Under the title of this book it is proposed to describe and illustrate
only those fictitious and symbolic creatures which appear in British
Heraldry. The list will include all those beings of whose existence we
have not the direct evidence of our senses, and those exaggerations and
combinations of natural forms which have been adopted in the system of
symbolic heraldry handed down to us from the Middle Ages. Many of the
ideas of the writers of that period were undoubtedly derived from still
earlier sources, namely, classic story, sacred and legendary art, and the
marvellous tales of early travellers; others were the coinage of their own
fancies and their fears.
As these unreal beings are constantly met with in symbolic art, of which
heraldry is the chief exponent, it may be assumed that they have been
adopted in each case with some obvious or latent meaning, as in the case
of real animals; they may, therefore, equally lay claim to our
consideration as emblems or types, more especially as less attention has
been devoted to them and the delineation of their forms by competent
artists. The writer has been led into considering and investigating the
subject with some degree of attention, from finding the frequent need of
some reliable authority, both descriptive and artistic, such as would
enable any one to depict with accuracy and true heraldic spirit the forms
and features of these chimerical beings. Books of reference on heraldry
unfortunately give but a meagre description of their shapes, with scarcely
a hint as to their history or meaning, while the illustrations are usually
stiff and awkward, representing a soulless state of art.
It cannot be said that artists at any period have succeeded, even in a
remote degree, in embodying the highly wrought conceptions of the poets
concerning these terrible creatures of the imagination. Milton seems to
have carried poetic personification to its utmost limits. Who, for
instance, could depict a being like this:
"Black it stood as night,
Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell!"
Out of the ambiguous and often conflicting accounts of different authors
and the vagaries of artists it became no easy task to arrive at a clear
conception of many of the forms of these ideal monsters. The poet's pen
may turn them to shapes, shadowy at the best; but the artist who follows
the poet in endeavouring to realise and give tangible shape to these ideas
finds it beyond his art to give material form and expression to his
personifications with anything like photographic fidelity. Such shadowy
beings prefer the dim light of allegory to the clear sunlight of reason,
and shrink from closer inspection. Like all spectres they are ever most
effective in the dark. In the childhood of the world, from the dawn of
history, and all through the dim and credulous ages past, many such
illusions have performed an important part in influencing the thought and
lives of mankind. Over many lands these inherited ideas still exercise a
paramount influence, but in the enlightenment of the coming time it is
probable their power, like that of an evil dream, will fade entirely away
with the dawn of a brighter day, and the memories of their name and
influence alone remain. At present we are chiefly concerned with them as
symbols, and with their mode of representation, breathing for a brief
moment the breath of life into their old dead skins. These mythical
creatures may be gazed upon, shorn of all their terrors, in the
illustrations I have been enabled to make, and if it is found that from
each creature I have not "plucked out the heart of its mystery" it is
probably because there is no mystery whatever about it, only what to us
now appears as an ingenious fiction engendered by a credulous, imaginative
and superstitious past. And so we find the old horrors and pleasing
fictions, after figuring for ages as terrible or bright realities in the
minds of entire peoples, reduced at length to the dead level of a figure
of speech and a symbol merely.