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