IDEALS OF SOCIAL REFORMERS 205
" In a hovel rude,
With naught to fence the weather from his head, The King I sought for, meekly stood ;
A naked, hungry child Clung round his gracious knee,
And a poor hunted slave looked up and smiled To bless the smile that set him free ;
New miracles I saw his presence do, . . . No more I knew the hovel bare and poor,
The gathered chips into a wood-pile grew, The broken morsel swelled to goodly store ;
I knelt and wept : my Christ no more I seek, His throne is with the outcast and the weak."
While not all of our modern poets are such prophets of Christian democracy as Lowell, yet with singular unanimity the greatest novelists of the Christian nations are full of reverence for plain suffering humanity, and full of scorn for the polished selfishness of the upper classes who used to absorb the attention of older novelists. In religious literature we look almost in vain for any honest dealing with the text about the camel and the needle's eye ; but one can find quite wonderful expositions of it in Tolstoi's War and Peace, Bourget's Cosmopolis, Charles Dudley Warner's A Little Journey in the World, Franzos' Ein Kampf urns Recht, and many others.
In pictorial art it is the same. Compare Watteau's well- finished pictures of well-clipped parks, full of well-dressed ladies exchanging compliments with well-behaved gentlemen, with Uhde's pictures of the Christ in the village school, or Christ at the peasant's table, and feel the difference of spirit, and the sense of the sacredness of life in its lowliest forms, which glorifies the latter. At the International Art Exhibition at Berlin I saw among the statuary the figure of an old man sitting on the ground, his clothes ragged, his shoulders bent, his face dull and weary, a broken potsherd of humanity. Underneath was the simple legend: " Prvximus tuus." Modern art is full of such prophetic sermons in oil and marble; but where do we see an\ thing like it in older periods of art? In one of the most |>
