"Invoke his warlike spirit,And your great uncle's, Edward the Black Prince,Who on the French ground play'd a tragedy,Making defeat on the full power of France,While his most mighty father on a hillStood smiling, to behold his lion's whelpForage in blood of French nobility."So a common idealist would have been rather alarmed at the thought of introducing the name of a street in Paris—Straw Street—Rue de Fouarre—into the midst of a description of the highest heavens. Not so Dante,—"Beyond, thou mayst the flaming lustre scanOf Isidore, of Bede, and that RichartWho was in contemplation more than man.And he, from whom thy looks returning areTo me, a spirit was, that in austereDeep musings often thought death kept too far.That is the light eternal of Sigier,Who while in Rue de Fouarre his days he wore,Has argued hateful truths in haughtiest ear."Cayley.What did it matter to Dante, up in heaven there, whether the mob below thought him vulgar or not! Sigierhadread in Straw Street; that was the fact, and he had to say so, and there an end.§ 9. There is, indeed, perhaps, no greater sign of innate andrealvulgarity of mind or defective education than the want of power to understand the universality of the ideal truth; the absence of sympathy with the colossal grasp of those intellects, which have in them so much of divine, that nothing is small to them, and nothing large; but with equal and unoffended vision they take in the sum of the world,—Straw Street and the seventh heavens,—in the same instant. A certain portion of this divine spirit is visible even in the lower examples of all the true men; it is, indeed, perhaps, the clearest test of their belonging to the true and great group, that they are continually touching what to the multitude appear vulgarities. The higher a man stands, the more the word "vulgar" becomes unintelligible to him. Vulgar? what, that poor farmer's girl of William Hunt's, bred in the stable, putting on her Sunday gown, and pinning her best cap out of the green and red pin-cushion! Not so; she may be straight on the road to those high heavens, and may shine hereafter as one of the stars in the firmament for ever. Nay, even that lady in the satin bodice with her arm laid over a balustrade to show it, and her eyes turned up to heaven to show them; and the sportsman waving his rifle for the terror of beasts, and displaying his perfect dress for the delight of men, are kept, by the very misery and vanity of them, in the thoughts of a great painter, at a sorrowful level, somewhat above vulgarity. It is only when the minor painter takes them on his easel, that they become things for the universe to be ashamed of.We may dismiss this matter of vulgarity in plain and few words, at least as far as regards art. There is never vulgarity in awholetruth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation.§ 10. "Well, but," (at this point the reader asks doubtfully,) "if then your great central idealist is to show all truth, low as well as lovely, receiving it in this passive way, what becomes of all your principles of selection, and of setting in the right place, which you were talking about up to the end of your fourth paragraph? How is Homer to enforce upon Achilles the cutting of the pork chops 'only at such time as Homer chooses,' if Homer is to havenochoice, but merely to see the thing done, and sing it as he sees it?" Why, the choice, as well as the vision, ismanifestedto Homer. The vision comes to him in its chosen order. Chosenforhim, notbyhim, but yet full of visible and exquisite choice, just as a sweet and perfect dream will come to a sweet and perfect person, so that, in some sense, they may be said to have chosen their dream, or composed it; and yet they could not help dreaming it so, and in no other wise. Thus, exactly thus, in all results of true inventive power, the whole harmony of the thing done seems as if it had been wrought by the most exquisite rules. But to him who did it, it presented itself so, and his will, and knowledge, and personality, for the moment went for nothing; he became simply a scribe, and wrote what he heard and saw.And all efforts to do things of a similar kind by rule or by thought, and all efforts to mend or rearrange the first order of the vision, are not inventive; on the contrary, they ignore and deny invention. If any man, seeing certain forms laid on the canvas, does by his reasoning power determine that certain changes wrought in them would mend or enforce them, that is not only uninventive, but contrary to invention, which must be the involuntary occurrence of certain forms or fancies to the mind in the order they are to be portrayed. Thus the knowing of rules and the exertion of judgment have a tendency to check and confuse the fancy in its flow; so that it will follow, that, in exact proportion as a master knows anything about rules of right and wrong, he is likely to be uninventive; and in exactproportion as he holds higher rank and has nobler inventive power, he will know less of rules; not despising them, but simply feeling that between him and them there is nothing in common,—that dreams cannot be ruled—that as they come, so they must be caught, and they cannot be caught in any other shape than that they come in; and that he might as well attempt to rule a rainbow into rectitude, or cut notches in a moth's wings to hold it by, as in any wise attempt to modify, by rule, the forms of the involuntary vision.§ 11. And this, which by reason we have thus anticipated, is in reality universally so. There is no exception. The great men never know how or why they do things. They have no rules; cannot comprehend the nature of rules;—do not, usually, even know, in what they do, what is best or what is worst: to them it is all the same; something they cannot help saying or doing,—one piece of it as good as another, and none of it (it seems tothem) worth much. The moment any man begins to talk about rules, in whatsoever art, you may know him for a second-rate man; and, if he talks about themmuch, he is a third-rate, or not an artist at all. Tothisrule there is no exception in any art; but it is perhaps better to be illustrated in the art of music than in that of painting. I fell by chance the other day upon a work of De Stendhal's, "Vies de Haydn, de Mozart, et de Metastase," fuller of common sense than any book I ever read on the arts; though I see, by the slight references made occasionally to painting, that the author's knowledge therein is warped and limited by the elements of general teaching in the schools around him; and I have not yet, therefore, looked at what he has separately written on painting. But one or two passages out of this book on music are closely to our present purpose."Counterpoint is related to mathematics: a fool, with patience, becomes a respectable savant in that; but for the part of genius, melody, it has no rules. No art is so utterly deprived of precepts for the production of the beautiful. So much the better for it and for us. Cimarosa, when first at Prague his air was executed, Pria che spunti in ciel l'Aurora, never heard the pedants say to him, 'Your air is fine, because you have followed such and such a rule established by Pergolesein such an one of his airs; but it would be finer still if you had conformed yourself to such another rule from which Galluppi never deviated.'"Yes: "so much the better for it, and for us;" but I trust the time will soon come when melody in painting will be understood, no less than in music, and when people will find that, there also, the great melodists have no rules, and cannot have any, and that there are in this, as in sound, "no precepts for the production of the beautiful."§ 12. Again. "Behold, my friend, an example of that simple way of answering which embarrasses much. One asked him (Haydn) thereasonfor a harmony—for a passage's being assigned to one instrument rather than another; but all he ever answered was, 'I have done it, because it does well.'" Farther on, De Stendhal relates an anecdote of Haydn; I believe one well known, but so much to our purpose that I repeat it. Haydn had agreed to give some lessons in counterpoint to an English nobleman. "'For our first lesson,' said the pupil, already learned in the art—drawing at the same time a quatuor of Haydn's from his pocket, 'for our first lesson may we examine this quatuor; and will you tell me the reasons of certain modulations, which I cannot entirely approve because they are contrary to the principles?' Haydn, a little surprised, declared himself ready to answer. The nobleman began; and at the very first measures found matter for objection. Haydn,who invented habitually, and who was the contrary of a pedant, found himself much embarrassed, and answered always, 'I have done that because it has a good effect. I have put that passage there because it does well.' The Englishman, who judged that these answers proved nothing, recommenced his proofs, and demonstrated to him, by very good reasons, that his quatuor was good for nothing. 'But, my lord, arrange this quatuor then to your fancy,—play it so, and you will see which of the two ways is the best.' 'But why is yours the best which is contrary to the rules?' 'Because it is the pleasantest.' The nobleman replied. Haydn at last lost patience, and said, 'I see, my lord, it is you who have the goodness to give lessons to me, and truly I am forced to confess to you that I do not deserve the honor.' The partizan of the rules departed, stillastonished that in following the rules to the letter one cannot infallibly produce a 'Matrimonio Segreto.'"This anecdote, whether in all points true or not, is in its tendency most instructive, except only in that it makesonefalse inference or admission, namely, that a good composition can becontraryto the rules. It may be contrary to certain principles, supposed in ignorance to be general; but every great composition is in perfect harmony with all true rules, and involves thousands too delicate for ear, or eye, or thought, to trace; still it is possible to reason, with infinite pleasure and profit, about these principles, when the thing is once done; only, all our reasoning will not enable any one to do another thing like it, because all reasoning falls infinitely short of the divine instinct. Thus we may reason wisely over the way a bee builds its comb, and be profited by finding out certain things about the angles of it. But the bee knows nothing about those matters. It builds its comb in a far more inevitable way. And, from a bee to Paul Veronese, all master-workers work with this awful, this inspired unconsciousness.§ 13. I said just now that there was no exception tothislaw, that the great men never knew how or why they did things. It is, of course, only with caution that such a broad statement should be made; but I have seen much of different kinds of artists, and I have always found the knowledge of, and attention to, rules soaccuratelyin the inverse ratio to the power of the painter, that I have myself no doubt that the law is constant, and that men's smallness may be trigonometrically estimated by the attention which, in their work, they pay to principles, especially principles of composition. The general way in which the great men speak is of "tryingto do" this or that, just as a child would tell of something he had seen and could not utter. Thus, in speaking of the drawing of which I have given an etching farther on (a scene on the St. Gothard[27]), Turner asked if I had been to see "that litter of stones which Iendeavoredto represent;" and William Hunt, when I asked him one day as he was painting, why he put on such and such a color, answered, "I don't know; I am justaimingat it;" andTurner, and he, and all the other men I have known who could paint, always spoke and speak in the same way; not in any selfish restraint of their knowledge, but in pure simplicity. While all the men whom I know, whocannotpaint, are ready with admirable reasons for everything they have done; and can show, in the most conclusive way, that Turner is wrong, and how he might be improved.§ 14. And this is the reason for the somewhat singular, but very palpable truth that the Chinese, and Indians, and other semi-civilized nations, can color better than we do, and that an Indian shawl or Chinese vase are still, in invention of color, inimitable by us. It is their glorious ignorance of all rules that does it; the pure and true instincts have play, and do their work,—instincts so subtle, that the least warping or compression breaks or blunts them; and the moment we begin teaching people any rules about color, and make them do this or that, we crush the instinct generally for ever. Hence, hitherto, it has been an actual necessity, in order to obtain power of coloring, that a nation should be half-savage: everybody could color in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; but we were ruled and legalized into grey in the fifteenth;—only a little salt simplicity of their sea natures at Venice still keeping their precious, shellfishy purpleness and power; and now that is gone; and nobody can color anywhere, except the Hindoos and Chinese; but that need not be so, and will not be so long; for, in a little while, people will find out their mistake, and give up talking about rules of color, and then everybody will color again, as easily as they now talk.§ 15. Such, then, being the generally passive or instinctive character of right invention, it may be asked how these unmanageable instincts are to be rendered practically serviceable in historical or poetical painting,—especially historical, in which given facts are to be represented. Simply by the sense and self-control of the whole man; not by control of the particular fancy or vision. He who habituates himself, in his daily life, to seek for the stern facts in whatever he hears or sees, will have these facts again brought before him by the involuntary imaginative power in their noblest associations; and he who seeks for frivolities and fallacies, will have frivolities and fallacies again presented to him in his dreams. Thus if, in reading history for the purpose of painting from it, the painter severely seeks for the accurate circumstances of every event; as, for instance, determining the exact spot of ground on which his hero fell, the way he must have been looking at the moment, the height the sun was at (by the hour of the day), and the way in which the light must have fallen upon his face, the actual number and individuality of the persons by him at the moment, and such other veritable details, ascertaining and dwelling upon them without the slightest care for any desirableness or poetic propriety in them, but for their own truth's sake; then these truths will afterwards rise up and form the body of his imaginative vision, perfected and united as his inspiration may teach. But if, in reading the history, he does not regard these facts, but thinks only how it might all most prettily, and properly, and impressively have happened, then there is nothing but prettiness and propriety to form the body of his future imagination, and his whole ideal becomes false. So, in the higher or expressive part of the work, the whole virtue of it depends on his being able to quit his own personality, and enter successively into the hearts and thoughts of each person; and in all this he is still passive: in gathering the truth he is passive, not determining what the truth to be gathered shall be; and in the after vision he is passive, not determining, but as his dreams will have it, what the truth to be represented shall be; only according to his own nobleness is his power of entering into the hearts of noble persons, and the general character of his dream of them.[28]§ 16. It follows from all this, evidently, that a great idealist never can be egotistic. The whole of his power depends upon his losing sight and feeling of his own existence, and becoming a mere witness and mirror of truth, and a scribe of visions,—always passive in sight, passive in utterance,—lamenting continually that he cannot completely reflect nor clearly utter all he has seen. Not by any means a proud state for a man to be in. But the man who has no invention is always setting things inorder, and putting the world to rights, and mending, and beautifying, and pluming himself on his doings as supreme in all ways.§ 17. There is still the question open, What are the principal directions in which this ideal faculty is to exercise itself most usefully for mankind?This question, however, is not to the purpose of our present work, which respects landscape-painting only; it must be one of those left open to the reader's thoughts, and for future inquiry in another place. One or two essential points I briefly notice.In Chap.IV. § 5. it was said, that one of the first functions of imagination was traversing the scenes of history, and forcing the facts to become again visible. But there is so little of such force in written history, that it is no marvel there should be none hitherto in painting. There does not exist, as far as I know, in the world a single example of a good historical picture (that is to say, of one which, allowing for necessary dimness in art as compared with nature, yet answers nearly the same ends in our minds as the sight of the real event would have answered); the reason being, the universal endeavor to geteffectsinstead of facts, already shown as the root of false idealism. True historical ideal, founded on sense, correctness of knowledge, and purpose of usefulness, does not yet exist; the production of it is a task which the closing nineteenth century may propose to itself.§ 18. Another point is to be observed. I do not, as the reader may have lately perceived, insist on the distinction between historical and poetical painting, because, as noted in the 22nd paragraph of the third chapter, all great painting must be both.Nevertheless, a certain distinction must generally exist between men who, like Horace Vernet, David, or Domenico Tintoret, would employ themselves in painting, more or less graphically, the outward verities of passing events—battles, councils, &c.—of their day (who, supposing them to work worthily of their mission, would become, properly so called, historical or narrative painters); and men who sought, in scenes of perhaps less outward importance, "noble grounds for noble emotion;"—who would be, in a certain separate sense,poeticalpainters,some of them taking for subjects events which had actually happened, and others themes from the poets; or, better still, becoming poets themselves in the entire sense, and inventing the story as they painted it. Painting seems to me only just to be beginning, in this sense also, to take its proper position beside literature, and the pictures of the "Awakening Conscience," "Huguenot," and such others, to be the first fruits of its new effort.§ 19. Finally, as far as I can observe, it is a constant law that the greatest men, whether poets or historians, live entirely in their own age, and that the greatest fruits of their work are gathered out of their own age. Dante paints Italy in the thirteenth century; Chaucer, England in the fourteenth; Masaccio, Florence in the fifteenth; Tintoret, Venice in the sixteenth;—all of them utterly regardless of anachronism and minor error of every kind, but getting always vital truth out of the vital present.§ 20. If it be said that Shakspere wrote perfect historical plays on subjects belonging to the preceding centuries, I answer, that theyareperfect plays just because there is no care about centuries in them, but a life which all men recognise for the human life of all time; and this it is, not because Shakspere sought to give universal truth, but because, painting honestly and completely from the men about him, he painted that human nature which is, indeed, constant enough,—a rogue in the fifteenth century being,at heart, what a rogue is in the nineteenth and was in the twelfth; and an honest or a knightly man being, in like manner, very similar to other such at any other time. And the work of these great idealists is, therefore, always universal; not because it isnot portrait, but because it iscompleteportrait down to the heart, which is the same in all ages: and the work of the mean idealists isnotuniversal, not because it is portrait, but because it ishalfportrait,—of the outside, the manners and the dress, not of the heart. Thus Tintoret and Shakspere paint, both of them, simply Venetian and English nature as they saw it in their time, down to the root; and it does foralltime; but as for any care to cast themselves into the particular ways and tones of thought, or custom, of past time in their historical work, you will find it inneither of them, nor in any other perfectly great man that I know of.§ 21. If there had been no vital truth in their present, it is hard to say what these men could have done. I suppose, primarily, they would not have existed; that they, and the matter they have to treat of, are given together, and that the strength of the nation and its historians correlatively rise and fall—Herodotus springing out of the dust of Marathon. It is also hard to say how far our better general acquaintance with minor details of past history may make us able to turn the shadow on the imaginative dial backwards, and naturally to live, and even live strongly if we choose, in past periods; but this main truth will always be unshaken, that the only historical painting deserving the name is portraiture of our own living men and our own passing times,[29]and that all efforts to summon up the events of bygone periods, though often useful and touching, must come under an inferior class of poetical painting; nor will it, I believe, ever be much followed as their main work by the strongest men, but only by the weaker and comparatively sentimental (rather than imaginative) groups. This marvellous first half of the nineteenth century has in this matter, as in nearly all others, been making a double blunder. It has, under the name of improvement, done all it could toEFFACE THE RECORDSwhich departed ages have left of themselves, while it has declared theFORGERY OF FALSE RECORDSof these same ages to be the great work of its historical painters! I trust that in a few years more we shall come somewhat to our senses in the matter, and begin to perceive that our duty is to preserve what the past has had to say for itself, and to say for ourselves also what shall be true for the future. Let us strive, with just veneration for that future, first to do what is worthy to be spoken, and then to speak it faithfully; and, with veneration for the past, recognize that it is indeed in the power of love to preserve the monument, but not of incantation to raise the dead.[24]The word "ideal" is used in this limited sense in the chapter on Generic Beauty in the second volume, but under protest. See § 4 in that chapter.[25]II. ix. 209.[26]"And yet you have just said it shall be at such time and place as Homer chooses. Is not thisaltering?" No; wait a little, and read on.[27]See Plate XXI. in Chap. III. Vol. IV.[28]The reader should, of course, refer for further details on this subject to the chapters on Imagination in Vol. II., of which I am only glancing now at the practical results.[29]See Edinburgh Lectures, p. 217.CHAPTER VIII.OF THE TRUE IDEAL: THIRDLY, GROTESQUE.§ 1. I have already, in the Stones of Venice, had occasion to analyze, as far as I was able, the noble nature and power of grotesque conception; I am not sorry occasionally to refer the reader to that work, the fact being that it and this are parts of one whole, divided merely as I had occasion to follow out one or other of its branches; for I have always considered architecture as an essential part of landscape; and I think the study of its best styles and real meaning one of the necessary functions of the landscape-painter; as, in like manner, the architect cannot be a master-workman until all his designs are guided by understanding of the wilder beauty of pure nature. But, be this as it may, the discussion of the grotesque element belonged most properly to the essay on architecture, in which that element must always find its fullest development.§ 2. The Grotesque is in that chapter[30]divided principally into three kinds:(A). Art arising from healthful but irrational play of the imagination in times of rest.(B). Art arising from irregular and accidental contemplation of terrible things; or evil in general.(C). Art arising from the confusion of the imagination by the presence of truths which it cannot wholly grasp.It is the central form of this art, arising from contemplation of evil, which forms the link of connection between it and the sensualist ideals, as pointed out above in the second paragraph of the sixth chapter, the fact being that the imagination, when at play, is curiously like bad children, and likes to play with fire; in its entirely serious moods it dwells by preference onbeautiful and sacred images, but in its mocking or playful moods it is apt to jest, sometimes bitterly, with undercurrent of sternest pathos, sometimes waywardly, sometimes slightly and wickedly, with death and sin; hence an enormous mass of grotesque art, some most noble and useful, as Holbein's Dance of Death, and Albert Durer's Knight and Death,[31]going down gradually through various conditions of less and less seriousness into an art whose only end is that of mere excitement, or amusement by terror, like a child making mouths at another, more or less redeemed by the degree of wit or fancy in the grimace it makes, as in the demons of Teniers and such others; and, lower still, in the demonology of the stage.§ 3. The form arising from an entirely healthful and open play of the imagination, as in Shakspere's Ariel and Titania, and in Scott's White Lady, is comparatively rare. It hardly ever is free from some slight taint of the inclination to evil; still more rarely is it, when so free, natural to the mind; for the moment we begin to contemplate sinless beauty we are apt to get serious; and moral fairy tales, and such other innocent work, are hardly ever truly, that is to say, naturally imaginative; but for the most part laborious inductions and compositions. The moment any real vitality enters them, they are nearly sure to become satirical, or slightly gloomy, and so connect themselves with the evil-enjoying branch.§ 4. The third form of the Grotesque is a thoroughly noble one. It is that which arises out of the use or fancy of tangible signs to set forth an otherwise less expressible truth; including nearly the whole range of symbolical and allegorical art and poetry. Its nobleness has been sufficiently insisted upon in the place before referred to. (Chapter on Grotesque Renaissance, §§LXIII. LXIV.&c.) Of its practical use, especially in painting, deeply despised among us, because grossly misunderstood, a few words must be added here.A fine grotesque is the expression, in a moment, by a series of symbols thrown together in bold and fearless connection, of truths which it would have taken a long time to express in any verbal way, and of which the connection is left for the beholderto work out for himself; the gaps, left or overleaped by the haste of the imagination, forming the grotesque character.§ 5. For instance, Spenser desires to tell us, (1.) that envy is the most untamable and unappeasable of the passions, not to be soothed by any kindness; (2.) that with continual labor it invents evil thoughts out of its own heart; (3.) that even in this, its power of doing harm is partly hindered by the decaying and corrupting nature of the evil it lives in; (4.) that it looks every way, and that whatever it sees is altered and discolored by its own nature; (5.) which discoloring, however, is to it a veil, or disgraceful dress, in the sight of others; (6.) and that it never is free from the most bitter suffering, (7.) which cramps all its acts and movements, enfolding and crushing it while it torments. All this it has required a somewhat long and languid sentence for me to say in unsymbolical terms,—not, by the way, that theyareunsymbolical altogether, for I have been forced, whether I would or not, to usesomefigurative words; but even with this help the sentence is long and tiresome, and does not with any vigor represent the truth. It would take some prolonged enforcement of each sentence to make it felt, in ordinary ways of talking. But Spenser puts it all into a grotesque, and it is done shortly and at once, so that we feel it fully, and see it, and never forget it. I have numbered above the statements which had to be made. I now number them with the same numbers, as they occur in the several pieces of the grotesque:—"And next to him malicious Envy rode(1.) Upon a ravenous wolfe, and (2. 3.) still did chawBetween his cankred[32]teeth a venemous todeThat all the poison ran about his jaw.(4. 5.) All in a kirtle of discolourd sayHe clothed was, y-paynted full of eies;(6.) And in his bosome secretly there layAn hatefull snake, the which his tail uptyes(7.) In many folds, and mortall sting implyes."There is the whole thing in nine lines; or, rather, in one image, which will hardly occupy any room at all on the mind's shelves, but can be lifted out, whole, whenever we want it. All noble grotesques are concentrations of this kind, and thenoblest convey truths which nothing else could convey; and not only so, but convey them, in minor cases with a delightfulness,—in the higher instances with an awfulness,—which no mere utterance of the symbolised truth would have possessed, but which belongs to the effort of the mind to unweave the riddle, or to the sense it has of there being an infinite power and meaning in the thing seen, beyond all that is apparent therein, giving the highest sublimity even to the most trivial object so presented and so contemplated."'Jeremiah, what seest thou?''I see a seething pot, and the face thereof is toward the north,'Out of the north an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land.'"And thus in all ages and among all nations, grotesque idealism has been the element through which the most appalling and eventful truth has been wisely conveyed, from the most sublime words of true Revelation, to the "ἀλλ᾿ ὅτ᾿ ἂν ἡμίονος βασιλεὐς," &c., of the oracles, and the more or less doubtful teaching of dreams; and so down to ordinary poetry. No element of imagination has a wider range, a more magnificent use, or so colossal a grasp of sacred truth.§ 6. How, then, is this noble power best to be employed in the art of painting?We hear it not unfrequently asserted that symbolism or personification should not be introduced in painting at all. Such assertions are in their grounds unintelligible, and in their substance absurd. Whatever is in words described as visible, may with all logical fitness[33]be rendered so by colors, and not only is this a legitimate branch of ideal art, but I believe there is hardly any other so widely useful and instructive; and I heartily wish that every great allegory which the poets ever invented were powerfully put on canvas, and easily accessible by all men, and that our artists were perpetually exciting themselves to invent more. And as far as authority bears on the question, the simple fact is that allegorical painting has been the delight of the greatest men and of the wisest multitudes, from the beginning of art, and will be till art expires. Orcagua's Triumph ofDeath; Simon Memmi's frescoes in the Spanish Chapel; Giotto's principal works at Assisi, and partly at the Arena; Michael Angelo's two best statues, the Night and Day; Albert Durer's noble Melancholy, and hundreds more of his best works; a full third, I should think, of the works of Tintoret and Veronese, and nearly as large a portion of those of Raphael and Rubens, are entirely symbolical or personifiant; and, except in the case of the last-named painter, are always among the most interesting works the painters executed. The greater and more thoughtful the artists, the more they delight in symbolism, and the more fearlessly they employ it. Dead symbolism, second-hand symbolism, pointless symbolism, are indeed objectionable enough; but so are most other things that are dead, second-hand, and pointless. It is also true that both symbolism and personification are somewhat more apt than most things to have their edges taken off by too much handling; and what with our modern Fames, Justices, and various metaphorical ideals, largely used for signs and other such purposes, there is some excuse for our not well knowing what the real power of personification is. But that power is gigantic and inexhaustible, and ever to be grasped with peculiar joy by the painter, because it permits him to introduce picturesque elements and flights of fancy into his work, which otherwise would be utterly inadmissible; to bring the wild beasts of the desert into the room of state, fill the air with inhabitants as well as the earth, and render the least (visibly) interesting incidents themes for the most thrilling drama. Even Tintoret might sometimes have been hard put to it, when he had to fill a large panel in the Ducal Palace with the portrait of a nowise interesting Doge, unless he had been able to lay a winged lion beside him, ten feet long from the nose to the tail, asleep upon the Turkey carpet; and Rubens could certainly have made his flatteries of Mary of Medicis palatable to no one but herself, without the help of rosy-cheeked goddesses of abundance, and seven-headed hydras of rebellion.§ 7. For observe, not only does the introduction of these imaginary beings permit greater fantasticism ofincident, but also infinite fantasticism oftreatment; and, I believe, so far from the pursuit of the false ideal having in any wise exhausted therealms of fantastic imagination, those realms have hardly yet been entered, and that a universe of noble dream-land lies before us, yet to be conquered. For, hitherto, when fantastic creatures have been introduced, either the masters have been so realistic in temper that they made the spirits as substantial as their figures of flesh and blood,—as Rubens, and, for the most part, Tintoret; or else they have been weak and unpractised in realization, and have painted transparent or cloudy spirits because they had no power of painting grand ones. But if a really great painter, thoroughly capable of giving substantial truth, and master of the elements of pictorial effect which have been developed by modern art, would solemnly, and yet fearlessly, cast his fancy free in the spiritual world, and faithfully follow out such masters of that world as Dante and Spenser, there seems no limit to the splendor of thought which painting might express. Consider, for instance, how the ordinary personifications of Charity oscillate between the mere nurse of many children, of Reynolds, and the somewhat painfully conceived figure with flames issuing from the heart, of Giotto; and how much more significance might be given to the representation of Love, by amplifying with tenderness the thought of Dante, "Tanta rossa, che a pena fora dentro al foco nota,"[34]that is to say, by representing the loveliness of her face and form as all flushed with glow of crimson light, and, as she descended through heaven, all its clouds colored by her presence as they are by sunset. In the hands of a feeble painter, such an attempt would end in mere caricature; but suppose it taken up by Correggio, adding to his power of flesh-painting the (not inconsistent) feeling of Angelico in design, and a portion of Turner's knowledge of the clouds. There is nothing impossible in such a conjunction as this. Correggio, trained in another school, might have even himself shown some such extent of grasp; and in Turner's picture of the dragon of the Hesperides, Jason, vignette to Voyage of Columbus ("Slowly along the evening sky they went"), and such others, as well as in many of the works of Watts and Rosetti, is already visible, as I trust, the dawn of a new era of art, in a true unison of the grotesque with the realistic power.§ 8. There is, however, unquestionably, a severe limit, in the case of all inferior masters, to the degree in which they may venture to realize grotesque conception, and partly, also, a limit in the nature of the thing itself, there being many grotesque ideas which may be with safety suggested dimly by words or slight lines, but which will hardly bear being painted into perfect definiteness. It is very difficult, in reasoning on this matter, to divest ourselves of the prejudices which have been forced upon us by the base grotesque of men like Bronzino, who, having no true imagination, are apt, more than others, to try by startling realism to enforce the monstrosity that has no terror in itself. But it is nevertheless true, that, unless in the hands of the very greatest men, the grotesque seems better to be expressed merely in line, or light and shade, or mere abstract color, so as to mark it for a thought rather than a substantial fact. Even if Albert Durer had perfectly painted his Knight and Death, I question if we should feel it so great a thought as we do in the dark engraving. Blake, perfectly powerful in the etched grotesque of the book of Job, fails always more or less as soon as he adds color; not merely for want of power (his eye for color being naturally good), but because his subjects seem, in a sort, insusceptible of completion; and the two inexpressibly noble and pathetic woodcut grotesques of Alfred Rethel's, Death the Avenger, and Death the Friend, could not, I think, but with disadvantage, be advanced into pictorial color.And what is thus doubtfully true of the pathetic grotesque, is assuredly and always true of the jesting grotesque. So far as it expresses any transient flash of wit or satire, the less labor of line, or color, given to its expression the better; elaborate jesting being always intensely painful.§ 9. For these several reasons, it seems not only permissible, but even desirable, that the art by which the grotesque is expressed should be more or less imperfect, and this seems a most beneficial ordinance as respects the human race in general. For the grotesque being not only a most forceful instrument of teaching, but a most natural manner of expression, springing as it does at once from any tendency to playfulness in minds highly comprehensive of truth; and being also one of the readiest ways in which such satire or wit as may be possessed by menof any inferior rank of mind can be for perpetuity expressed, it becomes on all grounds desirable that what is suggested in times of play should be rightly sayable without toil; and what occurs to men of inferior power or knowledge, sayable without any high degree of skill. Hence it is an infinite good to mankind when there is full acceptance of the grotesque, slightly sketched or expressed; and, if field for such expression be frankly granted, an enormous mass of intellectual power is turned to everlasting use, which, in this present century of ours, evaporates in street gibing or vain revelling; all the good wit and satire expiring in daily talk, (like foam on wine,) which in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had a permitted and useful expression in the arts of sculpture and illumination, like foam fixed into chalcedony. It is with a view (not the least important among many others bearing upon art) to the reopening of this great field of human intelligence, long entirely closed, that I am striving to introduce Gothic architecture into daily domestic use; and to revive the art of illumination, properly so called; not the art of miniature-painting in books, or on vellum, which has ridiculously been confused with it; but of makingwriting, simple writing, beautiful to the eye, by investing it with the great chord of perfect color, blue, purple, scarlet, white, and gold, and in that chord of color, permitting the continual play of the fancy of the writer in every species of grotesque imagination, carefully excluding shadow; the distinctive difference between illumination and painting proper, being, that illumination admitsnoshadows, but only gradations of pure color. And it is in this respect that illumination is specially fitted for grotesque expression; for, when I used the term "pictorialcolor," just now, in speaking of the completion of the grotesque of Death the Avenger, I meant to distinguish such color from the abstract, shadeless hues which are eminently fitted for grotesque thought. The requirement, respecting the slighter grotesque, is only that it shall beincompletelyexpressed. It may have light and shade without color (as in etching and sculpture), or color without light and shade (illumination), but must not, except in the hands of the greatest masters, have both. And for some conditions of the playfulgrotesque, the abstract color is a much more delightful element of expression than the abstract light and shade.§ 10. Such being the manifold and precious uses of the true grotesque, it only remains for us to note carefully how it is to be distinguished from the false and vicious grotesque which results from idleness, instead of noble rest; from malice, instead of the solemn contemplation of necessary evil; and from general degradation of the human spirit, instead of its subjection, or confusion, by thoughts too high for it. It is easy for the reader to conceive how different the fruits of two such different states of mindmustbe; and yet how like in many respects, and apt to be mistaken, one for the other;—how the jest which springs from mere fatuity, and vacant want of penetration or purpose, is everlastingly, infinitely, separated from, and yet may sometimes be mistaken for, the bright, playful, fond, far-sighted jest of Plato, or the bitter, purposeful, sorrowing jest of Aristophanes; how, again, the horror which springs from guilty love of foulness and sin, may be often mistaken for the inevitable horror which a great mind must sometimes feel in the full and penetrative sense of their presence;—how, finally, the vague and foolish inconsistencies of undisciplined dream or reverie may be mistaken for the compelled inconsistencies of thoughts too great to be well sustained, or clearly uttered. It is easy, I say, to understand what a difference there must indeed be between these; and yet how difficult it may be always to define it, or lay down laws for the discovery of it, except by the just instinct of minds set habitually in all things to discern right from wrong.§ 11. Nevertheless, one good and characteristic instance may be of service in marking the leading directions in which the contrast is discernible. On the opposite page, Plate I., I have put, beside each other, a piece of true grotesque, from the Lombard-Gothic, and of false grotesque from classical (Roman) architecture. They are both griffins; the one on the left carries on his back one of the main pillars of the porch of the cathedral of Verona; the one on the right is on the frieze of the temple of Antoninus and Faustina at Rome, much celebrated by Renaissance and bad modern architects.In some respects, however, this classical griffin deserves itsreputation. It is exceedingly fine in lines of composition, and, I believe (I have not examined the original closely), very exquisite in execution. For these reasons, it is all the better for our purpose. I do not want to compare the worst false grotesque with the best true, but rather, on the contrary, the best false with the simplest true, in order to see how the delicately wrought lie fails in the presence of the rough truth; for rough truth in the present case it is, the Lombard sculpture being altogether untoward and imperfect in execution.[35]§ 12. "Well, but," the reader says, "what do you mean by callingeitherof them true? There never were such beasts in the world as either of these?"No, never: but the difference is, that the Lombard workman did really see a griffin in his imagination, and carved it from the life, meaning to declare to all ages that he had verily seen with his immortal eyes such a griffin as that; but the classical workman never saw a griffin at all, nor anything else; but put the whole thing together by line and rule.§ 13. "How do you know that?"Very easily. Look at the two, and think over them. You know a griffin is a beast composed of lion and eagle. The classical workman set himself to fit these together in the most ornamental way possible. He accordingly carves a sufficiently satisfactory lion's body, then attaches very gracefully cut wings to the sides: then, because he cannot get the eagle's head on the broad lion's shoulders, fits the two together by something like a horse's neck (some griffins being wholly composed of a horse and eagle), then, finding the horse's neck look weak and unformidable, he strengthens it by a series of bosses, like vertebrae, in front, and by a series of spiny cusps, instead of a mane, on the ridge; next, not to lose the whole leonine character about the neck, he gives a remnant of the lion's beard, turned into a sort of griffin's whisker, and nicely curled and pointed; then an eye, probably meant to look grand and abstracted, and therefore neither lion's nor eagle's; and,finally, an eagle's beak, very sufficiently studied from a real one. The whole head being, it seems to him, still somewhat wanting in weight and power, he brings forward the right wing behind it, so as to enclose it with a broad line. This is the finest thing in the composition, and very masterly, both in thought, and in choice of the exactly right point where the lines of wing and beak should intersect (and it may be noticed in passing, that all men, who can compose at all, have this habit of encompassing or governing broken lines with broad ones, wherever it is possible, of which we shall see many instances hereafter). The whole griffin, thus gracefully composed, being, nevertheless, when all is done, a very composed griffin, is set to very quiet work, and raising his left foot, to balance his right wing, sets it on the tendril of a flower so lightly as not even to bend it down, though, in order to reach it, his left leg is made half as long again as his right.§ 14. We may be pretty sure, if the carver had ever seen a griffin, he would have reported of him as doing something else thanthatwith his feet. Let us see what the Lombardic workman saw him doing.Remember, first, the griffin, though part lion and part eagle, has the unitedpower of both. He is not merely a bit of lion and a bit of eagle, but whole lion, incorporate with whole eagle. So when we really see one, we may be quite sure we shall not find him wanting in anything necessary to the might either of beast or bird.Well, among things essential to the might of a lion, perhaps, on the whole, the most essential are histeeth. He could get on pretty well even without his claws, usually striking his prey down with a blow, woundless; but he could by no means get on without his teeth. Accordingly, we see that the real or Lombardic griffin has the carnivorous teeth bare to the root, and the peculiar hanging of the jaw at the back, which marks the flexible and gaping mouth of the devouring tribes.Again; among things essential to the might of an eagle, next to his wings (which are of course prominent in both examples), are hisclaws. It is no use his being able to tear anything with his beak, if he cannot first hold it in his claws; he has comparatively no leonine power of striking with his feet, but amagnificent power of grip with them. Accordingly, we see that the real griffin, while his feet are heavy enough to strike like a lion's, has them also extended far enough to give them the eagle's grip with the back claw; and has, moreover, some of the bird-like wrinkled skin over the whole foot, marking this binding power the more; and that he has besides verily got something to hold with his feet, other than a flower, of which more presently.§ 15. Now observe, the Lombardic workman did not do all this because he had thought it out, as you and I are doing together; he never thought a bit about it. He simply saw the beast; saw it as plainly as you see the writing on this page, and of course could not be wrong in anything he told us of it.Well, what more does he tell us? Another thing, remember, essential to an eagle is that it should flyfast. It is no use its having wings at all if it is to be impeded in the use of them. Now it would be difficult to impede him more thoroughly than by giving him two cocked ears to catch the wind.Look, again, at the two beasts. You see the false griffinhasthem so set, and, consequently, as he flew, there would be a continual humming of the wind on each side of his head, and he would have an infallible earache when he got home. But the real griffin has his ears flat to his head, and all the hair of them blown back, even to a point, by his fast flying, and the aperture is downwards, that he may hear anything going on upon the earth, where his prey is. In the false griffin the aperture is upwards.§ 16. Well, what more? As he is made up of the natures of lion and eagle, we may be very certain that a real griffin is, on the whole, fond of eating, and that his throat will look as if he occasionally took rather large pieces, besides being flexible enough to let him bend and stretch his head in every direction as he flies.Look, again, at the two beasts. You see the false one has got those bosses upon his neck like vertebrae, which must be infinitely in his way when he is swallowing, and which are evidently inseparable, so that he cannotstretchhis neck any more than a horse. But the real griffin is all loose about the neck, evidently being able to make it almost as much longer as helikes; to stretch and bend it anywhere, and swallow anything, besides having some of the grand strength of the bull's dewlap in it when at rest.§ 17. What more? Having both lion and eagle in him, it is probable that the real griffin will have an infinite look of repose as well as power of activity. One of the notablest things about a lion is his magnificentindolence, his look of utter disdain of trouble when there is no occasion for it; as, also, one of the notablest things about an eagle is his look of inevitable vigilance, even when quietest. Look, again, at the two beasts. You see the false griffin is quite sleepy and dead in the eye, thus contradicting his eagle's nature, but is putting himself to a great deal of unnecessary trouble with his paws, holding one in a most painful position merely to touch a flower, and bearing the whole weight of his body on the other, thus contradicting his lion's nature.But the real griffin is primarily, with his eagle's nature, wide awake; evidently quite ready for whatever may happen; and with his lion's nature, laid all his length on his belly, prone and ponderous; his two paws as simply put out before him as a drowsy puppy's on a drawingroom hearth-rug; not but that he has got something to do with them, worthy of such paws; but he takes not one whit more trouble about it than is absolutely necessary. He has merely got a poisonous winged dragon to hold, and for such a little matter as that, he may as well do it lying down and at his ease, looking out at the same time for any other piece of work in his way. He takes the dragon by the middle, one paw under the wing, another above, gathers him up into a knot, puts two or three of his claws well into his back, crashing through the scales of it and wrinkling all the flesh up from the wound, flattens him down against the ground, and so lets him do what he likes. The dragon tries to bite him, but can only bring his head round far enough to get hold of his own wing, which he bites in agony instead; flapping the griffin's dewlap with it, and wriggling his tail up against the griffin's throat; the griffin being, as to these minor proceedings, entirely indifferent, sure that the dragon's body cannot drag itself one hair's breadth off those ghastly claws, and that its head can do no harm but to itself.§ 18. Now observe how in all this, through every separate part and action of the creature, the imagination isalwaysright. It evidentlycannoterr; it meets every one of our requirements respecting the griffin as simply as if it were gathering up the bones of the real creature out of some ancient rock. It does not itself know or care, any more than the peasant laboring with his spade and axe, what is wanted to meet our theories or fancies. It knows simply what is there, and brings out the positive creature, errorless, unquestionable. So it is throughout art, and in all that the imagination does; if anything be wrong it is not the imagination's fault, but some inferior faculty's, which would have its foolish say in the matter, and meddled with the imagination, and said, the bones ought to be put together tail first, or upside down.§ 19. This, however, we need not be amazed at, because the very essence of the imagination is already defined to be the seeing to the heart; and it is not therefore wonderful that it should never err; but it is wonderful, on the other hand, how the composing legalism doesnothing elsethan err. One would have thought that, by mere chance, in this or the other element of griffin, the griffin-composer might have struck out a truth; that he might have had the luck to set the ears back, or to give some grasp to the claw. But, no; from beginning to end it is evidently impossible for him to be anything but wrong; his whole soul is instinct with lies; no veracity can come within hail of him; to him, all regions of right and life are for ever closed.§ 20. And another notable point is, that while the imagination receives truth in this simple way, it is all the while receiving statutes of composition also, far more noble than those for the sake of which the truth was lost by the legalist. The ornamental lines in the classical griffin appear at first finer than in the other; but they only appear so because they are more commonplace and more palpable. The subtlety of the sweeping and rolling curves in the real griffin, the way they waver and change and fold, down the neck, and along the wing, and in and out among the serpent coils, is incomparably grander, merely as grouping of ornamental line, than anything in the other; nor is it fine as ornamental only, but as massively useful, giving weight of stone enough to answer the entire purpose of pedestal sculpture. Note, especially, the insertion of the three plumes of the dragon's broken wing in the outer angle, just under the large coil of his body; this filling of the gap being one of the necessities, not of the pedestal block merely, but a means of getting mass and breadth, which all composers desire more or less, but which they seldom so perfectly accomplish.So that taking the truth first, the honest imagination gains everything; it has its griffinism, and grace, and usefulness, all at once: but the false composer, caring for nothing but himself and his rules, loses everything,—griffinism, grace, and all.PLATE 1PLATE 1J. Ruskin.R. P. Cuff.From Lithograph.R. P. Cuff.1. True and False Griffins.Mediæval.Classical.§ 21. I believe the reader will now sufficiently see how the terms "true" and "false" are in the most accurate sense attachable to the opposite branches of what might appear at first, in both cases, the merest wildness of inconsistent reverie. But they are even to be attached, in a deeper sense than that in which we have hitherto used them, to these two compositions. For the imagination hardly ever works in this intense way, unencumbered by the inferior faculties, unless it be under the influence of some solemn purpose or sentiment. And to all the falseness and all the verity of these two ideal creatures this farther falsehood and verity have yet to be added, that the classical griffin has, at least in this place, no other intent than that of covering a level surface with entertaining form; but the Lombardic griffin is a profound expression of the most passionate symbolism. Under its eagle's wings are two wheels,[36]which mark it as connected, in the mind of him who wrought it, with the living creatures of the vision of Ezekiel: "When they went, the wheels went by them, and whithersoever the spirit was to go, they went, and the wheels were lifted up over against them, for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels." Thus signed, the winged shape becomes at once one of the acknowledged symbols of the Divine power; and, in its unity of lion and eagle, the workman of the middle ages always means to set forth the unity of the human and divine natures,[37]In this unity it bears up the pillars of the Church, set for everas the corner stone. And the faithful and true imagination beholds it, in this unity, with everlasting vigilance and calm omnipotence, restrain the seed of the serpent crushed upon the earth; leaving the head of it free, only for a time, that it may inflict in its fury profounder destruction upon itself,—in this also full of deep meaning. The Divine power does not slay the evil creature. It wounds and restrains it only. Its final anddeadlywound is inflicted by itself.
"Invoke his warlike spirit,And your great uncle's, Edward the Black Prince,Who on the French ground play'd a tragedy,Making defeat on the full power of France,While his most mighty father on a hillStood smiling, to behold his lion's whelpForage in blood of French nobility."
So a common idealist would have been rather alarmed at the thought of introducing the name of a street in Paris—Straw Street—Rue de Fouarre—into the midst of a description of the highest heavens. Not so Dante,—
"Beyond, thou mayst the flaming lustre scanOf Isidore, of Bede, and that RichartWho was in contemplation more than man.And he, from whom thy looks returning areTo me, a spirit was, that in austereDeep musings often thought death kept too far.That is the light eternal of Sigier,Who while in Rue de Fouarre his days he wore,Has argued hateful truths in haughtiest ear."Cayley.
What did it matter to Dante, up in heaven there, whether the mob below thought him vulgar or not! Sigierhadread in Straw Street; that was the fact, and he had to say so, and there an end.
§ 9. There is, indeed, perhaps, no greater sign of innate andrealvulgarity of mind or defective education than the want of power to understand the universality of the ideal truth; the absence of sympathy with the colossal grasp of those intellects, which have in them so much of divine, that nothing is small to them, and nothing large; but with equal and unoffended vision they take in the sum of the world,—Straw Street and the seventh heavens,—in the same instant. A certain portion of this divine spirit is visible even in the lower examples of all the true men; it is, indeed, perhaps, the clearest test of their belonging to the true and great group, that they are continually touching what to the multitude appear vulgarities. The higher a man stands, the more the word "vulgar" becomes unintelligible to him. Vulgar? what, that poor farmer's girl of William Hunt's, bred in the stable, putting on her Sunday gown, and pinning her best cap out of the green and red pin-cushion! Not so; she may be straight on the road to those high heavens, and may shine hereafter as one of the stars in the firmament for ever. Nay, even that lady in the satin bodice with her arm laid over a balustrade to show it, and her eyes turned up to heaven to show them; and the sportsman waving his rifle for the terror of beasts, and displaying his perfect dress for the delight of men, are kept, by the very misery and vanity of them, in the thoughts of a great painter, at a sorrowful level, somewhat above vulgarity. It is only when the minor painter takes them on his easel, that they become things for the universe to be ashamed of.
We may dismiss this matter of vulgarity in plain and few words, at least as far as regards art. There is never vulgarity in awholetruth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation.
§ 10. "Well, but," (at this point the reader asks doubtfully,) "if then your great central idealist is to show all truth, low as well as lovely, receiving it in this passive way, what becomes of all your principles of selection, and of setting in the right place, which you were talking about up to the end of your fourth paragraph? How is Homer to enforce upon Achilles the cutting of the pork chops 'only at such time as Homer chooses,' if Homer is to havenochoice, but merely to see the thing done, and sing it as he sees it?" Why, the choice, as well as the vision, ismanifestedto Homer. The vision comes to him in its chosen order. Chosenforhim, notbyhim, but yet full of visible and exquisite choice, just as a sweet and perfect dream will come to a sweet and perfect person, so that, in some sense, they may be said to have chosen their dream, or composed it; and yet they could not help dreaming it so, and in no other wise. Thus, exactly thus, in all results of true inventive power, the whole harmony of the thing done seems as if it had been wrought by the most exquisite rules. But to him who did it, it presented itself so, and his will, and knowledge, and personality, for the moment went for nothing; he became simply a scribe, and wrote what he heard and saw.
And all efforts to do things of a similar kind by rule or by thought, and all efforts to mend or rearrange the first order of the vision, are not inventive; on the contrary, they ignore and deny invention. If any man, seeing certain forms laid on the canvas, does by his reasoning power determine that certain changes wrought in them would mend or enforce them, that is not only uninventive, but contrary to invention, which must be the involuntary occurrence of certain forms or fancies to the mind in the order they are to be portrayed. Thus the knowing of rules and the exertion of judgment have a tendency to check and confuse the fancy in its flow; so that it will follow, that, in exact proportion as a master knows anything about rules of right and wrong, he is likely to be uninventive; and in exactproportion as he holds higher rank and has nobler inventive power, he will know less of rules; not despising them, but simply feeling that between him and them there is nothing in common,—that dreams cannot be ruled—that as they come, so they must be caught, and they cannot be caught in any other shape than that they come in; and that he might as well attempt to rule a rainbow into rectitude, or cut notches in a moth's wings to hold it by, as in any wise attempt to modify, by rule, the forms of the involuntary vision.
§ 11. And this, which by reason we have thus anticipated, is in reality universally so. There is no exception. The great men never know how or why they do things. They have no rules; cannot comprehend the nature of rules;—do not, usually, even know, in what they do, what is best or what is worst: to them it is all the same; something they cannot help saying or doing,—one piece of it as good as another, and none of it (it seems tothem) worth much. The moment any man begins to talk about rules, in whatsoever art, you may know him for a second-rate man; and, if he talks about themmuch, he is a third-rate, or not an artist at all. Tothisrule there is no exception in any art; but it is perhaps better to be illustrated in the art of music than in that of painting. I fell by chance the other day upon a work of De Stendhal's, "Vies de Haydn, de Mozart, et de Metastase," fuller of common sense than any book I ever read on the arts; though I see, by the slight references made occasionally to painting, that the author's knowledge therein is warped and limited by the elements of general teaching in the schools around him; and I have not yet, therefore, looked at what he has separately written on painting. But one or two passages out of this book on music are closely to our present purpose.
"Counterpoint is related to mathematics: a fool, with patience, becomes a respectable savant in that; but for the part of genius, melody, it has no rules. No art is so utterly deprived of precepts for the production of the beautiful. So much the better for it and for us. Cimarosa, when first at Prague his air was executed, Pria che spunti in ciel l'Aurora, never heard the pedants say to him, 'Your air is fine, because you have followed such and such a rule established by Pergolesein such an one of his airs; but it would be finer still if you had conformed yourself to such another rule from which Galluppi never deviated.'"
Yes: "so much the better for it, and for us;" but I trust the time will soon come when melody in painting will be understood, no less than in music, and when people will find that, there also, the great melodists have no rules, and cannot have any, and that there are in this, as in sound, "no precepts for the production of the beautiful."
§ 12. Again. "Behold, my friend, an example of that simple way of answering which embarrasses much. One asked him (Haydn) thereasonfor a harmony—for a passage's being assigned to one instrument rather than another; but all he ever answered was, 'I have done it, because it does well.'" Farther on, De Stendhal relates an anecdote of Haydn; I believe one well known, but so much to our purpose that I repeat it. Haydn had agreed to give some lessons in counterpoint to an English nobleman. "'For our first lesson,' said the pupil, already learned in the art—drawing at the same time a quatuor of Haydn's from his pocket, 'for our first lesson may we examine this quatuor; and will you tell me the reasons of certain modulations, which I cannot entirely approve because they are contrary to the principles?' Haydn, a little surprised, declared himself ready to answer. The nobleman began; and at the very first measures found matter for objection. Haydn,who invented habitually, and who was the contrary of a pedant, found himself much embarrassed, and answered always, 'I have done that because it has a good effect. I have put that passage there because it does well.' The Englishman, who judged that these answers proved nothing, recommenced his proofs, and demonstrated to him, by very good reasons, that his quatuor was good for nothing. 'But, my lord, arrange this quatuor then to your fancy,—play it so, and you will see which of the two ways is the best.' 'But why is yours the best which is contrary to the rules?' 'Because it is the pleasantest.' The nobleman replied. Haydn at last lost patience, and said, 'I see, my lord, it is you who have the goodness to give lessons to me, and truly I am forced to confess to you that I do not deserve the honor.' The partizan of the rules departed, stillastonished that in following the rules to the letter one cannot infallibly produce a 'Matrimonio Segreto.'"
This anecdote, whether in all points true or not, is in its tendency most instructive, except only in that it makesonefalse inference or admission, namely, that a good composition can becontraryto the rules. It may be contrary to certain principles, supposed in ignorance to be general; but every great composition is in perfect harmony with all true rules, and involves thousands too delicate for ear, or eye, or thought, to trace; still it is possible to reason, with infinite pleasure and profit, about these principles, when the thing is once done; only, all our reasoning will not enable any one to do another thing like it, because all reasoning falls infinitely short of the divine instinct. Thus we may reason wisely over the way a bee builds its comb, and be profited by finding out certain things about the angles of it. But the bee knows nothing about those matters. It builds its comb in a far more inevitable way. And, from a bee to Paul Veronese, all master-workers work with this awful, this inspired unconsciousness.
§ 13. I said just now that there was no exception tothislaw, that the great men never knew how or why they did things. It is, of course, only with caution that such a broad statement should be made; but I have seen much of different kinds of artists, and I have always found the knowledge of, and attention to, rules soaccuratelyin the inverse ratio to the power of the painter, that I have myself no doubt that the law is constant, and that men's smallness may be trigonometrically estimated by the attention which, in their work, they pay to principles, especially principles of composition. The general way in which the great men speak is of "tryingto do" this or that, just as a child would tell of something he had seen and could not utter. Thus, in speaking of the drawing of which I have given an etching farther on (a scene on the St. Gothard[27]), Turner asked if I had been to see "that litter of stones which Iendeavoredto represent;" and William Hunt, when I asked him one day as he was painting, why he put on such and such a color, answered, "I don't know; I am justaimingat it;" andTurner, and he, and all the other men I have known who could paint, always spoke and speak in the same way; not in any selfish restraint of their knowledge, but in pure simplicity. While all the men whom I know, whocannotpaint, are ready with admirable reasons for everything they have done; and can show, in the most conclusive way, that Turner is wrong, and how he might be improved.
§ 14. And this is the reason for the somewhat singular, but very palpable truth that the Chinese, and Indians, and other semi-civilized nations, can color better than we do, and that an Indian shawl or Chinese vase are still, in invention of color, inimitable by us. It is their glorious ignorance of all rules that does it; the pure and true instincts have play, and do their work,—instincts so subtle, that the least warping or compression breaks or blunts them; and the moment we begin teaching people any rules about color, and make them do this or that, we crush the instinct generally for ever. Hence, hitherto, it has been an actual necessity, in order to obtain power of coloring, that a nation should be half-savage: everybody could color in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; but we were ruled and legalized into grey in the fifteenth;—only a little salt simplicity of their sea natures at Venice still keeping their precious, shellfishy purpleness and power; and now that is gone; and nobody can color anywhere, except the Hindoos and Chinese; but that need not be so, and will not be so long; for, in a little while, people will find out their mistake, and give up talking about rules of color, and then everybody will color again, as easily as they now talk.
§ 15. Such, then, being the generally passive or instinctive character of right invention, it may be asked how these unmanageable instincts are to be rendered practically serviceable in historical or poetical painting,—especially historical, in which given facts are to be represented. Simply by the sense and self-control of the whole man; not by control of the particular fancy or vision. He who habituates himself, in his daily life, to seek for the stern facts in whatever he hears or sees, will have these facts again brought before him by the involuntary imaginative power in their noblest associations; and he who seeks for frivolities and fallacies, will have frivolities and fallacies again presented to him in his dreams. Thus if, in reading history for the purpose of painting from it, the painter severely seeks for the accurate circumstances of every event; as, for instance, determining the exact spot of ground on which his hero fell, the way he must have been looking at the moment, the height the sun was at (by the hour of the day), and the way in which the light must have fallen upon his face, the actual number and individuality of the persons by him at the moment, and such other veritable details, ascertaining and dwelling upon them without the slightest care for any desirableness or poetic propriety in them, but for their own truth's sake; then these truths will afterwards rise up and form the body of his imaginative vision, perfected and united as his inspiration may teach. But if, in reading the history, he does not regard these facts, but thinks only how it might all most prettily, and properly, and impressively have happened, then there is nothing but prettiness and propriety to form the body of his future imagination, and his whole ideal becomes false. So, in the higher or expressive part of the work, the whole virtue of it depends on his being able to quit his own personality, and enter successively into the hearts and thoughts of each person; and in all this he is still passive: in gathering the truth he is passive, not determining what the truth to be gathered shall be; and in the after vision he is passive, not determining, but as his dreams will have it, what the truth to be represented shall be; only according to his own nobleness is his power of entering into the hearts of noble persons, and the general character of his dream of them.[28]
§ 16. It follows from all this, evidently, that a great idealist never can be egotistic. The whole of his power depends upon his losing sight and feeling of his own existence, and becoming a mere witness and mirror of truth, and a scribe of visions,—always passive in sight, passive in utterance,—lamenting continually that he cannot completely reflect nor clearly utter all he has seen. Not by any means a proud state for a man to be in. But the man who has no invention is always setting things inorder, and putting the world to rights, and mending, and beautifying, and pluming himself on his doings as supreme in all ways.
§ 17. There is still the question open, What are the principal directions in which this ideal faculty is to exercise itself most usefully for mankind?
This question, however, is not to the purpose of our present work, which respects landscape-painting only; it must be one of those left open to the reader's thoughts, and for future inquiry in another place. One or two essential points I briefly notice.
In Chap.IV. § 5. it was said, that one of the first functions of imagination was traversing the scenes of history, and forcing the facts to become again visible. But there is so little of such force in written history, that it is no marvel there should be none hitherto in painting. There does not exist, as far as I know, in the world a single example of a good historical picture (that is to say, of one which, allowing for necessary dimness in art as compared with nature, yet answers nearly the same ends in our minds as the sight of the real event would have answered); the reason being, the universal endeavor to geteffectsinstead of facts, already shown as the root of false idealism. True historical ideal, founded on sense, correctness of knowledge, and purpose of usefulness, does not yet exist; the production of it is a task which the closing nineteenth century may propose to itself.
§ 18. Another point is to be observed. I do not, as the reader may have lately perceived, insist on the distinction between historical and poetical painting, because, as noted in the 22nd paragraph of the third chapter, all great painting must be both.
Nevertheless, a certain distinction must generally exist between men who, like Horace Vernet, David, or Domenico Tintoret, would employ themselves in painting, more or less graphically, the outward verities of passing events—battles, councils, &c.—of their day (who, supposing them to work worthily of their mission, would become, properly so called, historical or narrative painters); and men who sought, in scenes of perhaps less outward importance, "noble grounds for noble emotion;"—who would be, in a certain separate sense,poeticalpainters,some of them taking for subjects events which had actually happened, and others themes from the poets; or, better still, becoming poets themselves in the entire sense, and inventing the story as they painted it. Painting seems to me only just to be beginning, in this sense also, to take its proper position beside literature, and the pictures of the "Awakening Conscience," "Huguenot," and such others, to be the first fruits of its new effort.
§ 19. Finally, as far as I can observe, it is a constant law that the greatest men, whether poets or historians, live entirely in their own age, and that the greatest fruits of their work are gathered out of their own age. Dante paints Italy in the thirteenth century; Chaucer, England in the fourteenth; Masaccio, Florence in the fifteenth; Tintoret, Venice in the sixteenth;—all of them utterly regardless of anachronism and minor error of every kind, but getting always vital truth out of the vital present.
§ 20. If it be said that Shakspere wrote perfect historical plays on subjects belonging to the preceding centuries, I answer, that theyareperfect plays just because there is no care about centuries in them, but a life which all men recognise for the human life of all time; and this it is, not because Shakspere sought to give universal truth, but because, painting honestly and completely from the men about him, he painted that human nature which is, indeed, constant enough,—a rogue in the fifteenth century being,at heart, what a rogue is in the nineteenth and was in the twelfth; and an honest or a knightly man being, in like manner, very similar to other such at any other time. And the work of these great idealists is, therefore, always universal; not because it isnot portrait, but because it iscompleteportrait down to the heart, which is the same in all ages: and the work of the mean idealists isnotuniversal, not because it is portrait, but because it ishalfportrait,—of the outside, the manners and the dress, not of the heart. Thus Tintoret and Shakspere paint, both of them, simply Venetian and English nature as they saw it in their time, down to the root; and it does foralltime; but as for any care to cast themselves into the particular ways and tones of thought, or custom, of past time in their historical work, you will find it inneither of them, nor in any other perfectly great man that I know of.
§ 21. If there had been no vital truth in their present, it is hard to say what these men could have done. I suppose, primarily, they would not have existed; that they, and the matter they have to treat of, are given together, and that the strength of the nation and its historians correlatively rise and fall—Herodotus springing out of the dust of Marathon. It is also hard to say how far our better general acquaintance with minor details of past history may make us able to turn the shadow on the imaginative dial backwards, and naturally to live, and even live strongly if we choose, in past periods; but this main truth will always be unshaken, that the only historical painting deserving the name is portraiture of our own living men and our own passing times,[29]and that all efforts to summon up the events of bygone periods, though often useful and touching, must come under an inferior class of poetical painting; nor will it, I believe, ever be much followed as their main work by the strongest men, but only by the weaker and comparatively sentimental (rather than imaginative) groups. This marvellous first half of the nineteenth century has in this matter, as in nearly all others, been making a double blunder. It has, under the name of improvement, done all it could toEFFACE THE RECORDSwhich departed ages have left of themselves, while it has declared theFORGERY OF FALSE RECORDSof these same ages to be the great work of its historical painters! I trust that in a few years more we shall come somewhat to our senses in the matter, and begin to perceive that our duty is to preserve what the past has had to say for itself, and to say for ourselves also what shall be true for the future. Let us strive, with just veneration for that future, first to do what is worthy to be spoken, and then to speak it faithfully; and, with veneration for the past, recognize that it is indeed in the power of love to preserve the monument, but not of incantation to raise the dead.
[24]The word "ideal" is used in this limited sense in the chapter on Generic Beauty in the second volume, but under protest. See § 4 in that chapter.
[24]The word "ideal" is used in this limited sense in the chapter on Generic Beauty in the second volume, but under protest. See § 4 in that chapter.
[25]II. ix. 209.
[25]II. ix. 209.
[26]"And yet you have just said it shall be at such time and place as Homer chooses. Is not thisaltering?" No; wait a little, and read on.
[26]"And yet you have just said it shall be at such time and place as Homer chooses. Is not thisaltering?" No; wait a little, and read on.
[27]See Plate XXI. in Chap. III. Vol. IV.
[27]See Plate XXI. in Chap. III. Vol. IV.
[28]The reader should, of course, refer for further details on this subject to the chapters on Imagination in Vol. II., of which I am only glancing now at the practical results.
[28]The reader should, of course, refer for further details on this subject to the chapters on Imagination in Vol. II., of which I am only glancing now at the practical results.
[29]See Edinburgh Lectures, p. 217.
[29]See Edinburgh Lectures, p. 217.
§ 1. I have already, in the Stones of Venice, had occasion to analyze, as far as I was able, the noble nature and power of grotesque conception; I am not sorry occasionally to refer the reader to that work, the fact being that it and this are parts of one whole, divided merely as I had occasion to follow out one or other of its branches; for I have always considered architecture as an essential part of landscape; and I think the study of its best styles and real meaning one of the necessary functions of the landscape-painter; as, in like manner, the architect cannot be a master-workman until all his designs are guided by understanding of the wilder beauty of pure nature. But, be this as it may, the discussion of the grotesque element belonged most properly to the essay on architecture, in which that element must always find its fullest development.
§ 2. The Grotesque is in that chapter[30]divided principally into three kinds:
(A). Art arising from healthful but irrational play of the imagination in times of rest.
(B). Art arising from irregular and accidental contemplation of terrible things; or evil in general.
(C). Art arising from the confusion of the imagination by the presence of truths which it cannot wholly grasp.
It is the central form of this art, arising from contemplation of evil, which forms the link of connection between it and the sensualist ideals, as pointed out above in the second paragraph of the sixth chapter, the fact being that the imagination, when at play, is curiously like bad children, and likes to play with fire; in its entirely serious moods it dwells by preference onbeautiful and sacred images, but in its mocking or playful moods it is apt to jest, sometimes bitterly, with undercurrent of sternest pathos, sometimes waywardly, sometimes slightly and wickedly, with death and sin; hence an enormous mass of grotesque art, some most noble and useful, as Holbein's Dance of Death, and Albert Durer's Knight and Death,[31]going down gradually through various conditions of less and less seriousness into an art whose only end is that of mere excitement, or amusement by terror, like a child making mouths at another, more or less redeemed by the degree of wit or fancy in the grimace it makes, as in the demons of Teniers and such others; and, lower still, in the demonology of the stage.
§ 3. The form arising from an entirely healthful and open play of the imagination, as in Shakspere's Ariel and Titania, and in Scott's White Lady, is comparatively rare. It hardly ever is free from some slight taint of the inclination to evil; still more rarely is it, when so free, natural to the mind; for the moment we begin to contemplate sinless beauty we are apt to get serious; and moral fairy tales, and such other innocent work, are hardly ever truly, that is to say, naturally imaginative; but for the most part laborious inductions and compositions. The moment any real vitality enters them, they are nearly sure to become satirical, or slightly gloomy, and so connect themselves with the evil-enjoying branch.
§ 4. The third form of the Grotesque is a thoroughly noble one. It is that which arises out of the use or fancy of tangible signs to set forth an otherwise less expressible truth; including nearly the whole range of symbolical and allegorical art and poetry. Its nobleness has been sufficiently insisted upon in the place before referred to. (Chapter on Grotesque Renaissance, §§LXIII. LXIV.&c.) Of its practical use, especially in painting, deeply despised among us, because grossly misunderstood, a few words must be added here.
A fine grotesque is the expression, in a moment, by a series of symbols thrown together in bold and fearless connection, of truths which it would have taken a long time to express in any verbal way, and of which the connection is left for the beholderto work out for himself; the gaps, left or overleaped by the haste of the imagination, forming the grotesque character.
§ 5. For instance, Spenser desires to tell us, (1.) that envy is the most untamable and unappeasable of the passions, not to be soothed by any kindness; (2.) that with continual labor it invents evil thoughts out of its own heart; (3.) that even in this, its power of doing harm is partly hindered by the decaying and corrupting nature of the evil it lives in; (4.) that it looks every way, and that whatever it sees is altered and discolored by its own nature; (5.) which discoloring, however, is to it a veil, or disgraceful dress, in the sight of others; (6.) and that it never is free from the most bitter suffering, (7.) which cramps all its acts and movements, enfolding and crushing it while it torments. All this it has required a somewhat long and languid sentence for me to say in unsymbolical terms,—not, by the way, that theyareunsymbolical altogether, for I have been forced, whether I would or not, to usesomefigurative words; but even with this help the sentence is long and tiresome, and does not with any vigor represent the truth. It would take some prolonged enforcement of each sentence to make it felt, in ordinary ways of talking. But Spenser puts it all into a grotesque, and it is done shortly and at once, so that we feel it fully, and see it, and never forget it. I have numbered above the statements which had to be made. I now number them with the same numbers, as they occur in the several pieces of the grotesque:—
"And next to him malicious Envy rode(1.) Upon a ravenous wolfe, and (2. 3.) still did chawBetween his cankred[32]teeth a venemous todeThat all the poison ran about his jaw.(4. 5.) All in a kirtle of discolourd sayHe clothed was, y-paynted full of eies;(6.) And in his bosome secretly there layAn hatefull snake, the which his tail uptyes(7.) In many folds, and mortall sting implyes."
There is the whole thing in nine lines; or, rather, in one image, which will hardly occupy any room at all on the mind's shelves, but can be lifted out, whole, whenever we want it. All noble grotesques are concentrations of this kind, and thenoblest convey truths which nothing else could convey; and not only so, but convey them, in minor cases with a delightfulness,—in the higher instances with an awfulness,—which no mere utterance of the symbolised truth would have possessed, but which belongs to the effort of the mind to unweave the riddle, or to the sense it has of there being an infinite power and meaning in the thing seen, beyond all that is apparent therein, giving the highest sublimity even to the most trivial object so presented and so contemplated.
"'Jeremiah, what seest thou?''I see a seething pot, and the face thereof is toward the north,'Out of the north an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land.'"
And thus in all ages and among all nations, grotesque idealism has been the element through which the most appalling and eventful truth has been wisely conveyed, from the most sublime words of true Revelation, to the "ἀλλ᾿ ὅτ᾿ ἂν ἡμίονος βασιλεὐς," &c., of the oracles, and the more or less doubtful teaching of dreams; and so down to ordinary poetry. No element of imagination has a wider range, a more magnificent use, or so colossal a grasp of sacred truth.
§ 6. How, then, is this noble power best to be employed in the art of painting?
We hear it not unfrequently asserted that symbolism or personification should not be introduced in painting at all. Such assertions are in their grounds unintelligible, and in their substance absurd. Whatever is in words described as visible, may with all logical fitness[33]be rendered so by colors, and not only is this a legitimate branch of ideal art, but I believe there is hardly any other so widely useful and instructive; and I heartily wish that every great allegory which the poets ever invented were powerfully put on canvas, and easily accessible by all men, and that our artists were perpetually exciting themselves to invent more. And as far as authority bears on the question, the simple fact is that allegorical painting has been the delight of the greatest men and of the wisest multitudes, from the beginning of art, and will be till art expires. Orcagua's Triumph ofDeath; Simon Memmi's frescoes in the Spanish Chapel; Giotto's principal works at Assisi, and partly at the Arena; Michael Angelo's two best statues, the Night and Day; Albert Durer's noble Melancholy, and hundreds more of his best works; a full third, I should think, of the works of Tintoret and Veronese, and nearly as large a portion of those of Raphael and Rubens, are entirely symbolical or personifiant; and, except in the case of the last-named painter, are always among the most interesting works the painters executed. The greater and more thoughtful the artists, the more they delight in symbolism, and the more fearlessly they employ it. Dead symbolism, second-hand symbolism, pointless symbolism, are indeed objectionable enough; but so are most other things that are dead, second-hand, and pointless. It is also true that both symbolism and personification are somewhat more apt than most things to have their edges taken off by too much handling; and what with our modern Fames, Justices, and various metaphorical ideals, largely used for signs and other such purposes, there is some excuse for our not well knowing what the real power of personification is. But that power is gigantic and inexhaustible, and ever to be grasped with peculiar joy by the painter, because it permits him to introduce picturesque elements and flights of fancy into his work, which otherwise would be utterly inadmissible; to bring the wild beasts of the desert into the room of state, fill the air with inhabitants as well as the earth, and render the least (visibly) interesting incidents themes for the most thrilling drama. Even Tintoret might sometimes have been hard put to it, when he had to fill a large panel in the Ducal Palace with the portrait of a nowise interesting Doge, unless he had been able to lay a winged lion beside him, ten feet long from the nose to the tail, asleep upon the Turkey carpet; and Rubens could certainly have made his flatteries of Mary of Medicis palatable to no one but herself, without the help of rosy-cheeked goddesses of abundance, and seven-headed hydras of rebellion.
§ 7. For observe, not only does the introduction of these imaginary beings permit greater fantasticism ofincident, but also infinite fantasticism oftreatment; and, I believe, so far from the pursuit of the false ideal having in any wise exhausted therealms of fantastic imagination, those realms have hardly yet been entered, and that a universe of noble dream-land lies before us, yet to be conquered. For, hitherto, when fantastic creatures have been introduced, either the masters have been so realistic in temper that they made the spirits as substantial as their figures of flesh and blood,—as Rubens, and, for the most part, Tintoret; or else they have been weak and unpractised in realization, and have painted transparent or cloudy spirits because they had no power of painting grand ones. But if a really great painter, thoroughly capable of giving substantial truth, and master of the elements of pictorial effect which have been developed by modern art, would solemnly, and yet fearlessly, cast his fancy free in the spiritual world, and faithfully follow out such masters of that world as Dante and Spenser, there seems no limit to the splendor of thought which painting might express. Consider, for instance, how the ordinary personifications of Charity oscillate between the mere nurse of many children, of Reynolds, and the somewhat painfully conceived figure with flames issuing from the heart, of Giotto; and how much more significance might be given to the representation of Love, by amplifying with tenderness the thought of Dante, "Tanta rossa, che a pena fora dentro al foco nota,"[34]that is to say, by representing the loveliness of her face and form as all flushed with glow of crimson light, and, as she descended through heaven, all its clouds colored by her presence as they are by sunset. In the hands of a feeble painter, such an attempt would end in mere caricature; but suppose it taken up by Correggio, adding to his power of flesh-painting the (not inconsistent) feeling of Angelico in design, and a portion of Turner's knowledge of the clouds. There is nothing impossible in such a conjunction as this. Correggio, trained in another school, might have even himself shown some such extent of grasp; and in Turner's picture of the dragon of the Hesperides, Jason, vignette to Voyage of Columbus ("Slowly along the evening sky they went"), and such others, as well as in many of the works of Watts and Rosetti, is already visible, as I trust, the dawn of a new era of art, in a true unison of the grotesque with the realistic power.
§ 8. There is, however, unquestionably, a severe limit, in the case of all inferior masters, to the degree in which they may venture to realize grotesque conception, and partly, also, a limit in the nature of the thing itself, there being many grotesque ideas which may be with safety suggested dimly by words or slight lines, but which will hardly bear being painted into perfect definiteness. It is very difficult, in reasoning on this matter, to divest ourselves of the prejudices which have been forced upon us by the base grotesque of men like Bronzino, who, having no true imagination, are apt, more than others, to try by startling realism to enforce the monstrosity that has no terror in itself. But it is nevertheless true, that, unless in the hands of the very greatest men, the grotesque seems better to be expressed merely in line, or light and shade, or mere abstract color, so as to mark it for a thought rather than a substantial fact. Even if Albert Durer had perfectly painted his Knight and Death, I question if we should feel it so great a thought as we do in the dark engraving. Blake, perfectly powerful in the etched grotesque of the book of Job, fails always more or less as soon as he adds color; not merely for want of power (his eye for color being naturally good), but because his subjects seem, in a sort, insusceptible of completion; and the two inexpressibly noble and pathetic woodcut grotesques of Alfred Rethel's, Death the Avenger, and Death the Friend, could not, I think, but with disadvantage, be advanced into pictorial color.
And what is thus doubtfully true of the pathetic grotesque, is assuredly and always true of the jesting grotesque. So far as it expresses any transient flash of wit or satire, the less labor of line, or color, given to its expression the better; elaborate jesting being always intensely painful.
§ 9. For these several reasons, it seems not only permissible, but even desirable, that the art by which the grotesque is expressed should be more or less imperfect, and this seems a most beneficial ordinance as respects the human race in general. For the grotesque being not only a most forceful instrument of teaching, but a most natural manner of expression, springing as it does at once from any tendency to playfulness in minds highly comprehensive of truth; and being also one of the readiest ways in which such satire or wit as may be possessed by menof any inferior rank of mind can be for perpetuity expressed, it becomes on all grounds desirable that what is suggested in times of play should be rightly sayable without toil; and what occurs to men of inferior power or knowledge, sayable without any high degree of skill. Hence it is an infinite good to mankind when there is full acceptance of the grotesque, slightly sketched or expressed; and, if field for such expression be frankly granted, an enormous mass of intellectual power is turned to everlasting use, which, in this present century of ours, evaporates in street gibing or vain revelling; all the good wit and satire expiring in daily talk, (like foam on wine,) which in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had a permitted and useful expression in the arts of sculpture and illumination, like foam fixed into chalcedony. It is with a view (not the least important among many others bearing upon art) to the reopening of this great field of human intelligence, long entirely closed, that I am striving to introduce Gothic architecture into daily domestic use; and to revive the art of illumination, properly so called; not the art of miniature-painting in books, or on vellum, which has ridiculously been confused with it; but of makingwriting, simple writing, beautiful to the eye, by investing it with the great chord of perfect color, blue, purple, scarlet, white, and gold, and in that chord of color, permitting the continual play of the fancy of the writer in every species of grotesque imagination, carefully excluding shadow; the distinctive difference between illumination and painting proper, being, that illumination admitsnoshadows, but only gradations of pure color. And it is in this respect that illumination is specially fitted for grotesque expression; for, when I used the term "pictorialcolor," just now, in speaking of the completion of the grotesque of Death the Avenger, I meant to distinguish such color from the abstract, shadeless hues which are eminently fitted for grotesque thought. The requirement, respecting the slighter grotesque, is only that it shall beincompletelyexpressed. It may have light and shade without color (as in etching and sculpture), or color without light and shade (illumination), but must not, except in the hands of the greatest masters, have both. And for some conditions of the playfulgrotesque, the abstract color is a much more delightful element of expression than the abstract light and shade.
§ 10. Such being the manifold and precious uses of the true grotesque, it only remains for us to note carefully how it is to be distinguished from the false and vicious grotesque which results from idleness, instead of noble rest; from malice, instead of the solemn contemplation of necessary evil; and from general degradation of the human spirit, instead of its subjection, or confusion, by thoughts too high for it. It is easy for the reader to conceive how different the fruits of two such different states of mindmustbe; and yet how like in many respects, and apt to be mistaken, one for the other;—how the jest which springs from mere fatuity, and vacant want of penetration or purpose, is everlastingly, infinitely, separated from, and yet may sometimes be mistaken for, the bright, playful, fond, far-sighted jest of Plato, or the bitter, purposeful, sorrowing jest of Aristophanes; how, again, the horror which springs from guilty love of foulness and sin, may be often mistaken for the inevitable horror which a great mind must sometimes feel in the full and penetrative sense of their presence;—how, finally, the vague and foolish inconsistencies of undisciplined dream or reverie may be mistaken for the compelled inconsistencies of thoughts too great to be well sustained, or clearly uttered. It is easy, I say, to understand what a difference there must indeed be between these; and yet how difficult it may be always to define it, or lay down laws for the discovery of it, except by the just instinct of minds set habitually in all things to discern right from wrong.
§ 11. Nevertheless, one good and characteristic instance may be of service in marking the leading directions in which the contrast is discernible. On the opposite page, Plate I., I have put, beside each other, a piece of true grotesque, from the Lombard-Gothic, and of false grotesque from classical (Roman) architecture. They are both griffins; the one on the left carries on his back one of the main pillars of the porch of the cathedral of Verona; the one on the right is on the frieze of the temple of Antoninus and Faustina at Rome, much celebrated by Renaissance and bad modern architects.
In some respects, however, this classical griffin deserves itsreputation. It is exceedingly fine in lines of composition, and, I believe (I have not examined the original closely), very exquisite in execution. For these reasons, it is all the better for our purpose. I do not want to compare the worst false grotesque with the best true, but rather, on the contrary, the best false with the simplest true, in order to see how the delicately wrought lie fails in the presence of the rough truth; for rough truth in the present case it is, the Lombard sculpture being altogether untoward and imperfect in execution.[35]
§ 12. "Well, but," the reader says, "what do you mean by callingeitherof them true? There never were such beasts in the world as either of these?"
No, never: but the difference is, that the Lombard workman did really see a griffin in his imagination, and carved it from the life, meaning to declare to all ages that he had verily seen with his immortal eyes such a griffin as that; but the classical workman never saw a griffin at all, nor anything else; but put the whole thing together by line and rule.
§ 13. "How do you know that?"
Very easily. Look at the two, and think over them. You know a griffin is a beast composed of lion and eagle. The classical workman set himself to fit these together in the most ornamental way possible. He accordingly carves a sufficiently satisfactory lion's body, then attaches very gracefully cut wings to the sides: then, because he cannot get the eagle's head on the broad lion's shoulders, fits the two together by something like a horse's neck (some griffins being wholly composed of a horse and eagle), then, finding the horse's neck look weak and unformidable, he strengthens it by a series of bosses, like vertebrae, in front, and by a series of spiny cusps, instead of a mane, on the ridge; next, not to lose the whole leonine character about the neck, he gives a remnant of the lion's beard, turned into a sort of griffin's whisker, and nicely curled and pointed; then an eye, probably meant to look grand and abstracted, and therefore neither lion's nor eagle's; and,finally, an eagle's beak, very sufficiently studied from a real one. The whole head being, it seems to him, still somewhat wanting in weight and power, he brings forward the right wing behind it, so as to enclose it with a broad line. This is the finest thing in the composition, and very masterly, both in thought, and in choice of the exactly right point where the lines of wing and beak should intersect (and it may be noticed in passing, that all men, who can compose at all, have this habit of encompassing or governing broken lines with broad ones, wherever it is possible, of which we shall see many instances hereafter). The whole griffin, thus gracefully composed, being, nevertheless, when all is done, a very composed griffin, is set to very quiet work, and raising his left foot, to balance his right wing, sets it on the tendril of a flower so lightly as not even to bend it down, though, in order to reach it, his left leg is made half as long again as his right.
§ 14. We may be pretty sure, if the carver had ever seen a griffin, he would have reported of him as doing something else thanthatwith his feet. Let us see what the Lombardic workman saw him doing.
Remember, first, the griffin, though part lion and part eagle, has the unitedpower of both. He is not merely a bit of lion and a bit of eagle, but whole lion, incorporate with whole eagle. So when we really see one, we may be quite sure we shall not find him wanting in anything necessary to the might either of beast or bird.
Well, among things essential to the might of a lion, perhaps, on the whole, the most essential are histeeth. He could get on pretty well even without his claws, usually striking his prey down with a blow, woundless; but he could by no means get on without his teeth. Accordingly, we see that the real or Lombardic griffin has the carnivorous teeth bare to the root, and the peculiar hanging of the jaw at the back, which marks the flexible and gaping mouth of the devouring tribes.
Again; among things essential to the might of an eagle, next to his wings (which are of course prominent in both examples), are hisclaws. It is no use his being able to tear anything with his beak, if he cannot first hold it in his claws; he has comparatively no leonine power of striking with his feet, but amagnificent power of grip with them. Accordingly, we see that the real griffin, while his feet are heavy enough to strike like a lion's, has them also extended far enough to give them the eagle's grip with the back claw; and has, moreover, some of the bird-like wrinkled skin over the whole foot, marking this binding power the more; and that he has besides verily got something to hold with his feet, other than a flower, of which more presently.
§ 15. Now observe, the Lombardic workman did not do all this because he had thought it out, as you and I are doing together; he never thought a bit about it. He simply saw the beast; saw it as plainly as you see the writing on this page, and of course could not be wrong in anything he told us of it.
Well, what more does he tell us? Another thing, remember, essential to an eagle is that it should flyfast. It is no use its having wings at all if it is to be impeded in the use of them. Now it would be difficult to impede him more thoroughly than by giving him two cocked ears to catch the wind.
Look, again, at the two beasts. You see the false griffinhasthem so set, and, consequently, as he flew, there would be a continual humming of the wind on each side of his head, and he would have an infallible earache when he got home. But the real griffin has his ears flat to his head, and all the hair of them blown back, even to a point, by his fast flying, and the aperture is downwards, that he may hear anything going on upon the earth, where his prey is. In the false griffin the aperture is upwards.
§ 16. Well, what more? As he is made up of the natures of lion and eagle, we may be very certain that a real griffin is, on the whole, fond of eating, and that his throat will look as if he occasionally took rather large pieces, besides being flexible enough to let him bend and stretch his head in every direction as he flies.
Look, again, at the two beasts. You see the false one has got those bosses upon his neck like vertebrae, which must be infinitely in his way when he is swallowing, and which are evidently inseparable, so that he cannotstretchhis neck any more than a horse. But the real griffin is all loose about the neck, evidently being able to make it almost as much longer as helikes; to stretch and bend it anywhere, and swallow anything, besides having some of the grand strength of the bull's dewlap in it when at rest.
§ 17. What more? Having both lion and eagle in him, it is probable that the real griffin will have an infinite look of repose as well as power of activity. One of the notablest things about a lion is his magnificentindolence, his look of utter disdain of trouble when there is no occasion for it; as, also, one of the notablest things about an eagle is his look of inevitable vigilance, even when quietest. Look, again, at the two beasts. You see the false griffin is quite sleepy and dead in the eye, thus contradicting his eagle's nature, but is putting himself to a great deal of unnecessary trouble with his paws, holding one in a most painful position merely to touch a flower, and bearing the whole weight of his body on the other, thus contradicting his lion's nature.
But the real griffin is primarily, with his eagle's nature, wide awake; evidently quite ready for whatever may happen; and with his lion's nature, laid all his length on his belly, prone and ponderous; his two paws as simply put out before him as a drowsy puppy's on a drawingroom hearth-rug; not but that he has got something to do with them, worthy of such paws; but he takes not one whit more trouble about it than is absolutely necessary. He has merely got a poisonous winged dragon to hold, and for such a little matter as that, he may as well do it lying down and at his ease, looking out at the same time for any other piece of work in his way. He takes the dragon by the middle, one paw under the wing, another above, gathers him up into a knot, puts two or three of his claws well into his back, crashing through the scales of it and wrinkling all the flesh up from the wound, flattens him down against the ground, and so lets him do what he likes. The dragon tries to bite him, but can only bring his head round far enough to get hold of his own wing, which he bites in agony instead; flapping the griffin's dewlap with it, and wriggling his tail up against the griffin's throat; the griffin being, as to these minor proceedings, entirely indifferent, sure that the dragon's body cannot drag itself one hair's breadth off those ghastly claws, and that its head can do no harm but to itself.
§ 18. Now observe how in all this, through every separate part and action of the creature, the imagination isalwaysright. It evidentlycannoterr; it meets every one of our requirements respecting the griffin as simply as if it were gathering up the bones of the real creature out of some ancient rock. It does not itself know or care, any more than the peasant laboring with his spade and axe, what is wanted to meet our theories or fancies. It knows simply what is there, and brings out the positive creature, errorless, unquestionable. So it is throughout art, and in all that the imagination does; if anything be wrong it is not the imagination's fault, but some inferior faculty's, which would have its foolish say in the matter, and meddled with the imagination, and said, the bones ought to be put together tail first, or upside down.
§ 19. This, however, we need not be amazed at, because the very essence of the imagination is already defined to be the seeing to the heart; and it is not therefore wonderful that it should never err; but it is wonderful, on the other hand, how the composing legalism doesnothing elsethan err. One would have thought that, by mere chance, in this or the other element of griffin, the griffin-composer might have struck out a truth; that he might have had the luck to set the ears back, or to give some grasp to the claw. But, no; from beginning to end it is evidently impossible for him to be anything but wrong; his whole soul is instinct with lies; no veracity can come within hail of him; to him, all regions of right and life are for ever closed.
§ 20. And another notable point is, that while the imagination receives truth in this simple way, it is all the while receiving statutes of composition also, far more noble than those for the sake of which the truth was lost by the legalist. The ornamental lines in the classical griffin appear at first finer than in the other; but they only appear so because they are more commonplace and more palpable. The subtlety of the sweeping and rolling curves in the real griffin, the way they waver and change and fold, down the neck, and along the wing, and in and out among the serpent coils, is incomparably grander, merely as grouping of ornamental line, than anything in the other; nor is it fine as ornamental only, but as massively useful, giving weight of stone enough to answer the entire purpose of pedestal sculpture. Note, especially, the insertion of the three plumes of the dragon's broken wing in the outer angle, just under the large coil of his body; this filling of the gap being one of the necessities, not of the pedestal block merely, but a means of getting mass and breadth, which all composers desire more or less, but which they seldom so perfectly accomplish.
So that taking the truth first, the honest imagination gains everything; it has its griffinism, and grace, and usefulness, all at once: but the false composer, caring for nothing but himself and his rules, loses everything,—griffinism, grace, and all.
§ 21. I believe the reader will now sufficiently see how the terms "true" and "false" are in the most accurate sense attachable to the opposite branches of what might appear at first, in both cases, the merest wildness of inconsistent reverie. But they are even to be attached, in a deeper sense than that in which we have hitherto used them, to these two compositions. For the imagination hardly ever works in this intense way, unencumbered by the inferior faculties, unless it be under the influence of some solemn purpose or sentiment. And to all the falseness and all the verity of these two ideal creatures this farther falsehood and verity have yet to be added, that the classical griffin has, at least in this place, no other intent than that of covering a level surface with entertaining form; but the Lombardic griffin is a profound expression of the most passionate symbolism. Under its eagle's wings are two wheels,[36]which mark it as connected, in the mind of him who wrought it, with the living creatures of the vision of Ezekiel: "When they went, the wheels went by them, and whithersoever the spirit was to go, they went, and the wheels were lifted up over against them, for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels." Thus signed, the winged shape becomes at once one of the acknowledged symbols of the Divine power; and, in its unity of lion and eagle, the workman of the middle ages always means to set forth the unity of the human and divine natures,[37]In this unity it bears up the pillars of the Church, set for everas the corner stone. And the faithful and true imagination beholds it, in this unity, with everlasting vigilance and calm omnipotence, restrain the seed of the serpent crushed upon the earth; leaving the head of it free, only for a time, that it may inflict in its fury profounder destruction upon itself,—in this also full of deep meaning. The Divine power does not slay the evil creature. It wounds and restrains it only. Its final anddeadlywound is inflicted by itself.