IN England, which has made great Symbolic Art, most people dislike
an art if they are told it is symbolic, for they confuse symbol and
allegory. Even Johnson’s Dictionary sees no great difference, for it
calls a Symbol ‘That which comprehends in its figure a representation
of something else’; and an Allegory, ‘A figurative discourse, in which
something other is intended than is contained in the words literally
taken.’ It is only a very modern Dictionary that calls a Symbol ‘the
sign or representation of any moral thing by the images or properties
of natural things,’ which, though an imperfect definition, is not
unlike ‘The things below are as the things above’ of the Emerald Tablet
of Hermes! _The Faerie Queene_ and _The Pilgrim’s Progress_ have been
so important in England that Allegory has overtopped Symbolism, and
for a time has overwhelmed it in its own downfall. William Blake was
perhaps the first modern to insist on a difference; and the other
day, when I sat for my portrait to a German Symbolist in Paris, whose
talk was all of his love for Symbolism and his hatred for Allegory,
his definitions were the same as William Blake’s, of whom he knew
nothing. William Blake has written, ‘Vision or imagination’—meaning
symbolism by these words—‘is a representation of what actually exists,
really or unchangeably. Fable or Allegory is formed by the daughters
of Memory.’ The German insisted with many determined gestures, that
Symbolism said things which could not be said so perfectly in any other
way, and needed but a right instinct for its understanding; while
Allegory said things which could be said as well, or better, in another
way, and needed a right knowledge for its understanding. The one gave
dumb things voices, and bodiless things bodies; while the other read
a meaning—which had never lacked its voice or its body—into something
heard or seen, and loved less for the meaning than for its own sake.
The only symbols he cared for were the shapes and motions of the body;
ears hidden by the hair, to make one think of a mind busy with inner
voices; and a head so bent that back and neck made the one curve, as in
Blake’s ‘Vision of Bloodthirstiness,’ to call up an emotion of bodily
strength; and he would not put even a lily, or a rose, or a poppy into
a picture to express purity, or love, or sleep, because he thought
such emblems were allegorical, and had their meaning by a traditional
and not by a natural right. I said that the rose, and the lily, and
the poppy were so married, by their colour and their odour, and their
use, to love and purity and sleep, or to other symbols of love and
purity and sleep, and had been so long a part of the imagination of the
world, that a symbolist might use them to help out his meaning without
becoming an allegorist. I think I quoted the lily in the hand of the
angel in Rossetti’s ‘Annunciation,’ and the lily in the jar in his
‘Childhood of Mary Virgin,’ and thought they made the more important
symbols, the women’s bodies, and the angels’ bodies, and the clear
morning light, take that place, in the great procession of Christian
symbols, where they can alone have all their meaning and all their
beauty.
It is hard to say where Allegory and Symbolism melt into one another,
but it is not hard to say where either comes to its perfection; and
though one may doubt whether Allegory or Symbolism is the greater
in the horns of Michael Angelo’s ‘Moses,’ one need not doubt that
its symbolism has helped to awaken the modern imagination; while
Tintoretto’s ‘Origin of the Milky Way,’ which is Allegory without any
Symbolism, is, apart from its fine painting, but a moment’s amusement
for our fancy. A hundred generations might write out what seemed the
meaning of the one, and they would write different meanings, for no
symbol tells all its meaning to any generation; but when you have said,
‘That woman there is Juno, and the milk out of her breast is making
the Milky Way,’ you have told the meaning of the other, and the fine
painting, which has added so much irrelevant beauty, has not told it
better.
All Art that is not mere story-telling, or mere portraiture, is
symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which
mediæval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade
their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it
entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.
A person or a landscape that is a part of a story or a portrait, evokes
but so much emotion as the story or the portrait can permit without
loosening the bonds that make it a story or a portrait; but if you
liberate a person or a landscape from the bonds of motives and their
actions, causes and their effects, and from all bonds but the bonds
of your love, it will change under your eyes, and become a symbol
of an infinite emotion, a perfected emotion, a part of the Divine
Essence; for we love nothing but the perfect, and our dreams make all
things perfect, that we may love them. Religious and visionary people,
monks and nuns, and medicine-men and opium-eaters, see symbols in
their trances; for religious and visionary thought is thought about
perfection and the way to perfection; and symbols are the only things
free enough from all bonds to speak of perfection.
Wagner’s dramas, Keats’ odes, Blake’s pictures and poems, Calvert’s
pictures, Rossetti’s pictures, Villiers De L’Isle Adam’s plays, and
the black-and-white art of Mr. Beardsley and Mr. Ricketts, and the
lithographs of Mr. Shannon, and the pictures of Mr. Whistler, and
the plays of M. Maeterlinck, and the poetry of Verlaine, in our own
day, but differ from the religious art of Giotto and his disciples in
having accepted all symbolisms, the symbolism of the ancient shepherds
and stargazers, that symbolism of bodily beauty which seemed a wicked
thing to Fra Angelico, the symbolism in day and night, and winter
and summer, spring and autumn, once so great a part of an older
religion than Christianity; and in having accepted all the Divine
Intellect, its anger and its pity, its waking and its sleep, its love
and its lust, for the substance of their art. A Keats or a Calvert is
as much a symbolist as a Blake or a Wagner; but he is a fragmentary
symbolist, for while he evokes in his persons and his landscapes an
infinite emotion, a perfected emotion, a part of the Divine Essence,
he does not set his symbols in the great procession as Blake would
have him, ‘in a certain order, suited’ to his ‘imaginative energy.’
If you paint a beautiful woman and fill her face, as Rossetti filled
so many faces, with an infinite love, a perfected love, ‘one’s eyes
meet no mortal thing when they meet the light of her peaceful eyes,’
as Michael Angelo said of Vittoria Colonna; but one’s thoughts stray
to mortal things, and ask, maybe, ‘Has her lover gone from her, or is
he coming?’ or ‘What predestinated unhappiness has made the shadow
in her eyes?’ If you paint the same face, and set a winged rose or a
rose of gold somewhere about her, one’s thoughts are of her immortal
sisters, Pity and Jealousy, and of her mother, Ancestral Beauty, and of
her high kinsmen, the Holy Orders, whose swords make a continual music
before her face. The systematic mystic is not the greatest of artists,
because his imagination is too great to be bounded by a picture or
a song, and because only imperfection in a mirror of perfection, or
perfection in a mirror of imperfection, delight our frailty. There
is indeed a systematic mystic in every poet or painter who, like
Rossetti, delights in a traditional Symbolism, or, like Wagner,
delights in a personal Symbolism; and such men often fall into trances,
or have waking dreams. Their thought wanders from the woman who is
Love herself, to her sisters and her forebears, and to all the great
procession; and so august a beauty moves before the mind, that they
forget the things which move before the eyes. William Blake, who was
the chanticleer of the new dawn, has written: ‘If the spectator could
enter into one of these images of his imagination, approaching them on
the fiery chariot of his contemplative thought, if ... he could make
a friend and companion of one of these images of wonder, which always
entreat him to leave mortal things (as he must know), then would he
arise from the grave, then would he meet the Lord in the air, and then
he would be happy.’ And again, ‘The world of imagination is the world
of Eternity. It is the Divine bosom into which we shall all go after
the death of the vegetated body. The world of imagination is infinite
and eternal, whereas the world of generation or vegetation is finite
and temporal. There exist in that eternal world the eternal realities
of everything which we see reflected in the vegetable glass of nature.’
Every visionary knows that the mind’s eye soon comes to see a
capricious and variable world, which the will cannot shape or change,
though it can call it up and banish it again. I closed my eyes a
moment ago, and a company of people in blue robes swept by me in a
blinding light, and had gone before I had done more than see little
roses embroidered on the hems of their robes, and confused, blossoming
apple-boughs somewhere beyond them, and recognised one of the company
by his square black, curling beard. I have often seen him; and one
night a year ago, I asked him questions which he answered by showing me
flowers and precious stones, of whose meaning I had no knowledge, and
he seemed too perfected a soul for any knowledge that cannot be spoken
in symbol or metaphor.
Are he and his blue-robed companions, and their like, ‘the Eternal
realities’ of which we are the reflection ‘in the vegetable glass of
nature,’ or a momentary dream? To answer is to take sides in the only
controversy in which it is greatly worth taking sides, and in the only
controversy which may never be decided.
1898.