There are not many men in the modern world who do not know that mood,
though it was not discovered by the moderns; it was the final and
seemingly fixed mood of nearly all the ancients. Only above the black
hole of Bethlehem they had seen a star wandering like a lost spark;
and it had done what the eternal suns and planets could not do.
It had disappeared.
There are some who resent the presence of such purple beside
the plain stable of the Nativity. But it seems strange that they
always rebuke it as if it were a blind vulgarity like the red
plush of a parvenu; a mere insensibility to a mere incongruity.
For in fact the insensibility is in the critics and not the artists.
It is an insensibility not to an accidental incongruity but to an
artistic contrast. Indeed it is an insensibility of a somewhat
tiresome kind, which can often be noticed in those sceptics who
make a science of folk-lore. The mark of them is that they fail
to see the importance of finding the upshot or climax of a tale,
even when it is a fairy-tale. Since the old devotional doctors
and designers were never tired of insisting on the sufferings of
the holy poor to the point of squalor, and simultaneously insisting
on the sumptuousness of the subject kings to the point of swagger,
it would really seem not entirely improbable that they may have been
conscious of the contrast themselves.
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