Upon me his eyes did shed a feeling of sorrow, but a sorrow that was like the soft comforting of a precious ointment. . . . And had it been said unto me: "Give that Jew the kiss of love," and I had given it him, I still should not have been kissing that in him which so beguiled me, as though I had been kissing thee, O Pontius, who art in very truth my love and my beloved. Rather would it have been as though, to kiss music, I had kissed my lute in music's stead. For music is in my flesh already, and standeth apart from it and from the lute alike. . . . O Pontius, conspire not against this man!
Pontius wrapped about him the softness of his fleecy white bathrobe, and smiled.
And the slave-woman drew back the curtains from before a window of Syrian glass, and the Roman passed to his bath, with the sheen of the blue sky striking reflections from the amphimallum's glistening folds.
And presently Pontius's feet were heard cleaving the bath water.
Giovanni Papini, in his voluble, not to say garrulous, and, as I find it, almost unreadable "Life of Christ," turned away from all that ornate estheticizing, with execrations on the "decadents," because he had become a good Catholic and wished to become a best seller.
Mary Austin turns away from all that because it really does not interest her. In "A Small Town Man," published originally in 1915, and now republished with revisions and a more explicit statement of her conclusions, Mary Austin comes to the interpretation of Jesus, as every sincere interpreter must, with just what she has of her own that can give her an original and personal view. She has, she assures us, studied her Biblical literature, topography, ethnography, etc.,
