GENERAL CONCLUSIONS RESPECTING THE THEORETIC FACULTY.
Sec. 1. There are no sources of the emotion of beauty more than those found
in things visible.
Sec. 2. What imperfection exists in visible things. How in a sort by
imagination removable.
Sec. 3. Which however affects not our present conclusions.
Of the sources of beauty open to us in the visible world, we have now
obtained a view which, though most feeble in its grasp and scanty in its
detail, is yet general in its range. Of no other sources than these
visible can we, by any effort in our present condition of existence,
conceive. For what revelations have been made to humanity inspired, or
caught up to heaven of things to the heavenly region belonging, have
been either by unspeakable words which it is not lawful for a man to
utter, or else by their very nature incommunicable, except in types and
shadows; and ineffable by words belonging to earth, for of things
different from the visible, words appropriated to the visible can convey
no image. How different from earthly gold that clear pavement of the
city might have seemed to the eyes of St. John, we of unreceived sight
cannot know; neither of that strange jasper and sardine can we conceive
the likeness which he assumed that sat on the throne above the crystal
sea; neither what seeming that was of slaying that the Root of David
bore in the midst of the elders; neither what change it was upon the
form of the fourth of them that walked in the furnace of Dura, that even
the wrath of idolatry knew for the likeness of the Son of God. The
knowing that is here permitted to us is either of things outward only,
as in those it is whose eyes faith never opened, or else of that dark
part that her glass shows feebly, of things supernatural, that gleaming
of the Divine form among the mortal crowd, which all may catch if they
will climb the sycamore and wait; nor how much of God's abiding at the
house may be granted to those that so seek, and how much more may be
opened to them in the breaking of bread, cannot be said; but of that
only we can reason which is in a measure revealed to all, of that which
is by constancy and purity of affection to be found in the things and
the beings around us upon earth. Now among all those things whose beauty
we have hitherto examined, there has been a measure of imperfection.
Either inferiority of kind, as the beauty of the lower animals, or
resulting from degradation, as in man himself; and although in
considering the beauty of human form, we arrived at some conception of
restoration, yet we found that even the restoration must be in some
respect imperfect, as incapable of embracing all qualities, moral and
intellectual, at once, neither to be freed from all signs of former evil
done or suffered. Consummate beauty, therefore, is not to be found on
earth, though often such intense measure of it as shall drown all
capacity of receiving; neither is it to be respecting humanity
legitimately conceived. But by certain operations of the imagination
upon ideas of beauty received from things around us, it is possible to
conceive respecting superhuman creatures (of that which is more than
creature, no creature ever conceived) a beauty in some sort greater than
we see. Of this beauty, however, it is impossible to determine anything
until we have traced the imaginative operations to which it owes its
being, of which operations this much may be prematurely said, that they
are not creative, that no new ideas are elicited by them, and that their
whole function is only a certain dealing with, concentrating or mode of
regarding the impressions received from external things, that therefore,
in the beauty to which they will conduct us, there will be found no new
element, but only a peculiar combination or phase of those elements that
we now know, and that therefore we may at present draw all the
conclusions with respect to the rank of the theoretic faculty, which the
knowledge of its subject matter can warrant.
Sec. 4. The four sources from which the pleasure of beauty is derived are
all divine.
We have seen that this subject matter is referable to four general
heads. It is either the record of conscience, printed in things
external, or it is a symbolizing of Divine attributes in matter, or it
is the felicity of living things, or the perfect fulfilment of their
duties and functions. In all cases it is something Divine, either the
approving voice of God, the glorious symbol of him, the evidence of his
kind presence, or the obedience to his will by him induced and
supported.
All these subjects of contemplation are such as we may suppose will
remain sources of pleasure to the perfected spirit throughout eternity.
Divine in their nature, they are addressed to the immortal part of men.
Sec. 5. What objections may be made to this conclusion.
There remain, however, two points to be noticed before I can hope that
this conclusion will be frankly accepted by the reader. If it be the
moral part of us to which beauty addresses itself, how does it happen,
it will be asked, that it is ever found in the works of impious men, and
how is it possible for such to desire or conceive it?
On the other hand, how does it happen that men in high state of moral
culture are often insensible to the influence of material beauty, and
insist feebly upon it as an instrument of soul culture.
These two objections I shall endeavor briefly to answer, not that they
can be satisfactorily treated without that detailed examination of the
whole body of great works of art, on which I purpose to enter in the
following volume. For the right determination of these two questions is
indeed the whole end and aim of my labor, (and if it could be here
accomplished, I should bestow no effort farther,) namely, the proving
that no supreme power of art can be attained by impious men; and that
the neglect of art, as an interpreter of divine things, has been of evil
consequence to the Christian world.
At present, however, I would only meet such objections as must
immediately arise in the reader's mind.
Sec. 6. Typical beauty may be aesthetically pursued. Instances.
Sec. 7. How interrupted by false feeling.
And first, it will be remembered that I have, throughout the examination
of typical beauty, asserted its instinctive power, the moral meaning of
it being only discoverable by faithful thought. Now this instinctive
sense of it varies in intensity among men, being given, like the hearing
ear of music, to some more than to others: and if those to whom it is
given in large measure be unfortunately men of impious or unreflecting
spirit, it is very possible that the perceptions of beauty should be by
them cultivated on principles merely aesthetic, and so lose their
hallowing power; for though the good seed in them is altogether divine,
yet, there being no blessing in the springing thereof, it brings forth
wild grapes in the end. And yet these wild grapes are well discernible,
like the deadly gourds of Gilgal. There is in all works of such men a
taint and stain, and jarring discord, blacker and louder exactly in
proportion to the moral deficiency, of which the best proof and measure
is to be found in their treatment of the human form, (since in landscape
it is nearly impossible to introduce definite expression of evil,) of
which the highest beauty has been attained only once, and then by no
system taught painter, but by a most holy Dominican monk of Fiesole; and
beneath him all stoop lower and lower in proportion to their inferior
sanctity, though with more or less attainment of that which is noble,
according to their intellectual power and earnestness, as Raffaelle in
his St. Cecilia, (a mere study of a passionate, dark-eyed, large formed
Italian model,) and even Perugino, in that there is about his noblest
faces a shortcoming, indefinable; an absence of the full outpouring of
the sacred spirit that there is in Angelico; traceable, I doubt not, to
some deficiencies and avaricious flaws of his heart, whose consequences
in his conduct were such as to give Vasari hope that his lies might
stick to him (for the contradiction of which in the main, if there be
not contradiction enough in every line that the hand of Perugino drew,
compare Rio, de la Poesie Chretienne, and note also what Rio has
singularly missed observing, that Perugino, in his portrait of himself
in the Florence gallery, has put a scroll into the hand, with the words
"Timete Deum," thus surely indicating that which he considered his duty
and message:) and so all other even of the sacred painters, not to speak
of the lower body of men in whom, on the one hand, there is marked
sensuality and impurity in all that they seek of beauty, as in
Correggio and Guido, or, on the other, a want in measure of the sense of
beauty itself, as in Rubens and Titian, showing itself in the adoption
of coarse types of feature and form; sometimes also (of which I could
find instances in modern times,) in a want of evidence of delight in
what they do; so that, after they have rendered some passage of
exceeding beauty, they will suffer some discordant point to interfere
with it, and it will not hurt them, as if they had no pleasure in that
which was best, but had done it in inspiration that was not profitable
to them, as deaf men might touch an instrument with a feeling in their
heart, which yet returns not outwardly upon them, and so know not when
they play false: and sometimes by total want of choice, for there is a
choice of love in all rightly tempered men, not that ignorant and
insolent choice which rejects half nature as empty of the right, but
that pure choice that fetches the right out of everything; and where
this is wanting, we may see men walking up and down in dry places,
finding no rest, ever and anon doing something noble, and yet not
following it up, but dwelling the next instant on something impure or
profitless with the same intensity and yet impatience, so that they are
ever wondered at and never sympathized with, and while they dazzle all,
they lead none; and then, beneath these again, we find others on whose
works there are definite signs of evil mind, ill-repressed, and then
inability to avoid, and at last perpetual seeking for and feeding upon
horror and ugliness, and filthiness of sin, as eminently in Salvator and
Caravaggio, and the lower Dutch schools, only in these last less
painfully as they lose the villanous in the brutal, and the horror of
crime in its idiocy.
Sec. 8. Greatness and truth are sometimes by the Deity sustained and spoken
in and through evil men.
But secondly, it is to be noted that it is neither by us uncertainable
what moments of pure feeling or aspiration may occur to men of minds
apparently cold and lost, nor by us to be pronounced through what
instruments, and in what strangely occurrent voices, God may choose to
communicate good to men. It seems to me that much of what is great, and
to all men beneficial, has been wrought by those who neither intended
nor knew the good they did, and that many mighty harmonies have been
discoursed by instruments that had been dumb or discordant, but that
God knew their stops. The Spirit of Prophecy consisted with the avarice
of Balaam, and the disobedience of Saul. Could we spare from its page
that parable, which he said, who saw the vision of the Almighty, falling
into a trance, but having his eyes open, though we know that the sword
of his punishment was then sharp in its sheath beneath him in the plains
of Moab? or shall we not lament with David over the shield cast away on
the Gilboa mountains, of him to whom God gave _another heart_ that day
when he turned his back to go from Samuel? It is not our part to look
hardly, nor to look always, to the character or the deeds of men, but to
accept from all of them, and to hold fast that which we can prove good,
and feel to be ordained for us. We know that whatever good there is in
them is itself divine, and wherever we see the virtue of ardent labor
and self-surrendering to a single purpose, wherever we find constant
reference made to the written scripture of natural beauty, this at least
we know is great and good, this we know is not granted by the counsel of
God, without purpose, nor maintained without result: Their
interpretation we may accept, into their labor we may enter, but they
themselves must look to it, if what they do has no intent of good, nor
any reference to the Giver of all gifts. Selfish in their industry,
unchastened in their wills, ungrateful for the Spirit that is upon them,
they may yet be helmed by that Spirit whithersoever the Governor
listeth; involuntary instruments they may become of others' good;
unwillingly they may bless Israel, doubtingly discomfit Amalek, but
shortcoming there will be of their glory, and sure, of their punishment.
Sec. 9. The second objection arising from the coldness of Christian men to
external beauty.
I believe I shall be able, incidentally, in succeeding investigations,
to prove this shortcoming, and to examine the sources of it, not
absolutely indeed, (seeing that all reasoning on the characters of men
must be treacherous, our knowledge on this head being as corrupt as it
is scanty, while even in living with them it is impossible to trace the
working, or estimate the errors of great and self-secreted minds,) but
at least enough to establish the general principle upon such grounds of
fact as may satisfy those who demand the practical proof (often in a
measure impossible) of things which can hardly be doubted in their
rational consequence. At present, it would be useless to enter on an
examination for which we have no materials; and I proceed, therefore, to
notice that other and opposite error of Christian men in thinking that
there is little use or value in the operation of the theoretic faculty,
not that I at present either feel myself capable, or that this is the
place for the discussion of that vast question of the operation of taste
(as it is called) on the minds of men, and the national value of its
teaching, but I wish shortly to reply to that objection which might be
urged to the real moral dignity of the faculty, that many Christian men
seem to be in themselves without it, and even to discountenance it in
others.
It has been said by Schiller, in his letters on aesthetic culture, that
the sense of beauty never farthered the performance of a single duty.
Sec. 10. Reasons for this coldness in the anxieties of the world. These
anxieties overwrought and criminal.
Sec. 11. Evil consequences of such coldness.
Sec. 12. Theoria the service of Heaven.
Although this gross and inconceivable falsity will hardly be accepted by
any one in so many terms, seeing that there are few so utterly lost but
that they receive, and know that they receive, at certain moments,
strength of some kind, or rebuke from the appealings of outward things;
and that it is not possible for a Christian man to walk across so much
as a rood of the natural earth, with mind unagitated and rightly poised,
without receiving strength and hope from some stone, flower, leaf, or
sound, nor without a sense of a dew falling upon him out of the sky;
though, I say, this falsity is not wholly and in terms admitted, yet it
seems to be partly and practically so in much of the doing and teaching
even of holy men, who in the recommending of the love of God to us,
refer but seldom to those things in which it is most abundantly and
immediately shown; though they insist much on his giving of bread, and
raiment, and health, (which he gives to all inferior creatures,) they
require us not to thank him for that glory of his works which he has
permitted us alone to perceive: they tell us often to meditate in the
closet, but they send us not, like Isaac, into the fields at even, they
dwell on the duty of self-denial, but they exhibit not the duty of
delight. Now there are reasons for this, manifold, in the toil and
warfare of an earnest mind, which, in its efforts at the raising of men
from utter loss and misery, has often but little time or disposition to
take heed of anything more than the bare life, and of those so occupied
it is not for us to judge, but I think, that, of the weaknesses,
distresses, vanities, schisms, and sins, which often even in the holiest
men, diminish their usefulness, and mar their happiness, there would be
fewer if, in their struggle with nature fallen, they sought for more aid
from nature undestroyed. It seems to me that the real sources of
bluntness in the feelings towards the splendor of the grass and glory of
the flower, are less to be found in ardor of occupation, in seriousness
of compassion, or heavenliness of desire, than in the turning of the eye
at intervals of rest too selfishly within; the want of power to shake
off the anxieties of actual and near interest, and to leave results in
God's hands; the scorn of all that does not seem immediately apt for our
purposes, or open to our understanding, and perhaps something of pride,
which desires rather to investigate than to feel. I believe that the
root of almost every schism and heresy from which the Christian church
has ever suffered, has been the effort of men to earn, rather than to
receive, their salvation; and that the reason that preaching is so
commonly ineffectual is, that it calls on men oftener to work for God,
than to behold God working for them. If, for every rebuke that we utter
of men's vices, we put forth a claim upon their hearts; if for every
assertion of God's demands from them, we could substitute a display of
his kindness to them; if side by side with every warning of death, we
could exhibit proofs and promises of immortality; if, in fine, instead
of assuming the being of an awful Deity, which men, though they cannot
and dare not deny, are always unwilling, sometimes unable, to conceive,
we were to show them a near, visible, inevitable, but all beneficent
Deity, whose presence makes the earth itself a heaven, I think there
would be fewer deaf children sitting in the market-place. At all events,
whatever may be the inability in this present life to mingle the full
enjoyment of the Divine works with the full discharge of every practical
duty, and confessedly in many cases this must be, let us not attribute
the inconsistency to any indignity of the faculty of contemplation, but
to the sin and the suffering of the fallen state, and the change of
order from the keeping of the garden to the tilling of the ground. We
cannot say how far it is right or agreeable with God's will, while men
are perishing round about us, while grief, and pain, and wrath, and
impiety, and death, and all the powers of the air, are working wildly
and evermore, and the cry of blood going up to heaven, that any of us
should take hand from the plough; but this we know, that there will come
a time when the service of God shall be the beholding of him; and
though in these stormy seas, where we are now driven up and down, his
Spirit is dimly seen on the face of the waters, and we are left to cast
anchors out of the stern, and wish for the day, that day will come,
when, with the evangelists on the crystal and stable sea, all the
creatures of God shall be full of eyes within, and there shall be "no
more curse, but his servants shall serve him, and shall see his face."
SECTION II.
OF THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY.
CHAPTER I.
OF THE THREE FORMS OF IMAGINATION.
Sec. 1. A partial examination only of the imagination is to be attempted.
We have hitherto been exclusively occupied with those sources of
pleasure which exist in the external creation, and which in any faithful
copy of it must to a certain extent exist also.
These sources of beauty, however, are not presented by any very great
work of art in a form of pure transcript. They invariably receive the
reflection of the mind under whose shadow they have passed, and are
modified or colored by its image.
This modification is the Work of Imagination.
As, in the course of our succeeding investigation, we shall be called
upon constantly to compare sources of beauty existing in nature with the
images of them presented by the human mind, it is very necessary for us
shortly to review the conditions and limits of the imaginative faculty,
and to ascertain by what tests we may distinguish its sane, healthy, and
profitable operation, from that which is erratic, diseased, and
dangerous.
It is neither desirable nor possible here to examine or illustrate in
full the essence of this mighty faculty. Such an examination would
require a review of the whole field of literature, and would alone
demand a volume. Our present task is not to explain or exhibit full
portraiture of this function of the mind in all its relations, but only
to obtain some certain tests by which we may determine whether it be
very imagination or no, and unmask all impersonations of it, and this
chiefly with respect to art, for in literature the faculty takes a
thousand forms, according to the matter it has to treat, and becomes
like the princess of the Arabian tale, sword, eagle, or fire, according
to the war it wages, sometimes piercing, sometimes soaring, sometimes
illumining, retaining no image of itself, except its supernatural power,
so that I shall content myself with tracing that particular form of it,
and unveiling those imitations of it only, which are to be found, or
feared, in painting, referring to other creations of mind only for
illustration.
Sec. 2. The works of the metaphysicians how nugatory with respect to this
faculty.
Unfortunately, the works of metaphysicians will afford us in this most
interesting inquiry no aid whatsoever. They who are constantly
endeavoring to fathom and explain the essence of the faculties of mind,
are sure in the end to lose sight of all that cannot be explained,
(though it may be defined and felt,) and because, as I shall presently
show, the essence of the imaginative faculty is utterly mysterious and
inexplicable, and to be recognized in its results only, or in the
negative results of its absence, the metaphysicians, as far as I am
acquainted with their works, miss it altogether, and never reach higher
than a definition of fancy by a false name.
What I understand by fancy will presently appear, not that I contend for
nomenclature, but only for distinction between two mental faculties, by
whatever name they be called, one the source of all that is great in the
poetic arts; the other merely decorative and entertaining, but which are
often confounded together, and which have so much in common as to render
strict definition of either difficult.
Sec. 3. The definition of D. Stewart, how inadequate.
Dugald Stewart's meagre definition may serve us for a starting point.
"Imagination," he says, "includes conception or simple apprehension,
which enables us to form a notion of those former objects of perception
or of knowledge, out of which we are to make a selection; abstraction,
which separates the selected materials from the qualities and
circumstances which are connected with them in nature; and judgment or
taste, which selects the materials and directs their combination. To
these powers we may add that particular habit of association to which I
formerly gave the name of fancy, as it is this which presents to our
choice all the different materials which are subservient to the efforts
of imagination, and which may therefore be considered as forming the
ground-work of poetical genius."
(By fancy in this passage, we find on referring to the chapter treating
of it, that nothing more is meant than the rapid occurrence of ideas of
sense to the mind.)
Now, in this definition, the very point and purpose of all the inquiry
is missed. We are told that judgment or taste "directs the combination."
In order that anything may be directed, an end must be previously
determined: What is the faculty that determines this end? and of what
frame and make, how boned and fleshed, how conceived or seen, is the end
itself? Bare judgment, or taste, cannot approve of what has no
existence; and yet by Dugald Stewart's definition we are left to their
catering among a host of conceptions, to produce a combination which, as
they work for, they must see and approve before it exists. This power of
prophecy is the very essence of the whole matter, and it is just that
inexplicable part which the metaphysician misses.
Sec. 4. This instance nugatory.
As might be expected from his misunderstanding of the faculty, he has
given an instance entirely nugatory.[49] It would be difficult to find
in Milton a passage in which less power of imagination was shown, than
the description of Eden, if, as I suppose, this be the passage meant, at
the beginning of the fourth book, in which I can find three expressions
only in which this power is shown, the "_burnished_ with golden rind,
hung amiable" of the Hesperian fruit, the "_lays forth_ her purple
grape" of the vine and the "_fringed_ bank with myrtle crowned," of the
lake, and these are not what Stewart meant, but only that accumulation
of bowers, groves, lawns, and hillocks, which is not imagination at all,
but composition, and that of the commonest kind. Hence, if we take any
passage in which there is real imagination, we shall find Stewart's
hypothesis not only inefficient and obscure, but utterly inapplicable.
Sec. 5. Various instances.
Take one or two at random.
"On the other side,
Incensed with indignation, Satan stood
Unterrified, and like a comet burned
That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge
In the arctic sky, and from his horrid hair
Shakes pestilence and war."
(Note that the word incensed is to be taken in its literal and material
sense, set on fire.) What taste or judgment was it that directed this
combination? or is there nothing more than taste or judgment here?
"Ten paces huge
He back recoiled; the tenth on bended knee
His massy spear upstaid, as if on earth
Winds under ground, or waters forcing way
_Sidelong had pushed a mountain from his seat
Half-sunk with all his pines._
"Together both ere the high lawns appeared
_Under the opening eyelids_ of the morn,
We drove a field, and both together heard
What time the gray-fly winds her _sultry_ horn.
"Missing thee, I walk unseen
On the dry smooth shaven green.
To behold the wandering moon
Riding near her highest noon,
_Like one that had been led astray_,
Through the heavens' wide pathless way,
And oft _as if her head she bowed_
Stooping through a fleecy cloud."
It is evident that Stewart's explanation utterly fails in all these
instances, for there is in them no "combination" whatsoever, but a
particular mode of regarding the qualities or appearances of a single
thing, illustrated and conveyed to us by the image of another; and the
act of imagination, observe, is not the selection of this image, but the
mode of regarding the object.
But the metaphysician's definition fails yet more utterly, when we look
at the imagination neither as regarding, nor combining, but as
penetrating.
"My gracious Silence, Hail:
Wouldst thou have laughed, had I come coffin'd home
That weep'st to see me triumph. Ah! my dear,
Such eyes the widows in Corioli wear,
And mothers that lack sons."
How did Shakspeare _know_ that Virgilia could not speak?
This knowledge, this intuitive and penetrative perception, is still one
of the forms, the highest, of imagination, but there is no combination
of images here.
Sec. 6. The three operations of the imagination. Penetrative, associative,
contemplative.
We find, then, that the imagination has three totally distinct
functions. It combines, and by combination creates new forms; but the
secret principle of this combination has not been shown by the analysts.
Again, it treats or regards both the simple images and its own
combinations in peculiar ways; and, thirdly, it penetrates, analyzes,
and reaches truths by no other faculty discoverable. These its three
functions, I shall endeavor to illustrate, but not in this order: the
most logical mode of treatment would be to follow the order in which
commonly the mind works; that is, penetrating first, combining next, and
treating or regarding, finally; but this arrangement would be
inconvenient, because the acts of penetration and of regard are so
closely connected, and so like in their relations to other mental acts,
that I wish to examine them consecutively, and the rather, because they
have to do with higher subject matter than the mere act of combination,
whose distinctive nature, that property which makes it imagination and
not composition, it will I think be best to explain at setting out, as
we easily may, in subjects familiar and material. I shall therefore
examine the imaginative faculty in these three forms; first, as
combining or associative; secondly, as analytic or penetrative; thirdly,
as regardant or contemplative.
FOOTNOTES
[49] He continues thus, "To illustrate these observations, let us
consider the steps by which Milton must have proceeded, in creating
his imaginary garden of Eden. When he first proposed to himself that
subject of description, it is reasonable to suppose that a variety
of the most striking scenes which he had seen, crowded into his
mind. The association of ideas suggested them and the power of
conception placed each of them before him with all its beauties and
imperfections. In every natural scene, if we destine it for any
particular purpose, there are defects and redundancies, which art
may sometimes, but cannot always correct. But the power of
imagination is unlimited. She can create and annihilate, and dispose
at pleasure her woods, her rocks, and her rivers. Milton,
accordingly, would not copy his Eden from any one scene, but would
select from each the features which were most eminently beautiful.
The power of abstraction enabled him to make the separation, and
taste directed him in the selection."
CHAPTER II.
OF IMAGINATION ASSOCIATIVE.
Sec. 1. Of simple conception.
In order to render our inquiry as easy as possible, we shall consider
the dealing of the associative imagination with the simplest possible
matter, that is,--with conceptions of material things. First, therefore,
we must define the nature of these conceptions themselves.
After beholding and examining any material object, our knowledge
respecting it exists in two different forms. Some facts exist in the
brain in a verbal form, as known, but not conceived, as, for instance,
that it was heavy or light, that it was eight inches and a quarter long,
etc., of which length we cannot have accurate conception, but only such
a conception as might attach to a length of seven inches or nine; and
which fact we may recollect without any conception of the object at all.
Other facts respecting it exist in the brain in a visible form, not
always visible, but voluntarily visible, as its being white, or having
such and such a complicated shape, as the form of a rose-bud, for
instance, which it would be difficult to express verbally, neither is it
retained by the brain in a verbal form, but a visible one, that is, when
we wish for knowledge of its form for immediate use, we summon up a
vision or image of the thing; we do not remember it in words, as we
remember the fact that it took so many days to blow, or that it was
gathered at such and such a time.
The knowledge of things retained in this visible form is called
conception by the metaphysicians, which term I shall retain; it is
inaccurately called imagination by Taylor, in the passage quoted by
Wordsworth in the preface to his poems, not but that the term
imagination is etymologically and rightly expressive of it, but we want
that term for a higher faculty.
Sec. 2. How connected with verbal knowledge.
There are many questions respecting this faculty of conception of very
great interest, such as the exact amount of aid that verbal knowledge
renders so visible, (as, for instance, the verbal knowledge that a
flower has five, or seven, or ten petals, or that a muscle is inserted
at such and such a point of the bone, aids the conception of the flower
or the limb;) and again, what amount of aid the visible knowledge
renders to the verbal, as for instance, whether any one, being asked a
question about some animal or thing, which instantly and from verbal
knowledge he cannot answer, may have such power of summoning up the
image of the animal or thing as to ascertain the fact, by actual
beholding, (which I do not assert, but can conceive to be possible;) and
again, what is that indefinite and subtile character of the conception
itself in most men, which admits not of being by themselves traced or
realized, and yet is a sure test of likeness in any representation of
the thing; like an intaglio, with a front light on it, whose lines
cannot be seen, and yet they will fit one definite form only, and that
accurately; these and many other questions it is irrelevant at present
to determine,[50] since to forward our present purpose, it will be well
to suppose the conception, aided by verbal knowledge, to be absolutely
perfect, and we will suppose a man to retain such clear image of a large
number of the material things he has seen, as to be able to set down any
of them on paper with perfect fidelity and absolute memory[51] of their
most minute features.
In thus setting them down on paper, he works, I suppose, exactly as he
would work from nature, only copying the remembered image in his mind,
instead of the real thing. He is, therefore, still nothing more than a
copyist. There is no exercise of imagination in this whatsoever.
Sec. 3. How used in composition.
But over these images, vivid and distinct as nature herself, he has a
command which over nature he has not. He can summon any that he chooses,
and if, therefore, any group of them which he received from nature be
not altogether to his mind, he is at liberty to remove some of the
component images, add others foreign, and re-arrange the whole.
Let us suppose, for instance, that he has perfect knowledge of the forms
of the Aiguilles Verte and Argentiere, and of the great glacier between
them at the upper extremity of the valley of Chamonix. The forms of the
mountains please him, but the presence of the glacier suits not his
purpose. He removes the glacier, sets the mountains farther apart, and
introduces between them part of the valley of the Rhone.
This is composition, and is what Dugald Stewart mistook for imagination,
in the kingdom of which noble faculty it has no part nor lot.
Sec. 4. Characteristics of composition.
The essential characters of composition, properly so called, are these.
The mind which desires the new feature summons up before it those images
which it supposes to be of the kind wanted, of these it takes the one
which it supposes to be fittest, and tries it: if it will not answer, it
tries another, until it has obtained such an association as pleases it.
In this operation, if it be of little sensibility, it regards only the
absolute beauty or value of the images brought before it; and takes that
or those which it thinks fairest or most interesting, without any regard
to their sympathy with those for whose company they are destined. Of
this kind is all vulgar composition; the "Mulino" of Claude, described
in the preface to the first part, being a characteristic example.
If the mind be of higher feeling, it will look to the sympathy or
contrast of the features, to their likeness or dissimilarity; it will
take, as it thinks best, features resembling or discordant, and if when
it has put them together, it be not satisfied, it will repeat the
process on the features themselves, cutting away one part and putting in
another, so working more and more delicately down to the lowest details,
until by dint of experiment, of repeated trials and shiftings, and
constant reference to principles, (as that two lines must not mimic one
another, that one mass must not be equal to another,) etc., it has
morticed together a satisfactory result.
Sec. 5. What powers are implied by it. The first of the three functions of
fancy.
This process will be more and more rapid and effective, in proportion to
the artist's powers of conception and association, these in their turn
depending on his knowledge and experience. The distinctness of his
powers of conception will give value, point, and truth to every fragment
that he draws from memory. His powers of association, and his knowledge
of nature will pour out before him in greater or less number and
appositeness the images from which to choose. His experience guides him
to quick discernment in the combination, when made, of the parts that
are offensive and require change.
The most elevated power of mind of all these, is that of association, by
which images apposite or resemblant, or of whatever kind wanted, are
called up quickly and in multitudes. When this power is very brilliant,
it is called fancy, not that this is the only meaning of the word fancy,
but it is the meaning of it in relation to that function of the
imagination which we are here considering; for fancy has three
functions; one subordinate to each of the three functions of the
imagination.
Great differences of power are manifested among artists in this respect,
some having hosts of distinct images always at their command, and
rapidly discerning resemblance or contrast; others having few images,
and obscure, at their disposal, nor readily governing those they have.
Where the powers of fancy are very brilliant, the picture becomes highly
interesting; if her images are systematically and rightly combined, and
truthfully rendered, it will become even impressive and instructive; if
wittily and curiously combined, it will be captivating and entertaining.
Sec. 6. Imagination not yet manifested.
But all this time the imagination has not once shown itself. All this
(except the gift of fancy) may be taught, all this is easily
comprehended and analyzed; but imagination is neither to be taught, nor
by any efforts to be attained, nor by any acuteness of discernment
dissected or analyzed.
We have seen that in composition the mind can only take cognizance of
likeness or dissimilarity, or of abstract beauty among the ideas it
brings together. But neither likeness nor dissimilarity secures harmony.
We saw in the chapter on unity that likeness destroyed harmony or unity
of membership, and that difference did not necessarily secure it, but
only that particular imperfection in each of the harmonizing parts which
can only be supplied by its fellow part. If, therefore, the combination
made is to be harmonious, the artist must induce in each of its
component parts (suppose two only, for simplicity's sake,) such
imperfection as that the other shall put it right. If one of them be
perfect by itself, the other will be an excrescence. Both must be faulty
when separate, and each corrected by the presence of the other. If he
can accomplish this, the result will be beautiful; it will be a whole,
an organized body with dependent members;--he is an inventor. If not,
let his separate features be as beautiful, as apposite, or as resemblant
as they may, they form no whole. They are two members glued together. He
is only a carpenter and joiner.
Sec. 7. Imagination is the correlative conception of imperfect component
parts.
Now, the conceivable imperfections of any single feature are infinite.
It is impossible, therefore, to fix upon a form of imperfection in the
one, and try with this all the forms of imperfection of the other until
one fits; but the two imperfections must be corelatively and
simultaneously conceived.
This is imagination, properly so called, imagination associative, the
grandest mechanical power that the human intelligence possesses, and one
which will appear more and more marvellous the longer we consider it. By
its operation, two ideas are chosen out of an infinite mass, (for it
evidently matters not whether the imperfections be conceived out of the
infinite number conceivable, or selected out of a number recollected,)
two ideas which are separately wrong, which together shall be right, and
of whose unity, therefore, the idea must be formed at the instant they
are seized, as it is only in that unity that either are good, and
therefore only the _conception of that unity can prompt the preference_.
Now, what is that prophetic action of mind, which, out of an infinite
mass of things that cannot be tried together, seizes, at the same
instant two that are fit for each other, together right; yet each
disagreeable alone.
Sec. 8. Material analogy with imagination.
This operation of mind, so far as I can see, is absolutely
inexplicable, but there is something like it in chemistry.
"The action of sulphuric acid on metallic zinc affords an instance of
what was once called disposing affinity. Zinc decomposes pure water at
common temperatures with extreme slowness; but as soon as sulphuric acid
is added, decomposition of the water takes place rapidly, though the
acid merely unites with oxide of zinc. The former explanation was, that
the affinity of the acid for oxide of zinc disposed the metal to unite
with oxygen, and thus enabled it to decompose water; that is, the oxide
of zinc was supposed to produce an effect previous to its existence. The
obscurity of this explanation arises from regarding changes as
consecutive, which are in reality simultaneous. There is no succession
in the process, the oxide of zinc is not formed previously to its
combination with the acid, but at the same instant. There is, as it
were, but one chemical change, which consists in the combination at one
and the same moment of zinc with oxygen, and of oxide of zinc with the
acid; and this change occurs because these two affinities, acting
together, overcome the attraction of oxygen and hydrogen for one
another."[52]
Now, if the imaginative artist will permit us, with all deference, to
represent his combining intelligence under the figure of sulphuric acid;
and if we suppose the fragment of zinc to be embarrassed among
infinitely numerous fragments of diverse metals, and the oxygen
dispersed and mingled among gases countless and indistinguishable, we
shall have an excellent type in material things of the action of the
imagination on the immaterial. Both actions are, I think, inexplicable,
for however simultaneous the chemical changes may be, yet the causing
power is the affinity of the acid for what has no existence. It is
neither to be explained how that affinity operates on atoms uncombined,
nor how the artist's desire for an unconceived whole prompts him to the
selection of necessary divisions.
Sec. 9. The grasp and dignity of imagination.
Now, this operation would be wonderful enough, if it were concerned with
two ideas only. But a powerfully imaginative mind seizes and combines
at the same instant, not only two, but all the important ideas of its
poem or picture, and while it works with any one of them, it is at the
same instant working with and modifying all in their relations to it,
never losing sight of their bearings on each other; as the motion of a
snake's body goes through all parts at once, and its volition acts at
the same instant in coils that go contrary ways.
This faculty is indeed something that looks as if man were made after
the image of God. It is inconceivable, admirable, altogether divine; and
yet wonderful as it may seem, it is palpably evident that no less an
operation is necessary for the production of any great work, for, by the
definition of unity of membership, (the essential characteristic of
greatness,) not only certain couples or groups of parts, but _all_ the
parts of a noble work must be separately imperfect; each must imply, and
ask for all the rest, and the glory of every one of them must consist in
its relation to the rest, neither while so much as one is wanting can
any be right. And it is evidently impossible to conceive in each
separate feature, a certain want or wrongness which can only be
corrected by the other features of the picture, (not by one or two
merely, but by all,) unless together with the want, we conceive also of
what is wanted, that is of all the rest of the work or picture. Hence
Fuseli:--
"Second thoughts are admissible in painting and poetry only as dressers
of the first conception; no great idea was ever formed in fragments."
"He alone can conceive and compose who sees the whole at once before
him."
Sec. 10. Its limits.
There is, however, a limit to the power of all human imagination. When
the relations to be observed are absolutely necessary, and highly
complicated, the mind cannot grasp them, and the result is a total
deprivation of all power of imagination associative in such matter. For
this reason, no human mind has ever conceived a new animal. For as it is
evident that in an animal, every part implies all the rest; that is, the
form of the eye involves the form of the brow and nose, these the form
of the forehead and lip, these of the head and chin, and so on, so that
it is physically impossible to conceive of any one of these members,
unless we conceive the relation it bears to the whole animal; and as
this relation is necessary, certain, and complicated, allowing of no
license or inaccuracy, the intellect utterly fails under the load, and
is reduced to mere composition, putting the bird's wing on men's
shoulders, or half the human body to half the horse's, in doing which
there is no action of imagination, but only of fancy; though in the
treatment and contemplation of the compound form there may be much
imagination, as we shall presently see. (Chap. III. Sec. 30.)
Sec. 11. How manifested in treatment of uncertain relations. Its deficiency
illustrated.
The matter, therefore, in which associative imagination can be shown is
that which admits of great license and variety of arrangements, and in
which a certain amount of relation only is required; as especially in
the elements of landscape painting, in which best it may be illustrated.
When an unimaginative painter is about to draw a tree, (and we will
suppose him, for better illustration of the point in question, to have
good feeling and correct knowledge of the nature of trees,) he probably
lays on his paper such a general form as he knows to be characteristic
of the tree to be drawn, and such as he believes will fall in agreeably
with the other masses of his picture, which we will suppose partly
prepared. When this form is set down, he assuredly finds it has done
something he did not intend it to do. It has mimicked some prominent
line, or overpowered some necessary mass. He begins pruning and
changing, and after several experiments, succeeds in obtaining a form
which does no material mischief to any other. To this form he proceeds
to attach a trunk, and having probably a received notion or rule (for
the unimaginative painter never works without a principle) that tree
trunks ought to lean first one way and then the other as they go up, and
ought not to stand under the middle of the tree, he sketches a
serpentine form of requisite propriety; when it has gone up far enough,
that is till it begins to look disagreeably long, he will begin to
ramify it, and if there be another tree in the picture with two large
branches, he knows that this, by all laws of composition, ought to have
three or four, or some different number; one because he knows that if
three or four branches start from the same point they will look formal,
therefore he makes them start from points one above another, and because
equal distances are improper, therefore they shall start at unequal
distances. When they are fairly started, he knows they must undulate or
go backwards and forwards, which accordingly he makes them do at random;
and because he knows that all forms ought to be contrasted, therefore he
makes one bend down while the other three go up. The three that go up he
knows must not go up without interfering with each other, and so he
makes two of them cross. He thinks it also proper that there should be
variety of character in them, so he makes the one that bends down
graceful and flexible, and of the two that cross, he splinters one and
makes a stump of it. He repeats the process among the more complicated
minor boughs, until coming to the smallest, he thinks farther care
unnecessary, but draws them freely, and by chance. Having to put on the
foliage, he will make it flow properly in the direction of the tree's
growth, he will make all the extremities graceful, but will be
grievously plagued by finding them come all alike, and at last will be
obliged to spoil a number of them altogether, in order to obtain
opposition. They will not, however, be united in this their spoliation,
but will remain uncomfortably separate and individually ill-tempered. He
consoles himself by the reflection that it is unnatural for all of them
to be equally perfect.
Sec. 12. Laws of art, the safeguard of the unimaginative.
Now I suppose that through the whole of this process he has been able to
refer to his definite memory or conception of nature for every one of
the fragments he has successively added, that the details, color,
fractures, insertions, etc., of his boughs, are all either actual
recollections or based on secure knowledge of the tree, (and herein I
allow far more than is commonly the case with unimaginative painters.)
But as far as the process of combination is concerned, it is evident
that from beginning to end his laws have been his safety, and his plague
has been his liberty. He has been compelled to work at random, or under
the guidance of feeling only, whenever there was anything left to his
own decision. He has never been decided in anything except in what he
_must_ or _must not_ do. He has walked as a drunken man on a broad road,
his guides are the hedges; and between these limits, the broader the
way, the worse he gets on.
Sec. 13. Are by the imaginative painter despised. Tests of imagination.
The advance of the imaginative artist is precisely the reverse of this.
He has no laws. He defies all restraint, and cuts down all hedges. There
is nothing within the limits of natural possibility that he dares not
do, or that he allows the necessity of doing. The laws of nature he
knows, are to him no restraint. They are his own nature. All other laws
or limits he sets at utter defiance, his journey is over an untrodden
and pathless plain. But he sees his end over the waste from the first,
and goes straight at it, never losing sight of it, nor throwing away a
step. Nothing can stop him, nothing turn him aside; falcons and lynxes
are of slow and uncertain sight compared with his. He saw his tree,
trunk, boughs, foliage and all, from the first moment; not only the tree
but the sky behind it; not only that tree or sky, but all the other
great features of his picture: by what intense power of instantaneous
selection and amalgamation cannot be explained, but by this it may be
proved and tested, that if we examine the tree of the unimaginative
painter, we shall find that on removing any part or parts of it, the
rest will indeed suffer, as being deprived of the proper development of
a tree, and as involving a blank space that wants occupation; but the
portions left are not made discordant or disagreeable. They are
absolutely and in themselves as valuable as they can be, every stem is a
perfect stem, and every twig a graceful twig, or at least as perfect and
as graceful as they were before the removal of the rest. But if we try
the same experiment on the imaginative painter's work, and break off the
merest stem or twig of it, it all goes to pieces like a Prince Rupert's
drop. There is not so much as a seed of it but it lies on the tree's
life, like the grain upon the tongue of Chaucer's sainted child. Take it
away, and the boughs will sing to us no longer. All is dead and cold.
Sec. 14. The monotony of unimaginative treatment.
This then is the first sign of the presence of real imagination as
opposed to composition. But here is another not less important.
Sec. 15. Imagination never repeats itself.
We have seen that as each part is selected and fitted by the
unimaginative painter, he renders it, in itself, as beautiful as he is
able. If it be ugly, it remains so, he is incapable of correcting it by
the addition of another ugliness, and therefore he chooses all his
features as fair as they may be (at least if his object be beauty.) But
a small proportion only of the ideas he has at his disposal will reach
his standard of absolute beauty. The others will be of no use to him,
and among those which he permits himself to use, there will be so marked
a family likeness, that he will be more and more cramped, as his picture
advances, for want of material, and tormented by multiplying
resemblances, unless disguised by some artifice of light and shade or
other forced difference, and with all the differences he can imagine,
his tree will yet show a sameness and sickening repetition in all its
parts, and all his trees will be like one another, except so far as one
leans east and another west, one is broadest at the top and another at
the bottom, while through all this insipid repetition, the means by
which he forces contrast, dark boughs opposed to light, rugged to
smooth, etc., will be painfully evident, to the utter destruction of all
dignity and repose. The imaginative work is necessarily the absolute
opposite of all this. As all its parts are imperfect, and as there is an
unlimited supply of imperfection, (for the ways in which things may be
wrong are infinite,) the imagination is never at a loss, nor ever likely
to repeat itself; nothing comes amiss to it, but whatever rude matter it
receives, it instantly so arranges that it comes right; all things fall
into their place and appear in that place perfect, useful, and evidently
not to be spared, so that of its combinations there is endless variety,
and every intractable and seemingly unavailable fragment that we give to
it, is instantly turned to some brilliant use, and made the nucleus of a
new group of glory; however poor or common the gift, it will be thankful
for it, treasure it up, and pay in gold, and it has that life in it and
fire, that wherever it passes, among the dead bones and dust of things,
behold a shaking, and the bones come together, bone to his bone.
Sec. 16. Relation of the imaginative faculty to the theoretic.
And now we find what noble sympathy and unity there is between the
imaginative and theoretic faculties. Both agree in this, that they
reject nothing, and are thankful for all; but the theoretic faculty
takes out of everything that which is beautiful, while the imaginative
faculty takes hold of the very imperfections which the theoretic
rejects, and by means of these angles and roughnesses, it joints and
bolts the separate stones into a mighty temple, wherein the theoretic
faculty in its turn, does deepest homage. Thus sympathetic in their
desires, harmoniously diverse in their operation, each working for the
other with what the other needs not, all things external to man are by
one or other turned to good.
Sec. 17. Modification of its manifestation.
Now we have hitherto, for the sake of clearness, opposed the total
absence of imagination to the perfect presence of it, in order to make
the difference between composition and imagination thoroughly
understood. But if we are to give examples of either the want or the
presence of the power, it is necessary to note the circumstances by
which both are modified. In the first place, few artists of any standing
are totally devoid of this faculty, some small measure of it most of
them possess, though of all the forms of intellect, this, and its
sister, penetrative imagination, are the rarest and most precious; but
few painters have reached eminence without some leaven of it, whether it
can be increased by practice I doubt. On the other hand, fewer still are
possessed of it in very high degree, and even with the men of most
gigantic power in this respect, of whom, I think, Tintoret stands far
the head, there are evident limits to its exercise, and portions to be
found in their works that have not been included in the original grasp
of them, but have been suggested and incorporated during their progress,
or added in decoration; and with the great mass of painters there are
frequent flaws and failures in the conception, so that, when they intend
to produce a perfect work they throw their thought into different
experimental forms, and decorate it and discipline it long before
realizing it, so that there is a certain amount of mere composition in
the most imaginative works; and a grain or two of imagination commonly
in the most artificial. And again, whatever portions of a picture are
taken honestly and without alteration from nature, have, so far as they
go, the look of imagination, because all that nature does is
imaginative, that is, perfect as a whole, and made up of imperfect
features; so that the painter of the meanest imaginative power may yet
do grand things, if he will keep to strict portraiture, and it would be
well if all artists were to endeavor to do so, for if they have
imagination, it will force its way in spite of them, and show itself in
their every stroke, and if not, they will not get it by leaving nature,
but only sink into nothingness.
Sec. 18. Instances of absence of imagination.--Claude, Gaspar Poussin.
Keeping these points in view, it is interesting to observe the different
degrees and relations of the imagination, as accompanied with more or
less feeling or desire of harmony, vigor of conception, or constancy of
reference to truth. Of men of name, perhaps Claude is the best instance
of a want of imagination, nearly total, borne out by painful but
untaught study of nature, and much feeling for abstract beauty of form,
with none whatever for harmony of expression. In Gaspar Poussin, we have
the same want of imagination disguised by more masculine qualities of
mind, and grander reachings after sympathy. Thus in the sacrifice of
Isaac in our own gallery, the spirit of the composition is solemn and
unbroken; it would have been a grand picture if the forms of the mass of
foliage on the right, and of the clouds in the centre, had not been
hopelessly unimaginative. The stormy wind of the picture of Dido and
Eneas blows loudly through its leaves, but the total want of invention
in the cloud forms bears it down beyond redemption. The foreground tree
of the La Riccia (compare Part II. Sec. VI. Chap. I., Sec. 6.) is another
characteristic instance of absolute nullity of imagination.
[Illustration: THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI. From a painting by Ruskin,
after Tintoret.]
Sec. 19. Its presence.--Salvator, Nicolo Poussin, Titian, Tintoret.
In Salvator, the imagination is vigorous, the composition dextrous and
clever, as in the St. Jerome of the Brera Gallery, the Diogenes of the
Pitti, and the pictures of the Guadagni palace. All are rendered
valueless by coarseness of feeling and habitual non-reference to nature.
All the landscape of Nicolo Poussin is imaginative, but the development
of the power in Tintoret and Titian is so unapproachably intense that
the mind unwillingly rests elsewhere. The four landscapes which occur to
me as the most magnificently characteristic are, first, the Flight into
Egypt, of the Scuola di San Rocco (Tintoret;) secondly, the Titian of
the Camuccini collection at Rome, with the figures by John Bellini;
thirdly, Titian's St. Jerome, in the Brera Gallery at Milan; and
fourthly, the St. Pietro Martire, which I name last, in spite of its
importance, because there is something unmeaning and unworthy of Titian
about the undulation of the trunks, and the upper part of it is
destroyed by the intrusion of some dramatic clouds of that species which
I have enough described in our former examination of the central cloud
region, Sec. 13.
I do not mean to set these four works above the rest of the landscape of
these masters; I name them only because the landscape is in them
prominent and characteristic. It would be well to compare with them the
other backgrounds of Tintoret in the Scuola, especially that of the
Temptation and the Agony in the Garden, and the landscape of the two
large pictures in the church of La Madonna dell' Orto.
Sec. 20. And Turner.
But for immediate and close illustration, it is perhaps best to refer to
a work more accessible, the Cephalus and Procris of Turner, in Liber
Studiorum.
I know of no landscape more purely or magnificently imaginative or
bearing more distinct evidence of the relative and simultaneous
conception of the parts. Let the reader first cover with his hand the
two trunks that rise against the sky on the right, and ask himself how
any termination of the central mass so _ugly_ as the straight trunk
which he will then painfully see, could have been conceived or admitted
without simultaneous conception of the trunks he has taken away on the
right? Let him again conceal the whole central mass, and leave these two
only, and again ask himself whether anything so ugly as that bare trunk
in the shape of a Y, could have been admitted without reference to the
central mass? Then let him remove from this trunk its two arms, and try
the effect; let him again remove the single trunk on the extreme right;
then let him try the third trunk without the excrescence at the bottom
of it; finally, let him conceal the fourth trunk from the right, with
the slender boughs at the top; he will find in each case that he has
destroyed a feature on which everything else depends, and if proof be
required of the vital power of still smaller features, let him remove
the sunbeam that comes through beneath the faint mass of trees on the
hill in the distance.[53]
It is useless to enter into farther particulars; the reader may be left
to his own close examination of this and of the other works of Turner,
in which he will always find the associative imagination developed in
the most profuse and marvellous modes, especially in the drawing of
foliage and skies, in both of which the presence or absence of the
associative power may best be tested in all artists. I have, however,
confined my present illustrations chiefly to foliage, because other
operations of the imagination besides the associative, interfere
extensively in the treatment of sky.
Sec. 21. The due function of Associative Imagination with respect to
nature.
There remains but one question to be determined relating to this
faculty, what operation, namely, supposing it possessed in high degree,
it has or ought to have in the artist's treatment of natural scenery.
I have just said that nature is always imaginative, but it does not
follow that her imagination is always of high subject, or that the
imagination of all the parts is of a like and sympathetic kind; the
boughs of every bramble bush are imaginatively arranged, so are those of
every oak and cedar; but it does not follow that there is imaginative
sympathy between bramble and cedar. There are few natural scenes whose
harmonies are not conceivably improvable either by banishment of some
discordant point, or by addition of some sympathetic one; it constantly
happens that there is a profuseness too great to be comprehended, or an
inequality in the pitch, meaning, and intensity of different parts. The
imagination will banish all that is extraneous, it will seize out of the
many threads of different feeling which nature has suffered to become
entangled, one only, and where that seems thin and likely to break, it
will spin it stouter, and in doing this, it never knots, but weaves in
the new thread, so that all its work looks as pure and true as nature
itself, and cannot be guessed from it but by its exceeding simplicity,
(_known_ from it, it cannot be,) so that herein we find another test of
the imaginative work, that it looks always as if it had been gathered
straight from nature, whereas the unimaginative shows its joints and
knots, and is visibly composition.
Sec. 22. The sign of imaginative work is its appearance of absolute truth.
And here then we arrive at an important conclusion (though one somewhat
contrary to the positions commonly held on the subject,) namely, that if
anything looks unnatural, there can be no imagination in it (at least
not associative.) We frequently hear works that have no truth in them,
justified or elevated on the score of being imaginative. Let it be
understood once for all, that imagination never designs to touch
anything but truth, and though it does not follow that where there is
the appearance of truth, there has been imaginative operation, of this
we may be assured, that where there is appearance of falsehood, the
imagination has had no hand.[54]
For instance, the landscape above mentioned of Titian's St. Jerome may,
for aught I know, be a pure transcript of a rocky slope covered with
chestnuts among his native mountains. It has all the look of a sketch
from nature; if it be not, the imagination developed in it is of the
highest order; if it be, the imagination has only acted in the
suggestion of the dark sky, of the shape of the flakes of solemn cloud,
and of the gleam of russet light along the distant ground.[55]
Again, it is impossible to tell whether the two nearest trunks of the
Aesacus and Hesperie of the Liber Studiorum, especially the large one on
the right with the ivy, have been invented, or taken straight from
nature, they have all the look of accurate portraiture. I can hardly
imagine anything so perfect to have been obtained except from the real
thing; but we know that the imagination must have begun to operate
somewhere, we cannot tell where, since the multitudinous harmonies of
the rest of the picture could hardly in any real scene have continued so
inviolately sweet.
The final tests, therefore, of the work of associative imagination are
its intense simplicity, its perfect harmony, and its absolute truth. It
may be a harmony, majestic, or humble, abrupt, or prolonged, but it is
always a governed and perfect whole, evidencing in all its relations the
weight, prevalence, and universal dominion of an awful, inexplicable
Power; a chastising, animating, and disposing Mind.
FOOTNOTES
[50] Compare Chapter IV. of this Section.
[51] On the distinction rightly made by the metaphysicians between
conception absolute and conception accompanied by reference to past
time, (or memory,) it is of no necessity here to insist.
[52] Elements of Chemistry, by the late Edward Turner, M.D. Part II.
Sec. IV.
[53] This ray of light, however, has an imaginative power of another
kind presently to be spoken of. Compare Chap. IV. Sec. 18.
[54] Compare Chap. III. Sec.30.
[55] It is said at Venice that Titian took the trees of the St.
Pietro Martiere out of his garden opposite Murano. I think this
unlikely; there is something about the lower trunks that has a taint
of composition: the thought of the whole, however, is thoroughly
fine. The backgrounds of the frescoes at Padua are also very
characteristic, and the well-known woodcut of St. Francis receiving
the stigmata, one of the mightiest of existing landscape thoughts;
and yet it is pure portraiture of pine and Spanish chestnut.
CHAPTER III.
OF IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE.
Sec. 1. Imagination penetrative is concerned not with the combining but
apprehending of things.
Thus far we have been defining that combining operation of the
imagination, which appears to be in a sort mechanical, yet takes place
in the same inexplicable modes, whatever be the order of conception
submitted to it, though I chose to illustrate it by its dealings with
mere matter before taking cognizance of any nobler subjects of imagery.
We must now examine the dealing of the imagination with its separate
conceptions, and endeavor to understand not only its principles of
selection, but its modes of apprehension with respect to what it
selects.
Sec. 2. Milton's and Dante's description of flame.
When Milton's Satan first "rears from off the pool, his mighty stature,"
the image of Leviathan before suggested not being yet abandoned, the
effect on the fire-wave is described as of the upheaved monster on the
ocean stream.
"On each hand the flames,
Driven backwards, slope their pointing spires,
and rolled
In billows, leave in the midst a horrid vale."
And then follows a fiercely restless piece of volcanic imagery.
"As when the force
Of subterranean wind transports a hill
Torn from Pelorus, or the shattered side
Of thundering Aetna, whose combustible
And fuell'd entrails thence conceiving fire,
Sublimed with mineral fury, aid the winds,
And leave a singed bottom, all involved
With stench and smoke; such resting found the sole
Of unblest feet."
Yet I think all this is too far detailed, and deals too much with
externals; we feel rather the form of the fire-waves than their fury, we
walk upon them too securely, and the fuel, sublimation, smoke, and
singeing, seem to me images only of partial combustion; they vary and
extend the conception, but they lower the thermometer. Look back, if you
will, and add to the description the glimmering of the livid flames; the
sulphurous hail and red lightning; yet altogether, however they
overwhelm us with horror, fail of making us thoroughly, unendurably hot.
The intense essence of flame has not been given. Now hear Dante:--
"Feriami 'l Sole in su l'omero destro
Che gia raggiando tutto l'Occidente
_Mutava in bianco aspetto di eilestro.
Ed io_ facea _con l'ombra piu rovente
Parer la flamma_."
That is a slight touch; he has not gone to Aetna nor Pelorus for fuel;
but we shall not soon recover from it--he has taken our breath away and
leaves us gasping. No smoke nor cinders there. Pure, white, hurtling,
formless flame; very fire crystal, we cannot make spires nor waves of
it, nor divide it, nor walk on it, there is no question about singeing
soles of feet. It is lambent annihilation.
Sec. 3. The imagination seizes always by the innermost point.
Such is always the mode in which the highest imaginative faculty seizes
its materials. It never stops at crusts or ashes, or outward images of
any kind, it ploughs them all aside, and plunges into the very central
fiery heart, nothing else will content its spirituality, whatever
semblances and various outward shows and phases its subject may possess,
go for nothing, it gets within all fence, cuts down to the root, and
drinks the very vital sap of that it deals with: once there it is at
liberty to throw up what new shoots it will, so always that the true
juice and sap be in them, and to prune and twist them at its pleasure,
and bring them to fairer fruit than grew on the old tree; but all this
pruning and twisting is work that it likes not, and often does ill; its
function and gift are the getting at the root, its nature and dignity
depend on its holding things always by the heart. Take its hand from off
the beating of that, and it will prophesy no longer; it looks not in the
eyes, it judges not by the voice, it describes not by outward features,
all that it affirms, judges, or describes, it affirms from within.
Sec. 4. It acts intuitively and without reasoning.
It may seem to the reader that I am incorrect in calling this
penetrating, possession-taking faculty, imagination. Be it so, the name
is of little consequence; the faculty itself, called by what name we
will, I insist upon as the highest intellectual power of man. There is
no reasoning in it, it works not by algebra, nor by integral calculus,
it is a piercing, Pholas-like mind's tongue that works and tastes into
the very rock heart, no matter what be the subject submitted to it,
substance or spirit, all is alike, divided asunder, joint and marrow,
whatever utmost truth, life, principle, it has, laid bare, and that
which has no truth, life, nor principle, dissipated into its original
smoke at a touch. The whispers at men's ears it lifts into visible
angels. Vials that have lain sealed in the deep sea a thousand years it
unseals, and brings out of them Genii.
Every great conception of poet or painter is held and treated by this
faculty. Every character that is so much as touched by men like
Aeschylus, Homer, Dante, or Shakspeare, is by them held by the heart; and
every circumstance or sentence of their being, speaking, or seeming, is
seized by process from within, and is referred to that inner secret
spring of which the hold is never lost for an instant; so that every
sentence, as it has been thought out from the heart, opens for us a way
down to the heart, leads us to the centre, and then leaves us to gather
what more we may; it is the open sesame of a huge, obscure, endless
cave, with inexhaustible treasure of pure gold scattered in it: the
wandering about and gathering the pieces may be left to any of us, all
can accomplish that; but the first opening of that invisible door in the
rock is of the imagination only.
Sec. 5. Signs of it in language.
Hence there is in every word set down by the imaginative mind an awful
under-current of meaning, and evidence and shadow upon it of the deep
places out of which it has come. It is often obscure, often half told,
for he who wrote it, in his clear seeing of the things beneath, may have
been impatient of detailed interpretation, but if we choose to dwell
upon it and trace it, it will lead us always securely back to that
metropolis of the soul's dominion from which we may follow out all the
ways and tracks to its farthest coasts.
I think the "Quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante" of Francesca di
Rimini, and the "He has no children" of Macduff are as fine instances as
can be given, but the sign and mark of it are visible on every line of
the four great men above instanced.
Sec. 6. Absence of imagination, how shown.
The imaginative writer, on the other hand, as he has never pierced to
the heart, so he can never touch it: if he has to paint a passion, he
remembers the external signs of it, he collects expressions of it from
other writers, he searches for similes, he composes, exaggerates, heaps
term on term, figure on figure, till we groan beneath the cold,
disjointed heap; but it is all faggot and no fire, the life breath is
not in it, his passion has the form of the Leviathan, but it never makes
the deep boil, he fastens us all at anchor in the scaly rind of it, our
sympathies remain as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.
And that virtue of originality that men so strain after, is not newness,
as they vainly think, (there is nothing new,) it is only genuineness; it
all depends on this single glorious faculty of getting to the spring of
things and working out from that; it is the coolness, and clearness, and
deliciousness of the water fresh from the fountain head, opposed to the
thick, hot, unrefreshing drainage from other men's meadows.
Sec. 7. Distinction between imagination and fancy.
This freshness, however, is not to be taken for an infallible sign of
imagination, inasmuch as it results also from a vivid operation of
fancy, whose parallel function to this division of the imaginative
faculty it is here necessary to distinguish.
I believe it will be found that the entirely unimaginative mind _sees_
nothing of the object it has to dwell upon or describe, and is therefore
utterly unable, as it is blind itself, to set anything before the eyes
of the reader.[56]
The fancy sees the outside, and is able to give a portrait of the
outside, clear, brilliant, and full of detail.[57]
The imagination sees the heart and inner nature, and makes them felt,
but is often obscure, mysterious, and interrupted, in its giving of
outer detail.
Take an instance. A writer with neither imagination nor fancy,
describing a fair lip, does not see it, but thinks about it, and about
what is said of it, and calls it well-turned, or rosy, or delicate, or
lovely, or afflicts us with some other quenching and chilling epithet.
Now hear fancy speak,--
"Her lips were red, and one was thin,
Compared with that was next her chin,
Some bee had stung it newly."[58]
The real, red, bright being of the lip is there in a moment But it is
all outside; no expression yet, no mind. Let us go a step farther with
Warner, of fair Rosamond struck by Eleanor.
"With that she dashed her on the lips
So dyed double red;
Hard was the heart that gave the blow,
Soft were those lips that bled."
The tenderness of mind begins to mingle with the outside color, the
imagination is seen in its awakening. Next Shelley,--
"Lamp of life, thy lips are burning
Through the veil that seems to hide them,
As the radiant lines of morning
Through thin clouds, ere they divide them."
There dawns the entire soul in that morning; yet we may stop if we
choose at the image still external, at the crimson clouds. The
imagination is contemplative rather than penetrative. Last, hear
Hamlet,--
"Here hung those lips that I have kissed, I know not how oft. Where be
your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment that
were wont to set the table on a roar?"
There is the essence of lip, and the full power of the imagination.
Again, compare Milton's flowers in Lycidas with Perdita's. In Milton it
happens, I think, generally, and in the case before us most certainly,
that the imagination is mixed and broken with fancy, and so the strength
of the imagery is part of iron and part of clay.
"Bring the rathe primrose, that forsaken dies (Imagination)
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine, (Nugatory)
The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet,-- (Fancy)
The glowing violet, (Imagination)
The musk rose, and the well-attired woodbine, (Fancy, vulgar)
With cowslips wan, that hang the pensive head, (Imagination)
And every flower that sad embroidery wears." (Mixed)
Then hear Perdita:--
"O, Proserpina,
For the flowers now, that frighted thou let'st fall
From Dis's wagon. Daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty. Violets, dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes
Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength, a malady
Most incident to maids."
Observe how the imagination in these last lines goes into the very
inmost soul of every flower, after having touched them all at first with
that heavenly timidness, the shadow of Proserpine's; and gilded them
with celestial gathering, and never stops on their spots, or their
bodily shape, while Milton sticks in the stains upon them, and puts us
off with that unhappy freak of jet in the very flower that without this
bit of paper-staining would have been the most precious to us of all.
"There is pansies, that's for thoughts."
Sec. 8. Fancy how involved with imagination.
So I believe it will be found throughout the operation of the fancy,
that it has to do with the outsides of things, and is content therewith:
of this there can be no doubt in such passage as that description of
Mab, so often given as an illustration of it, and many other instances
will be found in Leigh Hunt's work already referred to. Only some
embarrassment is caused by passages in which fancy is seizing the
outward signs of emotion, understanding them as such, and yet, in
pursuance of her proper function, taking for her share, and for that
which she chooses to dwell upon, the outside sign rather than the
emotion. Note in Macbeth that brilliant instance.
"Where the Norweyan banners flout the sky
And fan our people cold."
The outward shiver and coldness of fear is seized on, and irregularly
but admirably attributed by the fancy to the drift of the banners.
Compare Solomon's Song where the imagination stays not at the outside,
but dwells on the fearful emotion itself?
"Who is she that looketh forth as the morning; fair as the moon, clear
as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?"
Sec. 9. Fancy is never serious
Now, if this be the prevailing characteristic of the two faculties, it
is evident that certain other collateral differences will result from
it. Fancy, as she stays at the externals, can never feel. She is one of
the hardest hearted of the intellectual faculties, or rather one of the
most purely and simply intellectual. She cannot be made serious,[59] no
edge-tools but she will play with; whereas the imagination is in all
things the reverse. She cannot be but serious; she sees too far, too
darkly, too solemnly, too earnestly, ever to smile. There is something
in the heart of everything, if we can reach it, that we shall not be
inclined to laugh at. The [Greek: anerithmon gelasma] of the sea is on
its surface, not in the deep.
Sec. 10. Want of seriousness the bar to high art at the present time.
And thus there is reciprocal action between the intensity of moral
feeling and the power of imagination; for, on the one hand, those who
have keenest sympathy are those who look closest and pierce deepest, and
hold securest; and, on the other, those who have so pierced and seen the
melancholy deeps of things, are filled with the most intense passion and
gentleness of sympathy. Hence, I suppose that the powers of the
imagination may always be tested by accompanying tenderness of emotion,
and thus, (as Byron said,) there is no tenderness like Dante's, neither
any intensity nor seriousness like his, such seriousness that it is
incapable of perceiving that which is commonplace or ridiculous, but
fuses all down into its white-hot fire; and, on the other hand, I
suppose the chief bar to the action of imagination, and stop to all
greatness in this present age of ours, is its mean and shallow love of
jest and jeer, so that if there be in any good and lofty work a flaw or
failing, or undipped vulnerable part where sarcasm may stick or stay, it
is caught at, and pointed at, and buzzed about, and fixed upon, and
stung into, as a recent wound is by flies, and nothing is ever taken
seriously nor as it was meant, but always, if it may be, turned the
wrong way, and misunderstood; and while this is so, there is not, nor
cannot be any hope of achievement of high things; men dare not open
their hearts to us, if we are to broil them on a thorn-fire.
Sec. 11. Imagination is quiet; fancy, restless.
This, then, is one essential difference between imagination and fancy,
and another is like it and resultant from it, that the imagination being
at the heart of things, poises herself there, and is still, quiet, and
brooding; comprehending all around her with her fixed look, but the
fancy staying at the outside of things, cannot see them all at once, but
runs hither and thither, and round and about to see more and more,
bounding merrily from point to point, and glittering here and there, but
necessarily always settling, if she settle at all, on a point only,
never embracing the whole. And from these single points she can strike
out analogies and catch resemblances, which, so far as the point she
looks at is concerned, are true, but would be false, if she could see
through to the other side. This, however, she cares not to do, the point
of contact is enough for her, and even if there be a gap left between
the two things and they do not quite touch, she will spring from one to
the other like an electric spark, and be seen brightest in her leaping.
Sec. 12. The detailing operation of fancy.
Now these differences between the imagination and the fancy hold, not
only in the way they lay hold of separate conceptions, but even in the
points they occupy of time, for the fancy loves to run hither and
thither in time, and to follow long chains of circumstances from link to
link; but the imagination, if it may, gets holds of a moment or link in
the middle that implies all the rest, and fastens there. Hence Fuseli's
aphorism, "Invention never suffers the action to expire, nor the
spectator's fancy to consume itself in preparation, or stagnate into
repose. It neither begins from the egg, nor coldly gathers the remains."
In Retsch's illustrations to Schiller's Kampf mit dem Drachen, we have
an instance, miserably feeble indeed, but characteristic, and suited to
our present purpose, of the detailing, finishing action of the fancy.
The dragon is drawn from head to tail, vulture eyes, serpent teeth,
forked tongue, fiery crest, armor, claws and coils as grisly as may be;
his den is drawn, and all the dead bones in it, and all the savage
forest-country about it far and wide; we have him from the beginning of
his career to the end, devouring, rampant, victorious over whole armies,
gorged with death; we are present at all the preparations for his
attack, see him receive his death-wound, and our anxieties are finally
becalmed by seeing him lie peaceably dead on his back.
Sec. 13. And suggestive, of the imagination.
All the time we have never got into the dragon heart, we have never once
felt real pervading horror, nor sense of the creature's being; it is
throughout nothing but an ugly composition of claw and scale. Now take
up Turner's Jason, Liber Studiorum, and observe how the imagination can
concentrate all this, and infinitely more, into one moment. No far
forest country, no secret paths, nor cloven hills, nothing but a gleam
of pale horizontal sky, that broods over pleasant places far away, and
sends in, through the wild overgrowth of the thicket, a ray of broken
daylight into the hopeless pit. No flaunting plumes nor brandished
lances, but stern purpose in the turn of the crestless helmet, visible
victory in the drawing back of the prepared right arm behind the steady
point. No more claws, nor teeth, nor manes, nor stinging tails. We have
the dragon, like everything else, by the middle. We need see no more of
him. All his horror is in that fearful, slow, grinding upheaval of the
single coil. Spark after spark of it, ring after ring, is sliding into
the light, the slow glitter steals along him step by step, broader and
broader, a lighting of funeral lamps one by one, quicker and quicker; a
moment more, and he is out upon us, all crash and blaze among those
broken trunks;--but he will be nothing then to what he is now.
Sec. 14. This suggestiveness how opposed to vacancy.
Now, it is necessary here very carefully to distinguish between that
character of the work which depends on the imagination of the beholder,
and that which results from the imagination of the artist, for a work is
often called imaginative when it merely leaves room for the action of
the imagination; whereas though nearly all imaginative works do this,
yet it may be done also by works that have in them no imagination at
all. A few shapeless scratches or accidental stains on a wall; or the
forms of clouds, or any other complicated accidents, will set the
imagination to work to coin something out of them, and all paintings in
which there is much gloom or mystery, possess therein a certain
sublimity owing to the play given to the beholder's imagination,
without, necessarily, being in the slightest degree imaginative
themselves. The vacancy of a truly imaginative work results not from
absence of ideas, or incapability of grasping and detailing them, but
from the painter having told the whole pith and power of his subject and
disdaining to tell more, and the sign of this being the case is, that
the imagination of the beholder is forced to act in a certain mode, and
feels itself overpowered and borne away by that of the painter, and not
able to defend itself, nor go which way it will, and the value of the
work depends on the truth, authority, and inevitability of this
suggestiveness, and on the absolute right choice of the critical moment.
Now observe in this work of Turner's, that the whole value of it
depends on the character of curve assumed by the serpent's body; for had
it been a mere semicircle, or gone down in a series of smaller coils, it
would have been in the first case, ridiculous, as false and unlike a
serpent, and in the second, disgusting, nothing more than an exaggerated
viper, but it is that _coming straight_ at the right hand which suggests
the drawing forth of an enormous weight, and gives the bent part its
springing look, that frightens us. Again, remove the light trunk[60] on
the left, and observe how useless all the gloom of the picture would
have been, if this trunk had not given it depth and _hollowness_.
Finally and chiefly, observe that the painter is not satisfied even with
all the suggestiveness thus obtained, but to make sure of us, and force
us, whether we will or no, to walk his way, and not ours, the trunks of
the trees on the right are all cloven into yawning and writhing heads
and bodies, and alive with dragon energy all about us, note especially
the nearest with its gaping jaws and claw-like branch at the seeming
shoulder; a kind of suggestion which in itself is not imaginative, but
merely fanciful, (using the term fancy in that third sense not yet
explained, corresponding to the third office of imagination;) but it is
imaginative in its present use and application, for the painter
addresses thereby that morbid and fearful condition of mind which he has
endeavored to excite in the spectator, and which in reality would have
seen in every trunk and bough, as it penetrated into the deeper thicket,
the object of its terror.
Sec. 15. Imagination addresses itself to imagination.
Instances from the works of Tintoret.
It is nevertheless evident, that however suggestive the work or picture
may be, it cannot have effect unless we are ourselves both watchful of
its very hint, and capable of understanding and carrying it out, and
although I think that this power of continuing or accepting the
direction of feeling given is less a peculiar gift, like that of the
original seizing, than a faculty dependent on attention, and improvable
by cultivation; yet, to a certain extent, the imaginative work will not,
I think, be rightly esteemed except by a mind of some corresponding
power; not but that there is an intense enjoyment in minds of feeble yet
light conception in the help and food they get from those of stronger
thought; but a certain imaginative susceptibility is at any rate
necessary, and above all things, earnestness and feeling, so that
assuredly a work of high conceptive dignity will be always
incomprehensible and valueless except in those who go to it in earnest
and give it time; and this is peculiarly the case when the imagination
acts not merely on the immediate subject, nor in giving a fanciful and
peculiar character to prominent objects, as we have just seen, but
busies itself throughout in expressing occult and far-sought sympathies
in every minor detail, of which action the most sublime instances are
found in the works of Tintoret, whose intensity of imagination is such
that there is not the commonest subject to which he will not attach a
range of suggestiveness almost limitless, nor a stone, leaf, or shadow,
nor anything so small, but he will give it meaning and oracular voice.
Sec. 16. The Entombment.
In the centre of the gallery at Parma, there is a canvas of Tintoret's,
whose sublimity of conception and grandeur of color are seen in the
highest perfection, by their opposition to the morbid and vulgar
sentimentalism of Correggio. It is an Entombment of Christ, with a
landscape distance, of whose technical composition and details I shall
have much to say hereafter, at present I speak only of the thought it is
intended to convey. An ordinary or unimaginative painter would have made
prominent, among his objects of landscape, such as might naturally be
supposed to have been visible from the sepulchre, and shown with the
crosses of Calvary, some portion of Jerusalem, or of the Valley of
Jehoshaphat. But Tintoret has a far higher aim. Dwelling on the peculiar
force of the event before him, as the fulfilment of the final prophecy
respecting the passion, "He made his grave with the wicked and with the
_rich_ in his death," he desires to direct the mind of the spectator to
this receiving of the body of Christ, in its contrast with the houseless
birth and the desert life. And, therefore, behind the ghastly tomb-grass
that shakes its black and withered blades above the rocks of the
sepulchre, there is seen, not the actual material distance of the spot
itself, (though the crosses are shown faintly,) but that to which the
thoughtful spirit would return in vision, a desert place, where the
foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests, and against the
barred twilight of the melancholy sky are seen the mouldering beams and
shattered roofing of a ruined cattle-shed, the canopy of the nativity.
Sec. 17. The Annunciation.
Let us take another instance. No subject has been more frequently or
exquisitely treated by the religious painters than that of the
Annunciation, though as usual, the most perfect type of its pure ideal
has been given by Angelico, and by him with the most radiant
consummation (so far as I know) in a small reliquary in the sacristy of
St^a. Maria Novella. The background there, however, is altogether
decorative; but in the fresco of the corridor of St. Mark's, the
concomitant circumstances are of exceeding loveliness. The Virgin sits
in an open loggia, resembling that of the Florentine church of
L'Annunziata. Before her is a meadow of rich herbage, covered with
daisies. Behind her is seen through the door at the end of the loggia,
her chamber with its single grated window, through which a star-like
beam of light falls into the silence. All is exquisite in feeling, but
not inventive nor imaginative. Severe would be the shock and painful the
contrast, if we could pass in an instant from that pure vision to the
wild thought of Tintoret. For not in meek reception of the adoring
messenger, but startled by the rush of his horizontal and rattling
wings, the virgin sits, not in the quiet loggia, not by the green
pasture of the restored soul, but houseless, under the shelter of a
palace vestibule ruined and abandoned, with the noise of the axe and the
hammer in her ears, and the tumult of a city round about her desolation.
The spectator turns away at first, revolted, from the central object of
the picture, forced painfully and coarsely forward, a mass of shattered
brickwork, with the plaster mildewed away from it, and the mortar
mouldering from its seams; and if he look again, either at this or at
the carpenter's tools beneath it, will perhaps see in the one and the
other, nothing more than such a study of scene as Tintoret could but too
easily obtain among the ruins of his own Venice, chosen to give a coarse
explanation of the calling and the condition of the husband of Mary. But
there is more meant than this. When he looks at the composition of the
picture, he will find the whole symmetry of it depending on a narrow
line of light, the edge of a carpenter's square, which connects these
unused tools with an object at the top of the brickwork, a white stone,
four square, the corner-stone of the old edifice, the base of its
supporting column. This, I think, sufficiently explains the typical
character of the whole. The ruined house is the Jewish dispensation,
that obscurely arising in the dawning of the sky is the Christian; but
the corner-stone of the old building remains, though the builder's tools
lie idle beside it, and the stone which the builders refused is become
the Headstone of the corner.
Sec. 18. The Baptism of Christ. Its treatment by various painters.
In this picture, however, the force of the thought hardly atones for the
painfulness of the scene and the turbulence of its feeling. The power of
the master is more strikingly shown in his treatment of a subject which,
however important, and however deep in its meaning, supplies not to the
ordinary painter material enough ever to form a picture of high
interest; the Baptism of Christ. From the purity of Giotto to the
intolerable, inconceivable brutality of Salvator,[61] every order of
feeling has been displayed in its treatment; but I am aware of no single
case, except this of which I am about to speak, in which it has formed
an impressive picture.
Giotto's, in the Academy of Florence, engraved in the series just
published, (Galleria delle belle Arti,) is one of the most touching I
know, especially in the reverent action of the attendant angels, and
Leonardo's angel in that of Andrea del Verrocchio is very beautiful, but
the event is one whose character and importance are ineffable upon the
features: the descending dove hardly affects us, because its constant
symbolical occurrence hardens us, and makes us look on it as a mere type
or letter, instead of the actual presence of the Spirit; and by all the
sacred painters the power that might be put into the landscape is lost,
for though their use of foliage and distant sky or mountain is usually
very admirable, as we shall see in the fifth chapter, yet they cannot
deal with near water or rock, and the hexagonal and basaltic
protuberances of their river shore are I think too painful to be endured
even by the most acceptant mind, as eminently in that of Angelico, in
the Vita di Christo, which, as far as I can judge, is a total failure in
action, expression, and all else; and in general it is in this subject
especially, that the greatest painters show their weakness. For this
reason, I suppose, and feeling the difficulty of it, Tintoret has thrown
into it his utmost strength, and it becomes noble in his hands by his
most singularly imaginative expression, not only of the immediate fact,
but of the whole train of thought of which it is suggestive; and by his
considering the baptism not only as the submission of Christ to the
fulfilment of all righteousness, but as the opening of the earthly
struggle with the prince of the powers of the air, which instantly
beginning in the temptation, ended only on the cross.
Sec. 19. By Tintoret.
The river flows fiercely under the shadow of a great rock. From its
opposite shore, thickets of close, gloomy foliage rise against the
rolling chasm of heaven, through which breaks the brightness of the
descending Spirit. Across these, dividing them asunder, is stretched a
horizontal floor of flaky cloud, on which stand the hosts of heaven.
Christ kneels upon the water, and does not sink; the figure of St. John
is indistinct, but close beside his raised right arm there is a spectre
in the black shade; the fiend, harpy-shaped, hardly seen, glares down
upon Christ with eyes of fire, waiting his time. Beneath this figure
there comes out of the mist a dark hand, the arm unseen, extended to a
net in the river, the spars of which are in the shape of a cross.
Behinds this the roots and under stems of the trees are cut away by the
cloud, and beneath it, and through them, is seen a vision of wild,
melancholy, boundless light, the sweep of the desert, and the figure of
Christ is seen therein alone, with his arms lifted as in supplication or
ecstacy, borne of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the
devil.
There are many circumstances which combine to give to this noble work a
more than usually imaginative character. The symbolical use of the net,
which is the cross net still used constantly in the canals of Venice,
and common throughout Italy, is of the same character as that of the
carpenter's tools in the Annunciation; but the introduction of the
spectral figure is of bolder reach, and yet more, that vision of the
after temptation which is expressly indicated as a subject of thought
rather than of sight, because it is in a part of the scene, which in
_fact_ must have been occupied by the trunks of the trees whose tops are
seen above; and another circumstance completes the mystic character of
the whole, that the flaky clouds which support the angelic hosts take on
the right, where the light first falls upon them, the shape of the head
of a fish, the well-known type both of the baptismal sacrament, and of
Christ.
Sec. 20. The Crucifixion.
But the most exquisite instance of this imaginative power occurs in an
incident in the background of the Crucifixion. I will not insult this
marvellous picture by an effort at a verbal account of it. I would not
whitewash it with praise, and I refer to it only for the sake of two
thoughts peculiarly illustrative of the intellectual faculty immediately
under discussion. In the common and most catholic treatment of the
subject, the mind is either painfully directed to the bodily agony,
coarsely expressed by outward anatomical signs, or else it is permitted
to rest on that countenance inconceivable by man at any time, but
chiefly so in this its consummated humiliation. In the first case, the
representation is revolting; in the second, inefficient, false, and
sometimes blasphemous. None even of the greatest religious painters have
ever, so far as I know, succeeded here; Giotto and Angelico were cramped
by the traditional treatment, and the latter especially, as before
observed, is but too apt to indulge in those points of vitiated feeling
which attained their worst development among the Byzantines: Perugino
fails in his Christ in almost every instance (of other men than these
after them we need not speak.) But Tintoret here, as in all other cases,
penetrating into the root and deep places of his subject, despising all
outward and bodily appearances of pain, and seeking for some means of
expressing, not the rack of nerve or sinew, but the fainting of the
deserted Son of God before his Eloi cry, and yet feeling himself utterly
unequal to the expression of this by the countenance, has on the one
hand filled his picture with such various and impetuous muscular
exertion that the body of the Crucified is, by comparison, in perfect
repose, and on the other has cast the countenance altogether into shade.
But the agony is told by this, and by this only, that though there yet
remains a chasm of light on the mountain horizon where the earthquake
darkness closes upon the day, the broad and sunlike glory about the head
of the Redeemer has become wan, and of the color of ashes.[62]
But the great painter felt he had something more to do yet. Not only
that agony of the Crucified, but the tumult of the people, that rage
which invoked his blood upon them and their children. Not only the
brutality of the soldier, the apathy of the centurion, nor any other
merely instrumental cause of the Divine suffering, but the fury of his
own people, the noise against him of those for whom he died, were to be
set before the eye of the understanding, if the power of the picture was
to be complete. This rage, be it remembered, was one of disappointed
pride; and the disappointment dated essentially from the time, when but
five days before, the King of Zion came, and was received with
hosannahs, riding upon an ass, and a colt the foal of an ass. To this
time, then, it was necessary to direct the thoughts, for therein are
found both the cause and the character, the excitement of, and the
witness against, this madness of the people. In the shadow behind the
cross, a man, riding on an ass colt, looks back to the multitude, while
he points with a rod to the Christ crucified. The ass is feeding on the
_remnants_ of _withered palm-leaves_.
With this master-stroke I believe I may terminate all illustration of
the peculiar power of the imagination over the feelings of the
spectator, by the elevation into dignity and meaning of the smallest
accessory circumstances. But I have not yet sufficiently dwelt on the
fact from which this power arises, the absolute truth of statement of
the central fact as it was, or must have been. Without this truth, this
awful first moving principle, all direction of the feelings is useless.
That which we cannot excite, it is of no use to know how to govern.
Sec. 21. The Massacre of innocents.
I have before alluded, Sect. I. Chap. XIV., to the painfulness of
Raffaelle's treatment of the massacre of the innocents. Fuseli affirms
of it that, "in dramatic gradation he disclosed all the mother through
every image of pity and of terror." If this be so, I think the
philosophical spirit has prevailed over the imaginative. The imagination
never errs, it sees all that is, and all the relations and bearings of
it, but it would not have confused the mortal frenzy of maternal terror
with various development of maternal character. Fear, rage, and agony,
at their utmost pitch, sweep away all character: humanity itself would
be lost in maternity, the woman would become the mere personification of
animal fury or fear. For this reason all the ordinary representations of
this subject are, I think, false and cold: the artist has not heard the
shrieks, nor mingled with the fugitives, he has sat down in his study to
twist features methodically, and philosophize over insanity. Not so
Tintoret. Knowing or feeling, that the expression of the human face was
in such circumstances not to be rendered, and that the effort could only
end in an ugly falsehood, he denies himself all aid from the features,
he feels that if he is to place himself or us in the midst of that
maddened multitude, there can be no time allowed for watching
expression. Still less does he depend on details of murder or
ghastliness of death; there is no blood, no stabbing or cutting, but
there is an awful substitute for these in the chiaroscuro. The scene is
the outer vestibule of a palace, the slippery marble floor is fearfully
barred across by sanguine shadows, so that our eyes seem to become
bloodshot and strained with strange horror and deadly vision; a lake of
life before them, like the burning seen of the doomed Moabite on the
water that came by the way of Edom; a huge flight of stairs, without
parapet, descends on the left; down this rush a crowd of women mixed
with the murderers; the child in the arms of one has been seized by the
limbs, she hurls herself over the edge, and falls head downmost,
dragging the child out of the grasp by her weight;--she will be dashed
dead in a second: two others are farther in flight, they reach the edge
of a deep river,--the water is beat into a hollow by the force of their
plunge;--close to us is the great struggle, a heap of the mothers
entangled in one mortal writhe with each other and the swords, one of
the murderers dashed down and crushed beneath them, the sword of another
caught by the blade and dragged at by a woman's naked hand; the
youngest and fairest of the women, her child just torn away from a death
grasp and clasped to her breast with the grip of a steel vice, falls
backwards helplessly over the heap, right on the sword points; all knit
together and hurled down in one hopeless, frenzied, furious abandonment
of body and soul in the effort to save. Their shrieks ring in our ears
till the marble seems rending around us, but far back, at the bottom of
the stairs, there is something in the shadow like a heap of clothes. It
is a woman, sitting quiet,--quite quiet--still as any stone, she looks
down steadfastly on her dead child, laid along on the floor before her,
and her hand is pressed softly upon her brow.
Sec. 22. Various works in the Scuola di San Rocco.
Sec. 23. The Last Judgment. How treated by various painters.
This, to my mind, is the only imaginative; that is, the only true, real,
heartfelt representation of the being and actuality of the subject in
existence.[63] I should exhaust the patience of the reader if I were to
dwell at length on the various stupendous developments of the
imagination of Tintoret in the Scuola di San Rocco alone. I would fain
join a while in that solemn pause of the journey into Egypt, where the
silver boughs of the shadowy trees lace with their tremulous lines the
alternate folds of fair clouds, flushed by faint crimson light, and lie
across the streams of blue between those rosy islands, like the white
wakes of wandering ships; or watch beside the sleep of the disciples
among those massy leaves that lie so heavily on the dead of the night
beneath the descent of the angel of the agony, and toss fearfully above
the motion of the torches as the troop of the betrayer emerges out of
the hollows of the olives; or wait through the hour of accusing beside
the judgment seat of Pilate, where all is unseen, unfelt, except the one
figure that stands with its head bowed down, pale like a pillar of
moonlight, half bathed in the glory of the Godhead, half wrapt in the
whiteness of the shroud. Of these and all the other thoughts of
indescribable power that are now fading from the walls of those
neglected chambers, I may perhaps endeavor at some future time to
preserve some image and shadow more faithfully than by words; but I
shall at present terminate our series of illustrations by reference to a
work of less touching, but more tremendous appeal, the Last Judgment in
the Church of Santa Maria dell' Orto. In this subject, almost all
realizing or local statement had been carefully avoided by the most
powerful painters, they judging it better to represent its chief
circumstances as generic thoughts, and present them to the mind in a
typical or abstract form. In the judgment of Angelico the treatment is
purely typical, a long Campo santo, composed of two lines of graves,
stretches away into the distance; on the left side of it rise the
condemned; on the right the just. With Giotto and Orcagna, the
conception, though less rigid, is equally typical, no effort being made
at the suggestion of space, and only so much ground represented as is
absolutely necessary to support the near figures and allow space for a
few graves. Michael Angelo in no respect differs in his treatment,
except that his figures are less symmetrically grouped, and a greater
conception of space is given by their various perspective. No interest
is attached to his background in itself. Fra Bartolomeo, never able to
grapple with any species of sublimity except that of simple religious
feeling, fails most signally in this mighty theme.[64] His group of the
dead, including not more than ten or twelve figures, occupies the
foreground only, behind them a vacant plain extends to the foot of a
cindery volcano, about whose mouth several little black devils like
spiders are skipping and crawling. The judgment of quick and dead is
thus expressed as taking place in about a rood square, and on a dozen of
people at a time; the whole of the space and horizon of the sky and land
being left vacant, and the presence of the Judge of all the earth made
more finite than the sweep of a whirlwind or a thunder-storm.
Sec. 24. By Tintoret.