imperfect frescoes and painted cloths and eurtains of those wonderful lost centuries, in carven Wood and laburiously engraved metal, in glass, in stone, in colors, in rough sculpture—everywhere the likeness, the likeness of Christ. Likeness, be it understood, is some- thing deeper than a mere “arrangement of halr and beard,” as some skeptics express it. Likeness is a trick of ex- pression, a line of lip, a eurve of nose, & droop cf eve. ; rom the early unknown pain Michael Angelo, the giant ax:nonl;r:r.t? ists. the song runs the same, and for many a year after. Now and again some modern attempts - an imaginary Galilean, but dees any cne ever feel that he has painted Christ? Moreover. it s only the moderns who so dare to srezard the immutab! ctlnturles. le portrait of the t is by close sympathy w dead ‘day and its Wpo:k ’lnd“:‘es:::; that we believe most fully in Sir Wyke B‘aylia!‘ ideal concerning the likeness of Chrigt. Those men, preaching, work- ing, praying, hoping. had seen the Naz. arene, knew him, touched him, looked into his eyes, heard him speak of every day matters as well of the mysteries of life and death. “He was seen by more than five hundred brethren at once,” says Paul the apostle, “of whom the g‘r:l:eter plArtdrelmaln. but scme are fallen T a. by' n% S St of all, he was seen n Russia at this' Easter Seaso) greeting of rich and poor, high -n; h::e sad and glad, is the sweet old saluta. tion, “Christ is risen.” The known only the faint and through weary- centuries—the i face of Christ. A [ ISR,