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.  I confess this is an insensibility, not to say stupidity, in the sceptics and simplifiers, which I find very fatiguing.  I do not mind a man not believing a story, but I confess I am bored stiff (if I may be allowed the expression) by a man who can tell a story without seeing the point of the story, considered as a story or even considered as a lie.  And a man who sees the rags and the royal purple as a clumsy inconsistency is merely missing the meaning of a deliberate design.  He is like a man who should hear the story of King Cophetua and the beggar maid and say doubtfully that it was hard to recognise it as really a mariage de convenance; a phrase which (I may remark in parenthesis but not without passion) is not the French for “a marriage of convenience,” any more than hors d’oeuvre is the French for “out of work”; but may be more rightly rendered in English as “a suitable match.”  But nobody thought the match of the king and the beggar maid conventionally a suitable match; and nobody would ever have thought the story worth telling if it had been.  It is like saying that Diogenes, remaining in his tub after the offer of Alexander, must have been unaware of the opportunities of Greek architecture; or like saying that Nebuchadnezzar eating grass is clearly inconsistent with court etiquette, or not to be found in any fashionable cookery book.  I do not mind the learned sceptic saying it is a legend or a lie; but I weep for him when he cannot see the gist of it, I might even say the joke of it.  I do not object to his rejecting the story as a tall story; but I find it deplorable when he cannot see the point or end or upshot of the tall story, the very pinnacle or spire of that sublime tower.