^MSSlii

tilpa

Of arrogance, ....
If, having walked with Nature,
And ofl'ered, far as frailty would allow.
My heart a daily sacrifice to Truth,
I now afflrm of Nature and of Truth,
Whom I have served, that their Divinity
Revolts, offended at the ways of men.
Philosophers, who, though the human soul
Be of a thousand faculties composed,
And twice ten thousand interests, do yet prize
Tliis soul, and the transcendent universe,
No more than as a mirror that reflects
To proud Self-love her own intelligence."

The following chapters will be found to confirm and elucidate
the positions left doubtful in the preceding volume. They ought
not to have appeared in a detached form, but the writer could not
expect his argument to be either remembered with accuracy, or
reviewed with patience, if he allowed years to elapse between its
sections.

§ 1. By -what test is the health of the perceptive faculty to be determined? 18
§ 2. And in what sense may the terms " Right" and " Wrong" be attached to

§ 2. Of the false opinion that Beauty is Usefulness. Comp. Chap. XII. § 5. 29
§ 3. Of the false opinion that Beauty results from Custom. Compare Chap.

§ 7. Of the false opinion that Beauty depends on the Association of Ideas.. 31
§ 8. Association is, first, rational. It is of no efficiency as a cause of

I'!

-V.

Chapter XI. — General Inferences respecting Typical Beauty.
§ 1. The subject incompletely treated, yet admitting of general conclusions

8. The second perfection of the Theoretic faculty as concerned with life,
is justice of moi'al judgment,

§ 11. As also in plants................................................................... 95

§ 21. The due function of Associative imagination with respect to nature.... 155

"if

if
i

§ 8. The action of Contemplative imagination is not to be expressed by art 194
§ 9. Except under narrow limits.—First, Abstract rendering of form without

i?.
'1

■ . A
■■ i
■ .-'t

-I
-11

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Although the hasty execution and controversial tone of the § i. with what
former portions of this essay have been subjects of frequent regret ^g^to bTap"*^^*^'
to the writer, yet the one was in some measure excusable in a work proached;
referred to a temporary end, and the other unavoidable in one
directed against particular opinions. Nor is either of any necessary
detriment to its availableness as a foundation for more careful and
extended survey, in so far as its province was confined to the
assertion of obvious and yisible facts, the verification of which
could in no degree be dependent either on the care with which they
might be classed, or the temper in which they were regarded.
Not so with respect to the investigation now before us, which,
being not of things outward, and sensibly demonstrable, but of the
value and meaning of mental impressions, must be entered upon
with a modesty and cautiousness proportioned to the difficulty of
determining the likeness, or community, of such impressions, as
they are received by different men; and with seriousness pro-
vol. ii. b

portioned to the importance of rightly regarding those faculties
over which we have moral power, and therefore in relation to
which we assuredly incur a moral responsibility. There is not the
thing left to the choice of man to do or not to do, but there is some
sort or degree of duty involved in his determination; and by how
much the more, therefore, our subject becomes embarrassed by the
cross influences of variously admitted passion, administered dis-
cipline, or encouraged affection, upon the minds of men, by so
much the more it becomes matter of weight and import to observe
by what laws we should be guided, and of what responsibilities
regardful, in all that we admit, administer, or encourage.
§ 2. And of Nor indeed have I ever, even in the preceding sections, spoken
aifce^^crasWered, with levity, though sometimes perhaps with rashness. I have
f- never treated the subject as other than demanding heedful and

justify, as they reward, our utmost ardour and earnestness of pur-
^ suit. That it justifies them must be my present task to prove;

that it demands them has never been doubted. Art, properly so
called, is no recreation; it cannot be learned at spare moments, nor
f| pursued when we have nothing better to do. It is no handiwork

for drawingroom tables, no relief of the ennui of boudoirs; it
must be understood and undertaken seriously, or not at all. To
advance it men's lives must be given, and to receive it their hearts.
" Le peintre Rubens s'amuse 6tre ambassadeur," said one with
whom, but for his own words, we might have thought that effort
had been absorbed in power, and the labour of his art in its felicity.
" E faticoso lo studio della pittura, e sempre si fa il mare mag-
giore," said he, who of all men was least likely to have left us dis-
couraging report of anything that majesty of intellect could grasp,
or continuity of labour overcome.' But that this labour, the
necessity of which in all ages has been most frankly admitted by
the greatest men, is justifiable in a moral point of view, that it is
not a vain devotion of the lives of men, that it has functions of iise-
fulness addressed to the weightiest of human interests, and that the
objects of it have calls upon us which it isi inconsistent alike with
our human dignity and our heavenward duty to disobey, has never

been boldly asserted nor fairly admitted; least of all is it likely to
be so in these days of despatch and display, where vanity, on the
one side, supplies the place of that love of art which is the only
effective patronage, and, on the other, that of the incorruptible and
earnest pride which no applause, no reprobation, can blind to its
shortcomings, or beguile of its hope.

And yet it is in the expectation of obtaining at least a partial
acknowledgment of this, as a truth decisive both of aim and conduct,
that I enter upon the second division of my subject. The time I
have already devoted to the task I should have considered too
great, and that which I fear may be yet required for its completion
would have been cause to me of utter discouragement, but that the
object I propose to myself is of no partial nor accidental importance.
It is not now to distinguish between disputed degrees of ability in
individuals, or agreeableness in canvasses; it is not now to expose
the ignorance or defend the principles of party or person; it is to
summon the moral energies of the nation to a forgotten duty, to
display the use, force, and function of a great body of neglected
sympathies and desires, and to elevate to its healthy and beneficial
operation that art which, being altogether addressed to them, rises
or falls with their variableness of vigour, now leading them with
Tyrtgean fire, now singing them to sleep with baby murmurings.

Because that with many of us the recommendation of our own § 3, The doubt-
favourite pursuits is, I fear, rooted more in conceit of ourselves,
than in affection towards others, so that sometimes in our very
pointing of the way we had rather that the intricacy of it should
be admired than unfolded, whence a natural distrust of such recom-
mendation may well have place in the minds of those who have not
yet perceived any value in the thing praised; and because, also,
men in the present century understand the word Useful in a strange
way, or at least (for the word has been often so accepted from the
beginning of time) since in these days they act its more limited
meaning farther out, and give to it more practical weight and
authority; it will be well in the outset, that I define exactly what
kind of Utility I mean to attribute to art, and especially to that
branch of it which is concerned with those impressions of external
Beauty whose nature it is our present object to discover.

That is, to everything created, preeminently useful which enables
it rightly and fully to perform the functions appointed to it by its
Creator. Therefore, that we may determine what is chiefly useful
to man, it is necessary first to determine the use of Man himself.

Man's use and function (and let him who will not grant me this
follow me no farther, for this I purpose always to assume) are, to be
tlie witness of the glory of God, and to advance that glory by his
reasonable obedience and resultant happiness.

Whatever enables us to fulfil this function is, in the pure and
first sense of the word, Useful to us: preeminently therefore,
whatever sets the glory of God more brightly before us. But
things that only help us to exist are, in a secondary and mean
sense, useful; or rather, if they be looked for alone, they are vise-
less, and worse, for it would be better that we should not exist,
than that we should guiltily disappoint the purposes of existence.

And yet people speak in this working age, when they speak from
their hearts, as if houses and lands, and food and raiment, were
alone useful, and as if Sight, Thought, and Admiration' were all
profitless, so that men insolently call themselves Utilitarians, who
would turn, if they had their way, themselves and their race into
vegetables; men who think, as far as such can be said to think,
that the meat is more than the life, and the raiment than the body,
who look to the earth as a stable, and to its fruit as fodder; vine-
dressers and husbandmen, who love the corn they grind, and the
grapes they crush, better than the gardens of the angels upon the
slopes of Eden; hewers of wood and drawers of water, who think
that it is to give them wood to hew and water to draw, that the
pine-forests cover the mountains like the shadow of God, and the
great rivers move like his eternity. And so come upon us that
Woe of the preacher, that though God " hath made everything
beautiful in his time, also he hath set the world in their heart, so
that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the be-
ginning to the end." |

This Nebuchadnezzar curse, that sends men to grass like oxen,
seems to follow but too closely on the excess or continuance of
national power and peace. In the perplexities of nations, in their
struggles for existence, in their infancy, their impotence, or even
' " We live by admiration, hope, and love." Excursion, book iv.

§ 6. How falsely
applied in these
times.

§6. The evil
consequences of
such interpret-
ation how
connected with
national power;

their disorganization, they have higher hopes and nobler passions.
Out of the suffering comes the serious mind; out of the salvation,
the grateful heart; out of endurance, fortitude; out of deliverance,
faith: but when they have learned to live under providence of
laws, and with decency and justice of regard for each other, and
when they have done away with violent and external sources of
suffering, worse evils seem to arise out of their rest; evils that vex
less and mortify more, that suck the blood though they do not shed
it, and ossify the heart though they do not torture it. And deep
though the causes of thankfulness must be to every people at peace
with others and at unity in itself, there are causes of fear, also, a
fear greater than of sword and sedition: that dependence on God
may be forgotten, because the bread is given and the water sure;
that gratitude to him may cease, because his constancy of protection
has taken the semblance of a natural law; that heavenly hope may
grow faint amidst the full fruition of the world; that selfishness
may take place of undemanded devotion, compassion be lost in vain-
glory, and love in dissimulation'; that enervation may succeed to
strength, apathy to patience, and the noise of jesting words and
foulness of dark thoughts, to the earnest purity of the girded loins
and the burning lamp. About the river of human life there is a
wintry wind, though a heavenly sunshine; the iris colours its agita-
tion, the frost fixes upon its repose. Let us beware that our rest
become not the rest of stones, which so long as they are torrent-
tossed and thunder-stricken maintain their majesty, but when the
stream is silent, and the storm passed, suffer the grass to cover them
and the lichen to feed on them, and are ploughed down into dust. ^

And though I believe that we have salt enough of ardent and § 7. How to be
holy mind amongst us to keep us in some measure from this moral
decay, yet the signs of it must be watched with anxiety, in all
matter however trivial, in all directions however distant. And at

^ I have suffered these passages to remain unaltered, because, though recent events
have turned them into irony, they are, perhaps, not undeserving of attention, as having
marked, during a period of profound and widely extended peace, some of the sources
of the national debasement which, on the continent of Europe, has precipitated its close,
and been manifested alike in the dissolution of authority, the denial of virtue, and the
unresisted victory of every dream of folly, and every shape of sin.

this time, when the iron roads are tearing up the surface of Europe,
as grapeshot do the sea, when their great net is drawing and twitch-
ing the ancient frame and strength together, contracting all its
various life, its rocky arms and rural heart, into a narrow, finite,
calculating metropolis of manufactures ; when there is not a monu-
ment throughout the cities of Europe that speaks of old years and
mighty people, but it is being swept away to build cafes and
gaming-houses ^; when the honour of God is thought to consist in

' The extent of ravage among works of art, or of historical interest, continually
committing throughout the continent may, perhaps, be in some measure estimated from
the following facts, to which the experience of every traveller may add indefinitely : —

At Beauvais.—The magnificent old houses at the corner of the market-place, sup-
ported on columns of workmanship (so far as I recollect) unique in the North of Fi'ance,
have recently been destroyed for the enlarging of some ironmongery and grocery ware-
houses. The arch across the street leading to the cathedral has been destroyed also,
for what purpose I know not.

At Kouen__The last of the characteristic houses on the quay is now disappearing.

When I was last there, I witnessed the destruction of the noble Gothic portal of the
church of St. Nicholas, whose position interfered with the courtyard of a hotel; the
greater part of the ancient churches are used as smithies, or warehouses for goods.

So also at Tours (St. Julien).— One of the most interesting pieces of middle-age
domestic architecture in Europe, opposite the west front of the cathedral, is occupied
as a cafe; and its lower story concealed by painted wainscotings, representing, if I
recollect right, twopenny rolls surrounded by circles of admiring cherubs.

At Geneva.—The wooden projections or loggias, which were once the characteristic
feature of the city, have been entirely removed within the last ten years.

At Pisa,—The old Baptistery is at this present time in process of being "restored,"
that is, dashed to pieces ; and common stone, painted black and varnished, substituted
for its black marble. In the Campo Santo, the invaluable frescoes, which might be
protected by merely glazing the arcades, are left exposed to wind and weather. While
I was there in 1846, I saw a monument to some private person put up against the
lower part of the wall. The bricklayers knocked out a large space of the lower brick-
work, with what beneficial effect to the loose and blistered stucco on which the frescoes
are painted above, I leave the reader to imagine; inserted the tablet, and then plastered
over the marks of the insertion, destroying a portion of the border of one of the paint-
ings. The greater part of Giotto's " Satan before God" has been destroyed by the
recent insertion of one of the beams of the roof.

The tomb of Antonio Puccinello, which was the last actually put up against the
frescoes, and which destroyed the terminal subject of the Giotto series, beai-s date 1808.

It has been proposed (or at least it is so reported), that the church of La Spina
should be destroyed in order to widen the quay.

At Florence. — One of its most important and characteristic streets, that in which
stands the church of Or San Michele, has been within the last five years entirely
destroyed and rebuilt in the French style; consisting now almost exclusively of shops
of Bijouterie and Parfumerie. Owing to this direction of public funds, the fronts of
the Duomo, Santa Croce, San Lorenzo, and half the others in Florence, remain in their
original bricks.

the poverty of his temple, and the column is shortened and the
pinnacle shattered, the colour denied to the casement and the
marble to the altar, while exchequers are exhausted in luxury of
boudoirs and pride of reception-rooms; when we ravage without a
pause all the loveliness of creation which God in giving pronounced
Good, and destroy without a thought all those labours which men
have given their lives and their sons' sons' lives to complete, and
have left for a legacy to all their kind, a legacy of more than their
hearts' blood, for it is of their souls' travail; there is need, bitter
need, to bring back into men's minds, that to live is nothing, unless
to live be to know him by whom we live; and that he is not to be
known by marring his fair works, and blotting out the evidence of
his influences upon his creatures; not amidst the hurry of crowds
and crash of innovation, but in solitary places, and out of the
glowing intelligences which he gave to men of old. He did not

Giotto, at least one of the finest works of his school, is used as a carpet manufactory.
In order to see the fresco, I had to get on the top of a loom. The cenacolo (of
RafFaelle ?) recently discovered I saw when the refectory it adorns was used as a coach-
house. The fresco which gave Raffaclle the idea of the Clirist of the Transfiguration is
in an old wood-shed at San Miniato, concealed behind a heap of faggots. In June,
1846, I saw Gentile da Fabriano's picture of the Adoration of the Magi, belonging to
the Academy of Florence, put face upmost in a shower of rain in an open cai-t; on my
suggesting the possibility of the rain's hurting it, an old piece of matting was thrown
over its face, and it was wheeled away " per essere pulita." What fate this signified is
best to be discovered from the large Perugino in the Academy; whose divine distant
landscape is now almost concealed by the mass of French ultramarine painted over it,
apparently with a common house-brush, by the picture cleaner.

Not to detain the reader by going through the cities of Italy, I will only further men-
tion, that at Padua the rain beats through the west window of the Arena chapel, and
runs down over the frescoes. That at Venice, in September, 1846,1 saw three buckets
set in the Scuola di San Rocco to catch the rain which came through the canvasses of
Tintoret on the roof; and that, while the old works of art are left thus unprotected, the
palaces ai-e being restored in the following modes. The English residents knock out
bow windows to see up and down the canal. The Italians paint all the marble white or
cream colour, stucco the fronts, and paint them in blue and white stripes to imitate
alabaster. This has been done with Danieli's hotel, with the north angle of the church
of St. Mark (there taking the place of the real alabasters which have been torn down),
with a noble old house in St. Mark's Place, and with several in the narrow canals.
The marbles of St. Mark's, and carvings, are being scraped down to make them look
bright; the lower arcade of the Doge's palace is whitewashed ; the entrance porch is
being restored, the operation having already proceeded so far as the knocking off of the
heads of the old statues; an iron railing painted black and yellow has been put round
the court. Faded tapestries and lottery tickets (the latter for the benefit of charitable
institutions) are exposed for sale in the council chambers.

teach them how to build for glory and for beautj, he did not give
them the fearless, faithful, inherited energies that worked on and
down from death to death, generation after generation, that we
might give the work of their poured-out spirit to the axe and the
hammer; he has not cloven the earth with rivers, that their white
wild waves might turn wheels and push paddles, nor turned it up
under, as it were fire, that it might heat wells and cure diseases;
he brings not up his quails bj the east wind, only to let them fall
in flesh about the camp of men; he has not heaped the rocks of the
mountain only for the quarry, nor clothed the grass of the field
only for the oven.

§ 8. Division of Science and art are either subservient to life or the objects of it.

are, in the common sense. Useless. And yet the step between
practical and theoretic science is the step between the miner and
the geologist, the apothecary and the chemist; and the step be-
tween practical and theoretic art is that between the builder and
the architect, between the plumber and the artist; and this is a step
allowed on all hands to be from less to greater. So that the so-
called useless part of each profession does, by the authoritative
and right instinct of mankind, assume the more noble place ; even
though books be sometimes written, and that by writers of no
ordinary mind, which assume that a chemist is rewarded for the
years of toil which have traced the greater part of the combinations
of matter to their ultimate atoms, by discovering a cheap way of
refining sugar; and date the eminence of the philosopher whose
life has been spent in the investigation of the laws of light, from
the time of his inventing an improvement in spectacles.

But the common consent of men admits that whatever branch of
any pursuit ministers to the bodily comforts, and regards material
uses, is ignoble, and whatever part is addressed to the mind only
is noble; and that geology does better in reclothing dry bones
and revealing lost creations, than in tracing veins of lead and beds
of iron; astronomy better in opening to us the houses of heaven,
than in teaching navigation; botany better in displaying structure
than in expressing juices ; surgery better in investigating organiza-
tion than in setting limbs. Only it is ordained that, for our en-

couragement, every step we make in the more exalted range of
science adds something also to its practical applicabilities ; that all
the great phenomena of nature, the knowledge of which is desired
by the angels only, by us partly, as it reveals to farther vision the
being and the glory of Him in whom they rejoice and we live,
dispense yet such kind influences and so much of material blessing
as to be joyfully felt by all inferior creatures, and to be desired by
them with such single desire as the imperfection of their nature
may admit ^; that the strong torrents which, in their own gladness,
fill the hills with hollow thunder and the vales with winding light,
have yet their bounden charge of field to feed, and barge to bear;
that the fierce flames to which the Alp owes its uplieaval, and the
volcano its terror, temper for us the metal vein and warm the
quickening spring; and that for our incitement, I say not our
reward, for knowledge is its own reward, herbs have their healing,
stones their preciousness, and stars their times.

It would appear, therefore, that those pursuits which are alto- § 9. Their reia-
gether theoretic, whose results are desirable or admirable in them- «^ign't'^s-
selves and for their own sake, and in which no farther end to which
their productions or discoveries are referred can interrupt the con-
templation of things as they are by the endeavour to discover of
what selfish uses they are capable (and of this order are painting
and sculpture), ought to take rank above all pursuits which have
any taint in them of subserviency to life, in so far as all such ten-
dency is the sign of less eternal and less holy function.^ And such § lo. How re-
rank these two sublime arts would indeed assume in the minds of erring noUoifs^
nations, and become objects of corresponding efforts, but for two pf^t^^Tmilma-
fatal and wide-spread errors respecting the great faculties of mind ginative facui-
concerned in them.

I do not assert that the accidental utility of a theoretic pursuit, as of botany for
instance, in any way degrades it, though it cannot be considered as elevating it. But
essential utility, a purpose to which the pursuit is in some measure referred, as in
architectui-e, invai-iably degrades, because then the theoretic part of the art is compara-
tively lost sight of; and thus architecture takes a level below that of sculpture or
painting, even when the powers of mind developed in it are of the same high order.

AVhen we pronounce the name of Giotto, our venerant thoughts are at Assisi and
Padua, before they climb the Campanile of Santa Maria del Piore. And he who
would raise the ghost of Michael Angelo must haunt the Sistine and San Lorenzo, not
St. Peter's,

The first of these, or the Theoretic faculty, is concerned with
the moral perception and appreciation of ideas of beauty. And the
error respecting it is, the considering and calling it Esthetic, de-
grading it to a mere operation of sense, or perhaps worse, of
custom; so that the arts which appeal to it sink into a mere
amusement, ministers to morbid sensibilities, ticklers and fanners
of the soul's sleep.

The second great faculty is the Imaginative, which the mind
exercises in a certain mode of regarding or combining the ideas it
has received from external nature, and the operations of which
become in their turn objects of the theoretic faculty to other minds.
And the error respecting this faculty is, in considering that its
function is one of falsehood, that its operation is to exhibit things
as they are not, and that in so doing it mends the works of God.

Now, as these are the two faculties to which I shall have occa-
sion constantly to refer during that examination of the Ideas of
Beauty and Relation on which we are now entering, because it is
only as received and treated by these that those ideas become ex-
alted and profitable, it becomes necessary for me in the outset to
explain their power and define their sphere; and to vindicate, in
the system of our nature, their true place for the intellectual lens
and moral retina by which and on which our informing thoughts
are concentrated and represented.

§ 11. Object
of the present
section.

Note.—The i-eader will probably recollect the two sonnets of Wordsworth which
were published at the time when the bill for the railroad between Kendal and Bowness
was laid before Parliament. His remonstrance was of course in vain; and I have
since heard that there are proposals entertained for continuing this line to Whitehaven
through Borrowdale. I transcribe the note prefixed by Wordsworth to the first sonnet.

" The degree and kind of attachment which many of the yeomanry feel to their
small inheritances can scarcely be overrated. Near the house of one of them stands a
magnificent tree, which a neighbour of the owner advised him to fell for profit's sake.
' Fell it!' exclaimed the yeoman ; ' I had rather fall on my knees and worship it.' It
happens, I believe, that the intended railway would pass through this little property,
and I hope that an apology for the answer will not be thought necessary by one who
enters into the strength of the feeling."

The men who thus feel will always be few, and overborne by the thoughtless ava-
ricious crowd: but is it right, because they are a minority, that there should be no
respect for them, no concession to them, that their voice should be utterly without
regard in the council of the nation ; and that any attempt to defend one single district
from the ofi'ence and foulness of mercenary uses, on the ground of its beauty and
power over men's hearts, should be met, as I doubt not it would be, by total and
impenetrable scorn ?

I PROCEED therefore, first, to examine the nature of what I have § i. Expiana-
called the Theoretic faculty, and to justify my substitution of the «^Theoretic/™
term " Theoretic" for " J^sthetic," which is the one commonly
employed with reference to it.

Now the term " sesthesis " properly signifies mere sensual percep-
tion of the outward qualities and necessary effects of bodies; in
which sense only, if we would arrive at any accurate conclusions
on this difficult subject, it should always be used. But I wholly
deny that the impressions of beauty are in any way sensual; they
are neither sensual nor intellectual, but moral: and for the faculty
receiving them, whose difference from mere perception I shall im-
mediately endeavour to explain, no term can be more accurate or
convenient than that employed by the Greeks, " Theoretic," which
I pray permission, therefore, always to use, and to call the operation
of the faculty itself, Theoria.

Let us begin at the lowest point, and observe, first, what differ- § 2. of the dif-
ences of dignity may exist between different kinds of sesthetic or in'^^eaTOrero"'^
sensual pleasure, properly so called.

Now it is evident that the being common to brutes, or peculiar
to man, can alone be no rational test of inferiority or dignity in
pleasures. We must not assume that man is the nobler animal,
and then deduce the nobleness of his delights; but we must prove
the nobleness of the delights, and thence the nobleness of the animal.
The dignity of affection is no way lessened, because a large measure
of it may be found in lower animals; neither is the vileness of
gluttony and lust abated, because they are common to men. It is

clear, therefore, that there is a standard of dignity in the pleasures
and passions themselves, by which we also class the creatures
capable of, or suffering them.

The first great distinction, we observe, is that noted by Aristotle,
that men are called temperate and intemperate with regard to some,
and not so with respect to others; and that those with respect to
which they are so called are, by common consent, held to be the
vilest. But Aristotle, though exquisitely subtle in his notation of
facts, does not frequently give us satisfactory account of, or reason
for them. Content with stating the fact of these pleasures being
held the lowest, he shows not why this estimation of them is just,
and confuses the reader by observing casually respecting the higher
pleasures, what is indeed true, but appears at first opposed to his
own position, namely, that " in these also men may be conceived
as taking pleasure either rightly, or more or less than is right." ^
Which being so, and evident capability of excess or defect existing
in pleasures of this higher order, let us consider how it happens
that men are not called intemperate when they indulge in excess
of this kind; and what is that difference in nature of the pleasure,
which diminishes the criminality of its excess.

Men are held intemperate, only when their desires overcome or
prevent the action of their reason; and they are indeed intemperate
in the exact degree in which such prevention or interference takes
place, and therefore in many instances and acts which do not lower
the world's estimation of their temperance. For so long as it can
be supposed that the reason has acted imperfectly owing to its own
imperfection, or to the imperfection of the premises submitted to it,
as when men give an inordinate preference to their own pursuits,
because they cannot, in the nature of things, have sufficiently ex-
perienced the goodness and benefit of others; and so long as it may
be presumed that men have referred to reason in what they do, and
have not suffered its orders to be disobeyed through mere impulse
and desire, though those orders may be i full of error owing to
the reason's own feebleness; so long men are not held intemperate.
But when it is palpably evident that the reason cannot have erred,
but that its voice has been deadened or disobeyed, and that the

§3. Use of the
terms tempe-
rate" and " in-
temperate."

§ 4. Right use
of the term
hitemperate.'

reasonable creature has been dragged dead round the walls of his
own citadel by mere passion, then, and then only, men are of all held
intemperate. And this is evidently the case with respect to inor-
dinate indulgence in pleasures of touch and taste; for these, being
destructive in their continuance not only of all other pleasures, but
of the very sensibilities by which they themselves are received, and
this penalty being actually known and experienced by those in-
dulging in them, so that the reason cannot but pronounce right
respecting their perilousness, there is no palliation of the wrong
choice; and the man, as utterly incapable of Will ^ is called in-
temperate, or aKoXaaros.

It would be well if the reader would for himself follow out this
subject, which it would be irrelevant here to pursue farther, ob-
serving, how a certain degree of intemperance is suspected and
attributed to men with respect to higher impulses; as, for instance,
in the case of anger, or any other passion criminally indulged ; and
yet is not so attributed as in the case of sensual pleasures: because
in anger the reason is supposed not to have had time to operate,
and to be itself affected by the presence of the passion, which seizes
the man involuntarily and before he is aware; whereas, in the case
of the sensual pleasures, the act is deliberate, and determined on
beforehand, in direct defiance of reason. Nevertheless, if no pre-
caution be taken against immoderate anger, and the passions gain
upon the man, so as to be evidently wilful and unrestrained, and
admitted contrary to all reason, we begin to look upon him as, in
the real sense of the word, intemperate; and, in consequence, assign
to him his place, for the time, among the beasts, as definitely as if
he had yielded to the pleasurable temptations of touch or taste.

We see, then, that the primal ground of inferiority in these §5, Grounds of
pleasures is that which proves their indulgence to be contrary to |he^p\e"sure8

reason: namely, their destructiveness upon prolongation, and their 'which are sub-
/ . 1, .1 1 11. 1 f. jects of intem-

And this incapability of continuance directs us to the second cause
of their inferiority; namely, that they are given to us as subservient
to life, as instruments of our preservation, compelling us to seek the
' Comp. Hooker, Eccl. Pol. book i. chap. viii.

things necessary to our being, and that, therefore, when this their
function is fully performed, they ought to have an end; and can
be only artificially, and under high penalty, prolonged. But the
pleasures of sight and hearing are given as gifts. They answer not
any purposes of mere existence; for the distinction of all that is
useful or dangerous to us might be made, and often is made, by the
eye, without its receiving the slightest pleasure of sight. We might
have learned to distinguish fruits and grain from flowers, without
having any superior pleasure in the aspect of the latter; and the ear
might have learned to distinguish the sounds that communicate
ideas, or to recognise intimations of elemental danger, without per-
ceiving either melody in the voice, or majesty in the thunder.
And as these pleasures have no function to perform, so there is
no limit to their continuance in the accomplishment of their end,
for they are an end in themselves, and so may be perpetual with
all of us; being in no way destructive, but rather increasing in
exquisiteness by repetition.

Herein, then, we find very sufficient ground for the higher es-
timation of these delights; first, in their being eternal and inex-
Sight and Hear- baustible, and secondly, in their being evidently no means or
instrument of life, but an object of life. Now in whatever is an
object of life, in whatever may be infinitely and for itself desired,
we may be sure there is something of divine; for God will not make
•any thing an object of life to his creatures which does not point to,
or partake of. Himself. And so, though we were to regard the
pleasures of sight merely as the highest of sensual pleasures, and
though they were of rare occurrence, and, when occurring, isolated
and imperfect, there would still be a supernatural character about
them, owing to their self-sufficiency. But when, instead of being
scattered, interrupted, or chance-distributed, they are gathered
together, and so arranged to enhance each other as Ijy chance they
could not be, there is caused by them not only a feeling of strong
affection towards the object in which they exist, but a perception of
purpose and adaptation of it to our desires; a perception, therefore,
of the immediate operation of the Intelligence which so formed us,
and so feeds us.

§ 6. Evidence
of higher rank-
in pleasures of

Now the mere animal consciousness of tlie pleasantness I call
jEstliesis; but the exulting, reverent, and grateful perception of it
I call Theoria. For this, and this only, is the full comprehension
and contemplation of the Beautiful as a gift of God; a gift not
necessary to our being, but added to, and elevating it, and twofold;
jSrst of the desire, and secondly of the thing desired.

And that this joy fulness and reverence are a necessary part of § 7. How the
Theoretic pleasure is very evident, when we consider that, by the m^y be^eLTated
presence of these feelings, even the lower and more sensual pleasures
may be rendered Theoretic. Thus Aristotle has subtly noted that
" we call not men intemperate so much with respect to the scents of
roses or herb-perfumes as of ointments and of condiments," though
the reason that he gives for this be futile enough. For the fact is,
that of scents artificially prepared the extreme desire is intempe-
rance ; but of natural and God-given scents, which take their part in
the harmony and pleasantness of creation, there can hardly be in-
temperance : not that there is any absolute difference between the
two kinds, but that these are likely to be received with gratitude
and joyfulness rather than those; so that we despise the seeking of
essences and unguents, but not the sowing of violets along our
garden banks. But all things may be elevated by affection, as
the spikenard of Mary, and in the Song of Solomon the myrrh upon
the handles of the lock, and the sense of Isaac of the field-fragrance
upon his son. And the general law for all these pleasures is, that,
when sought in the abstract and ardently, they are foul things; but
when received with thankfulness and with reference to God's glory,
they become Theoretic: and so we may find something divine in the
sweetness of wild fruits, as well as in the pleasantness of the pure
air, and the tenderness of its natural perfumes that come and go as
they list.

It will now be understood why it was formerly said in the § 8. idpas of
chapter respecting ideas of beauty, that those ideas were the subject ^n^^aUy'Aral's
of moral, and not of intellectual, nor altogether of sensual percep-
tion ; and why I spoke of the pleasures connected with them as
derived from " those material sources which are agreeable to our
moral nature in its purity and perfection." For, as it is necessary
to the existence of an idea of beauty, that the sensual pleasure

which may be its basis should be accompanied first with joy, then
with love of the object, then with the perception of kindness in
a superior intelligence, finally, with thankfulness and veneration
towards that intelligence itself; and as no idea can be at all con-
sidered as in any way an idea of beauty, until it be made up of
these emotions, any more than we can be said to have an idea of a
letter of which we perceive the perfume and the fair writing, with-
out understanding the contents of it, or intent of it; and as these
emotions are in no way resultant from, nor obtainable by, any ope-
ration of the Intellect; it is evident that the sensation of beauty is
not sensual on the one hand, nor is it intellectual on the other, but
is dependent on a pure, right, and open state of the heart, both for
its truth and for its intensity, insomuch that even the right after-
action of the Intellect upon facts of beauty so apprehended, is de-
pendent on the acuteness of the heart-feeling about them. And
thus the Apostolic words come true, in this minor respect as in all
others, that men are alienated from the life of God through the
ignorance that is in them, having the Understanding darkened
because of the hardness of their hearts, and so, being past feeling,
give themselves up to lasciviousness. For we do indeed see con-
stantly that men having naturally acute perceptions of the beau-
tiful, yet not receiving it with a pure heart, nor into their hearts at
all, never comprehend it, nor receive good from it, but make it a
mere minister to their desires, and accompaniment and seasoning of
lower sensual pleasures, until all their emotions take the same
earthly stamp, and the sense of beauty sinks into the servant of
lust. 11

§ 9. How de- Nor is what the world commonly understands by the cultivation
fess'^reception'^'^" taste, anything more or better than this; at least in times of cor-
rupt and over-pampered civilization, when men build palaces and
plant groves and gather luxuries, that they and their devices may
hang in the corners of the world like fine-spun cobwebs, with
greedy, putFed-up, spider-Hke lusts in the middle. And this,
which in Christian times is the abuse and corruption of the sense
of beauty, was in that Pagan life of which St. Paul speaks, little
less than the essence of it, and the best they had. I do not know
that of the expressions of aiFection towards external nature to be

found among Heathen writers, there are any of which the leading
thought leans not towards the sensual parts of her. Her benefi-
cence they sought, and her power they shunned; her teaching
through both they understood never. The pleasant influences of
soft winds, and ringing streamlets, and shady coverts, of the violet
couch and plane tree shade, they received, perhaps, in a more
noble way than we; but they found not anything, except fear,
upon the bare mountain, or in the ghostly glen. The Hybla § lo. How ex-
heather they loved more for its sweet hives than its purple hues, yo®'^
But the Christian Theoria seeks not, though it accepts and touches
with its own purity, what the Epicurean sought; but finds its food
and the objects of its love everywhere, in what is harsh and fearful
as well as in what is kind : nay, even in all that seems coarse and
commonplace, seizing that which is good; and sometimes delight-
ing more at finding its table spread in strange places, and in the
presence of its enemies, and its honey coming out of the rock, than
if all were harmonized into a less wondrous pleasure ; hating only
what is self-sighted and insolent of men's work, despising all
that is not of God, unless reminding it of God, yet able to find evi-
dence of him still where all seems forgetful of him, and to turn
that into a witness of his working which was meant to obscure it;
and so with clear and unofFended sight beholding him for ever,
according to the written promise, " Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they shall see God."

Hitherto we have observed only the distinctions of dignity among
pleasures of sense^ considered merely as such^ and the way in which
any of them may become theoretic in being received with right
feeling.

But as we go farther, and examine the distinctive nature of ideas
of beauty, we shall, I believe, perceive something in_^them besides
aesthetic pleasure, something which attests a more important func-
tion belonging to them than attaches to other sensual ideas, and
exhibits a more exalted character in the faculty by which they are
received. And this was what I alluded to, when I said in the
chapter already referred to (§ L), that "we may indeed perceive,
as far as we are acquainted with the nature of God, that we have
been so constructed as in a healthy state of mind to derive pleasure
from whatever things are illustrative of that nature."

Our first inquiry must evidently be, how we are authorized to
affirm of any man's mind,"* respecting impressions of sight, that it is
in a healthy state or otherwise; what canon or test there is by which
we may determine of these impressions that they are or are not
rightly esteemed beautiful. For it does not at first appear easy to
prove that men ought to like one thing rather than another; and
although this is granted generally by men's speaking of bad or good
tastCi yet the right of individual opinion sometimes claimed even in
moral m£ttters, though then palpably without foundation, does not
appear altogether irrational in matters aesthetic, wherein little ope-
ifation of voluntary choice is supposed possible. It would appear
strange, for instance, to assert, respecting a particular person who

§ 1. By what
test is the health
of the Percefi-
tive faculty to
be determined?

preferred the scent of violets to that of roses, that he had no right to
do so. And yet, while I have said that the sensation of beauty is
intuitive and necessary, as men derive pleasure from the scent of a
rose, I have assumed that there are some sources from which it is
rightly derived, and others from which it is wrongly derived; in
other words, that men have no right to think some things beautiful
and no right to remain apathetic with regard to others.

Hence then arise two questions, according to the sense in which § 2. And in
the word "right" is taken: the first, in what way an impression ^e^temr
of sense may be deceptive, and therefore a conclusion respecting it
untrue; and the second, in what way an impression of sense, or attached to its
the preference of one, may be a subject of will, and therefore of ^

To the first of these questions I answer, that we cannot speak of
the immediate impression of sense as false, nor of its preference to
others as mistaken; for no one can be deceived respecting the
actual sensation he perceives or prefers. But falsity may attach
to his assertion or supposition, that what he himself perceives is
from the same object perceived by others, or is always to be by
himself perceived, or is always to be by himself preferred; and
when we speak of a man as wrong in his impressions of sense, we
either mean that he feels differently from all, or from a majority,
respecting a certain object, or that he prefers at present those of
his impressions which ultimately he will not prefer.

To the second I answer, that over immediate impressions and
immediate preferences we have no power, but over ultimate im-
pressions, and especially ultimate preferences, we have; and that,
though we can neither at once choose whether we shall see an
object red, green, or blue, nor determine to like the red better than
the blue, or the blue better than the red, yet we can, if we choose,
make ourselves ultimately susceptible of such impressions in other
degrees, and capable of pleasure in them in different measure; and,
seeing that wherever power of any kind is given there is respon-
sibility attached, it is the duty of men to prefer certain impressions
of sense to others, because they have the power of doing so. And
this is precisely analogous to the law of the moral world, whereby
men are supposed not only capable of governing their likes and

dislikes, but the whole culpability or propriety of actions is depen-
dent upon this capability; so that men are guilty or otherwise, not
for what they do, but for what they desire, the command being
not, thou shalt obey, but thou shalt love, the Lord thy God; a
vain command if men were not capable of governing and directing
their affections.

I assert therefore, that even with respect to impressions of sense,
we have a power of preference, and a corresponding duty; and I
shall show first the nature of the power, and afterwards the nature
of the duty.

Let us take an instance from one of the lowest of the senses, and
observe the kind of power we have over the impressions of lingual
taste. On the first offering of two different things to the palate, it
is not in our power to prevent or command the instinctive pre-
ference. One will be unavoidably and helplessly preferred to the
other. But if the same two things be submitted to judgment fre-
quently and attentively, it will be often found that their relations
change. The palate, which at first perceived only the coarse and
violent qualities of cither, will, as it becomes more experienced,
acquire greater subtlety of discrimination, perceiving in both cha-
racters at first unnoticed, which on continued experience will pro-
bably become more influential than the first impressions; and
whatever this final verdict may be, it is felt by the person who
gives it, and received by others, as a more correct one than the
first.

So, then, the power we have over the preference of impressions
of taste is not actual nor immediate, but only a power of testing
and comparing them frequently and carefully, until that which is
the more permanent, the more consistently agreeable, be determined.
But when the instrument of taste is thus in some degree perfected
and rendered subtle, by its being practised upon a single object, its
conclusions will be more rapid with respect to others, and it will be
able to distinguish more quickly in other things, and even to
prefer at once those qualities which are calculated finally to give it
most pleasure, though more capable with respect to those on which
it is more frequently exercised; whence people are called judges
with respect to this or that particular object of Taste.

§ 3. What power
■we have over
impressions of
sense.

§ 4. Depends on
acuteness of at-
tention.

Now, that verdicts of this kind are received as authoritative by § s. ultimate
others, proves another and more important fact; namely, that not
only changes of opinion take place in consequence of experience,
but that those changes are from variation of opinion to unity of
opinion, and that whatever may be the differences of estimate
among unpractised or uncultivated tastes, there will be unity of
taste among the experienced; and that, therefore, the result of
repeated trial and experience is to arrive at principles of preference
in some sort common to all, and which are a part of our nature.

I select the sense of taste for an instance, because it is the least
favourable to the position I hold, since there is more latitude
allowed, and more actual variety of verdict, in the case of this
sense than of any other; and yet, however susceptible of variety
even the ultimate approximations of its preferences may be, the
authority of judges is distinctly allowed; and we hear every day
the admission, by those of unpractised palate, that they are, or may
be, wrong in their opinions respecting the real pleasurableness of
things either to themselves or to others.

The sense, however, in which they thus use the word "wrong" §6. whatdutj
is merely that of falseness or inaccuracy in conclusion, not of [w'f^ower over
moral delinquency. But there is, as I have stated, a duty, more impressions of
or less imperative, attached to every power we possess, and there-
fore to this power over the lower senses as well as to all others.

And this duty is, evidently, to bring every sense into that state
of cultivation in which it shall form the truest conclusions respect-
ing all that is submitted to it, and procure us the greatest amount
of pleasure consistent with its due relation to other senses and
functions. Which three constituents of perfection in sense, true
judgment, maximum sensibility, and right relation to others, are
invariably coexistent and involved one by the other; for the true
judgment is the result of the high sensibility, and the high sensi-
bility of the right relation. Thus, for instance, with respect to
pleasures of taste, it is our duty not to devote such inordinate at-
tention to the discrimination of them as must be inconsistent with
our pursuit, and destructive of our capacity, of higher and prefer-
able pleasures, but to cultivate the sense of them in that way
which is consistent with all other good; by temperance, namely.

and by such attention as the mind, at certain resting moments,
may fitly pay even to so ignoble a source of pleasure as this. By
which discipline we shall bring the faculty of taste itself to its real
maximum of sensibility; for it cannot be doubted that health,
hunger, and such general refinement of bodily habits as shall make
the body a perfect and fine instrument in all respects, are better
promoters of actual enjoyment of taste, than the sickened, sluggish,
hard-stimulated fastidiousness of Epicurism.

So also it will certainly be found with all the senses, that they
individually receive the greatest and purest pleasure when they
are in right condition and degree of subordination to all the rest,
and that by the over-cultivation of any one (for morbid soiirces of
pleasure, and correspondent temptations to irrational indulgence,
confessedly are attached to all) we shall add more to their power
as instruments of punishment than of pleasure.

If then, as we find in this example of the lowest sense, the
power we have over sensation depends mainly on the exercise of
attention through certain prolonged periods, and if by this exercise
we arrive at ultimate, constant, and common sources of agreeable-
ness, casting oiF those which are external, accidental, and indi-
vidual, that which is required in order to the attainment of
accurate conclusions respecting the Essence of the beautiful is
nothing more than earnest, loving, and unselfish attention to our
impressions of it, by which those which are shallow, false, or pecu-
liar to times and temperaments, may be distinguished from those
that are eternal. And this dwelling upon and fond contemplation
of them (the Anschauung of the Germans) is perhaps as much as
was meant by the Greek Theoria; and it is indeed a very noble
exercise of the souls of men, and one by which they are peculiarly
distinguished from the anima of lower creatures, which cannot, I
think, be proved to have any capacity of contemplation at all, but
only a restless vividness of perception and conception, the "fancy"
of Hooker (Eccl. Pol. book i. chap. vi. 2.).

But two very important points are to be observed respecting the
direction and discipline of the attention in the early stages of
judgment. The first, that, for beneficent purposes, the nature of
man has been made reconcilable by custom to many things
naturally painful to it, and even improper for it, and that there-

§ 8. Errors in-
duced by the
power of habit.

fore, though by continued experience, united with thought, we
may discover that which is best of several, yet if we submit our-
selves to authority or fashion, and close our eyes, we may be by
custom made to tolerate, and even to love and long for, that which
is naturally painful and pernicious to us; whence arise incalculable
embarrassments on the subject of art.

much faith in authority as shall make us repeatedly observe and
attend to that which is said to be right, even though at present we
may not feel it so. And in the right mingling of this faith with
the openness of heart which proves all things, lies the great diffi-
culty of the cultivation of the taste, as far as the spirit of the
scholar is concerned; though, even when he has this spirit, he
may be long retarded by having evil examples submitted to him
by ignorant masters.

The temper, therefore, by which right taste is formed, is charac-
teristically patient. It dwells upon what is submitted to it. It
does not trample upon it, lest it should be pearls, even though it
look like husks. It is a good ground, soft, penetrable, retentive;
it does not send up thorns of unkind thoughts, to choke the weak
seed; it is hungry and thirsty too, and drinks all the dew that falls
on it. It is an honest and good heart, that shows no too ready
springing before the sun be up, but fails not afterwards; it is dis-
trustful of itself, so as to be ready to believe and to try all things,
and yet so trustful of itself, that it will neither quit what it has
tried, nor take anything without trying. And the pleasure which
it has in things that it finds true and good is so great, that it cannot
possibly be led aside by any tricks of fashion, or diseases of vanity;
it cannot be cramped in its conclusions by partialities and hypo-
crisies ; its visions and its delights are too penetrating, too living,
for any white-washed object or shallow fountain long to endure or
supply. It clasps all that it loves so hard, that it crushes it if it
be hollow.

Now, the conclusions of this disposition are sure to be eventually § lo. The large
right; more and more right according to the general maturity of Juredjudgment

all the powers, but it is sure to come right at last, because its
operation is in analogy to, and in harmony with, the whole spirit of
the Christian moral system, and must ultimately love and rest in
the great sources of happiness common to all the human race, and
based on the relations they hold to their Creator.

These common and general sources of pleasure consist, I believe,
in a certain seal, or impress of divine work and character, upon
whatever God has wrought in all the world; only, it being necessary
for the perception of them, that their contraries should also be set
before us, these divine characteristics, though inseparable from all
divine works, are yet suffered to exist in such varieties of degree,
that their most limited manifestation shall, in opposition to their
most abundant, act as a foil or contrary; just as we conceive of
cold as contrary to heat, though the most extreme cold we can
produce or conceive is not inconsistent with an unknown amount of
heat in the body.

§11. Howdis- Our purity of taste, therefore, is best tested by its universality;

our cause for liking is of a finite and false nature. But if we can
perceive beauty in everything of God's doing, we may argue that
we have reached the true perception of its universal laws. Hence,
false taste may be known by its fastidiousness, by its demands of
pomp, splendour, and unusual combination, by its enjoyment only
of particular styles and modes of things, and by its pride also: for
it is for ever meddling, mending, accumulating, and self-exulting;
its eye is always upon itself, and it tests all things round it by the
way they fit it. But true taste is for ever growing, learning, read-
ing, worshipping, laying its hand upon its mouth because it is
astonished, lamenting over itself, and testing itself by the way that
it fits things. And it finds whereof to feed, and whereby to grow,
in all things. The complaint so often heard from young artists,
that they have not within their reach materials or subjects enough
for their fancy, is utterly groundless, and the sign only of their own
blindness and inefficiency; for there is that to be seen in every
street and lane of every city, that to be felt and found in every
human heart and countenance, that to be loved in every roadside
weed and moss-grown wall, which, in the hands of faithful men,
may convey emotions of glory and sublimity continual and exalted.

Let therefore the young artist beware of the spirit of Choice '; it § 12. The dan- ''
is an insolent spirit at the best, and commonly a base and blind one orcBoiceT^"'
too, checking all progress and blasting all power, encouraging weak-
nesses, pampering partialities, and teaching us to look to accidents
of nature for the help and the joy which should come from our own
hearts. He draws nothing well who thirsts not to draw everything;
when a good painter shrinks, it is because he is humbled, not
fastidious; when he stops, it is because he is surfeited, and not
because he thinks Nature has given him unkindly food, or that he
fears famine. ^

Hence, it becomes a more imperative duty to accustom ourselves § 13. And cri-
to the enjoyment of those pleasures of sight which are most elevated
in character, because these are not only the most acute, but the
most easily, constantly, and unselfishly attainable. For had it been
ordained by the Almighty that the highest pleasures of sight should
be those of most difiicult attainment, and that to arrive at them it
should be necessary to accumulate gilded palaces, tower over tower,
and pile artificial mountains around insinuated lakes, there would
have been a direct contradiction between the unselfish duties and
inherent desires of every individual. But no such contradiction
exists in the system of Divine Providence; which, leaving it open to
us, if we will, as creatures in probation, to abuse this sense like
every other, and pamper it with selfish and thoughtless vanities as
we pamper the palate with deadly meats, until the appetite of tasteful
cruelty is lost in its sickened satiety, incapable of pleasure, unless,
Caligula like, it concentrate the labour of a million of lives into the
sensation of an hour, leaves it also open to us, by humble and
loving ways, to make ourselves susceptible of deep delight from the
meanest objects of creation; and of a delight which shall not
separate us from our fellows, nor require the sacrifice of any duty
or occupation, but which shall bind us closer to men and to God,
and be with us always, harmonized with every action, consistent
with every claim, unchanging and eternal.

® Yet note the difference between the choice that comes of Pride, and the choice that
comes of Love, and compare Chap. XV. § 6.

culated to give us this universal pleasure^ are demonstrably constant
in their address to human nature, they must belong in some
measure to whatever has been esteemed beautiful throughout
successive ages of the world, and they are also by their definition
common to all the works of God. Therefore it is evident that it
must be possible to reason them out, as well as to feel them out;
possible to divest every object of that which makes it accidentally
or temporarily pleasant, and to strip it bare of distinctive qualities,
until we arrive at those which it has in common with all other
beautiful things, which we may then safely affirm to be the cause
of its ultimate and true delightfulness.

Now this process of reasoning will be that which I shall endeavour
to employ in the succeeding investigations, a process perfectly safe,
so long as we are quite sure that we are reasoning concerning
objects which produce in us one and the same sensation, but not
safe if the sensation produced be of a different nature, though it
may be equally agreeable; for what produces a different sensation
must be a different cause. And the difficulty of reasoning respect-
ing Beauty arises chiefly from the ambiguity of the word, which
stands in different people's minds for totally different sensations, for
which there can be no common cause.

When, for instance, Mr. Alison endeavours to support his position,
that " no man is sensible to beauty in those objects with regard to
which he has not previous ideas," by the remark that " the beauty
of a theory, or of a relic of antiquity, is unintelligible to a peasant,"
we see at once that it is hopeless to argue with a man who, under
his general term Beauty, may, for anything we know, be sometimes
speaking of mathematical demonstrability and sometimes of historical
interest. While, even if we could succeed in limiting the term to the
sense of external attractiveness, there would ibe still room for many
phases of error: for though the beauty of a snowy mountain and of
a human cheek or forehead, so far as both are considered as mere
matter, is the same, and traceable to certain qualities of colour and
line, common to both, and by reason extricable; yet the flush of the
cheek and moulding of the brow, as they express modesty, affection,
or intellect, possess sources of agreeableness which are not common
to the snowy mountain, and the interference of whose influence we

tain conclu-
sions respecting
beauty are by
reason demon-
strable.

§15. With
what liabilities
to error.

must be cautious to prevent in our examination of those which are
material or universal. ^

The first thing, then, that we have to do, is accurately to dis- § 16. The term
criminate and define those appearances from which we are about to limitabie in the
reason as belonging to beauty, properly so called, and to clear the °nto typteai'^d
ground of all the confused ideas and erroneous theories with which ^itoi-
the misapprehension or metaphorical use of the term has encum-
bered it.

By the term Beauty, then, properly are signified two things,
rirst, that external quality of bodies already so often spoken of, and
which, whether it occur in a stone, flower, beast, or in man, is ab-
solutely identical, which, as I have already asserted, may be shown
to be in some sort typical of the Divine attributes, and which there-
fore I shall, for distinction's sake, call Typical Beauty: and,
secondarily, the appearance of felicitous fulfilment of function in
living things, more especially of the joyful and right exertion of
perfect life in man; and this kind of beauty I shall call Vital
Beauty.

Any application of the word Beautiful to other appearances or
qualities than these is either false or metaphorical; as, for instance,
to the splendour of a discovery, the fitness of a proportion, the co-
herence of a chain of reasoning, or the power of bestowing pleasure
which objects receive from association, a power confessedly great,
and interfering, as we shall presently find, in a most embarrassing
way with the attractiveness of inherent beauty.

But in order that the mind of the reader may not be biassed at
the outset by that which he may happen to have received of cur-
rent theories respecting beauty, founded on the above metaphorical
uses of the word (theories which are less to be reprobated as ac-
counting falsely for the sensations of which they treat, than as con-
fusing two or more pleasurable sensations together), I shall briefly
glance at the four erroneous positions most frequently held upon
this subject, before proceeding to examine those typical and vital
properties of things, to which I conceive that all our original con-
ceptions of beauty may be traced.

" But ah, believe me, there is more than so,
That works such wonders in the minds of men."

I PUEPOSE at present to speak only of four of the more current
opinions respecting Beauty, for of the errors connected with the
pleasurableness of proportion, and of the expression of right feel-
ings in the countenance, I shall have opportunity to treat in the
succeeding chapters (compare Ch, YL Ch XIY.).

Those erring or inconsistent positions which I would at once
dismiss are : the first, that the Beautiful is the True; the second,
that the Beautiful is the Useful; the third, that it is dependent on
Custom; and the fourth, that it is dependent on the Association of
Ideas.

To assert that the Beautiful is the True, appears, at first, like
asserting that propositions are matter, and matter propositions.
But giving the best and most rational interpretation we can, and
supposing the holders of this strange position to mean only that
things are beautiful which appear what they indeed are, and ugly
which appear what they are not, we find them instantly contradicted
by each and every conclusion of experience. A stone looks as truly
a stone as a rose looks a rose, and yet is not so beautiful; a cloud
may look more like a castle than a cloud, and be the more beautiful
on that account. The mirage of the desert is fairer than its sands;
the false image of the under heaven fairer than the sea. I am at a
loss to know how any so untenable a position could ever have been
advanced; but it may, perhaps, have arisen from some confusion
of the beauty of art with the beauty of nature, and from an illogical
expansion of the very certain truth, that nothing is beautiful in art,
which, professing to be an imitation, or a statement, is not as such
in some sort true.

§ 1. Of the
false opinion
that Truth is
Beauty, and
vice versa.

That the Beautiful is the Useful, is an assertion evidently based
on that limited and false sense of the latter term which I have
already deprecated. As it is the most degrading and dangerous
supposition which can be advanced on the subject, so, fortunately,
it is the most palpably absurd. It is to confound admiration with
hunger, love with lust, and life with sensation; it is to assert that
the human creature has no ideas and no feelings except those ulti-
mately referable to its brutal appetites. It has not a single fact
nor appearance of fact to support it, and needs no combating; at
least until its advocates have obtained the consent of the majority
of mankind, that the most beautiful productions of nature are seeds
and roots ; and of art, spades and millstones.

Somewhat more rational grounds appear for the assertion that
the sense of the Beautiful arises from Familiarity with the object,
though even this could not long be maintained by a thinking person.
For all that can be alleged in defence of such a supposition is,
that familiarity deprives some objects, which at first appeared ugly,
of much of their repulsiveness ; whence it is as rational to conclude
that familiarity is the cause of beauty, as it would be to argue that
because it is possible to acquire a taste for olives, therefore custom
is the cause of lusciousness in grapes. Nevertheless, there are
some phenomena resulting from the tendency of our nature to be
influenced by habit, of which it may be well to observe the limits.

Custom has a two-fold operation; the one to deaden the fre-
quency and force of repeated impressions, the other to endear the
familiar object to the affections. Commonly, where the mind is
vigorous, and the power of sensation very perfect, it has rather the
last operation than the first; with meaner minds, the first takes place
in the higher degree, so that they are commonly characterized by
a desire of excitement, and the want of the loving, fixed, theoretic
power. But both take place in some degree with all men; so that
as life advances impressions of all kinds become less rapturous,
owing to their repetition. It is however beneficently ordained
that repulsiveness shall be diminished by custom in a far greater
degree than the sensation of beauty; so that the anatomist in a little
time loses all sense of horror in the torn flesh and carious bone,
while the sculptor ceases not to feel, to the close of his life, the deli-

§2. Of the
false opinion
that Beauty is
Usefulness.
Compare Chap.
XII. § 6.

§3. Of the
false opinion
that Beauty re-
sults from Cus-
tom. Compare
Chap. VI. § 1.

§ 4. The two-
fold operation
of Custom. It
deadens sensa-
tion, but con-
firms affection.

ciousness of every line of the outward frame. So then, as in that
with which we are made familiar the repulsiveness is constantly-
diminishing, and such claims as it may be able to put forth on the
affections are daily becoming stronger, while, in what is submitted
to us of new or strange, that which may be repulsive is felt in its
full force while no hold is as yet laid on the affections, there is a
very strong preference induced in most minds for that to which
they are accustomed over that they know not, and this is strongest

§ 5. But never in those which are least open to sensations of positive beauty. But

or destroys the however far this operation may be carried, its utmost effect is but

Beauty.the deadening and approximating of the sensations of beauty and
ugliness. It never mixes, nor crosses, nor in any way alters them;
it has not the slightest connection with, or power over, their nature.
By tasting two wines alternately, we may deaden our perception of
their flavour; nay, we may even do more than can ever be done in
the case of sight, we may confound the two flavours together:
but it will hardly be argued, therefore, that custom is the cause of
either flavour. And so, though by habit we may deaden the effect
of ugliness or beauty, it is not for that reason to be affirmed that
habit is the cause of either sensation. We may keep a skull beside
us as long as we please, we may overcome its repulsiveness, we
may render ourselves capable of perceiving many qualities of beauty
about its lines, we may contemplate it for years together if we will,
it and nothing else, but we shall not get ourselves to think as well
of it as of a child's fair face.

§ 6. Instances, It would be easy to pursue the subject farther, but I believe that
every thoughtful reader will be perfectly well able to supply
farther illustrations, and sweep away the sandy foundations of the
opposite theory, unassisted. Let it, however, be observed, that, in
spite of all custom, an Englishman instantly acknowledges, and at
first sight, the superiority of the turban* to the hat, or of the plaid
to the coat; that, whatever the dictates of immediate fashion may
compel, the superior gracefulness of the Greek or middle-age
costumes is invariably felt; and that, respecting what has been
asserted of negro nations looking with disgust on the white face, no
importance whatever is to be attached to the opinions of races who
have never received any ideas of beauty whatsoever (these ideas

being only received by minds under some certain degree of culti-
vation), and whose disgust arises naturally from what they may
suppose to be a sign of weakness or ill health. It would be futile to
proceed into farther detail.

I pass to the last and most weighty theory, that the agreeableness
in objects which we call Beauty, is the result of the Association
with them of agreeable or interesting ideas.

Frequent has been the support and wide the acceptance of this § 7. Of the
supposition, and yet I suppose that no two consecutive sentences that Beauty de-

were ever written in defence of it, without involving either a con- p®"^» o" the

tradiction or a confusion of terms. Thus Alison: " There are scenes Meas
undoubtedly more beautiful than Runnymede, yet, to those who
recollect the great event that passed there, there is no scene per-
haps which so strongly seizes on the imagination." Where we are
wonder-struck at the audacious obtuseness which would prove the
power of imagination by its overcoming that very other power (of
inherent beauty) whose existence the arguer denies. For the only
logical conclusion which can possibly be drawn from the above
sentence is, that imagination is not the source of beauty, for although
no scene seizes so strongly on the imagination, yet there are scenes
" more beautiful than Runnymede." And though instances of self-
contradiction as laconic and complete as this are to be found in few
writers except Alison, yet if the arguments on the subject be fairly
sifted from the mass of confused language with which they are
always encumbered, and placed in logical form, they will be found
invariably to involve one of these two syllogisms: either. Association
gives pleasure, and Beauty gives pleasure, therefore Association is
Beauty; or, the power of Association is stronger than the power
of Beauty, therefore the power of Association is the power of
Beauty.

Nevertheless it is necessary for us to observe the real value and § s. Associa-
authority of association in the moral system, and how ideas of rayonai^*^^!!; is
actual beauty may be affected by it, otherwise we shall be liable to of efficiency
embarrassment throughout the whole of the succeeding argument. Beauty.

Association is of two kinds. Rational and Accidental. By
Rational Association I understand the interest which any object
may bear historically, as having been in some way connected with

; j

it.
:(

the affairs or affections of men; an interest shared in the minds of
all who are aware of such connection: which to call beauty is mere
and gross confusion of terras; it is no theory to be confuted, but a
misuse of language to be set aside, a misuse involving the positions
that in uninhabited countries the vegetation has no grace, the rock
no dignity, the cloud no colour, and that the snowy summits of the
Alps receive no loveliness from the sunset light, because they have
not been polluted by the wrath, ravage, and misery of men.
§ 9.^Association By Accidental Association, I understand the accidental connection
The extent of of ideas and memories with material things, owing to which those
its influence. material things are regarded as agreeable or otherwise, according
to the nature of the feelings or recollections they summon; the
association being commonly involuntary and oftentimes so vague as
that no distinct image is suggested by the object, but we feel a
painfulness in it or pleasure from it, without knowing wherefore.
Of this operation of the mind (which is that of which I spoke as
causing inextricable embarrassments on the subject of beauty) the
experience is constant, so that its more energetic manifestations re-
quire no illustration. But I do not think that the minor degrees
and shades of this great influence have been sufficiently appreciated.
Not only all vivid emotions, and all circumstances of exciting interest,
leave their light and shadow on the senseless things and instruments
among which, or through whose agency, they have been felt or
learned, but I believe that the eye cannot rest on a material form,
in a moment of depression or exultation, without communicating to
that form a spirit and a life, a life which will make it afterwards in
some degree loved or feared, a charm or a painfulness for which
we shall be unable to account even to ourselves, which will not
indeed be perceptible, except by its delicate influence on our judg-
ment in cases of complicated beauty. Let the eye but rest on a
rough piece of branch of cui'ious form during a conversation with a
friend, rest however unconsciously, and though the conversation be
forgotten, though every circumstance connected with it be as utterly
lost to the memory as though it had not been, yet the eye will,
through the whole life after, take a certain pleasure in such boughs
which it had not before, a pleasure so slight, a trace of feeling so
delicate, as to leave us utterly unconscious of its peculiar power;

but undestroyable by any reasoning, a part, thenceforward, of our
constitution, destroyable only by tlie same arbitrary process of
association by which it was created. Reason has no effect upon it
whatsoever. And there is probably no one opinion which is formed
by any of us, in matters of taste, which is not in some degree
influenced by unconscious association of this kind. In many who
have no definite rules of judgment, preference is decided by
little else, and thus, unfortunately, its operations are mistaken for,
or rather substituted for, those of inherent beauty, and its real
position and value in the moral system are in a great measure over-
looked.

For I believe that mere pleasure and pain have less associative § lo. The dig-
power than duty performed or omitted, and that the great use of ^ ^

the Associative faculty is not to add beauty to material things, but
to add force to the Conscience. But for this external and all-
powerful witness, the voice of the inward guide might be lost in
each particular instance, almost as soon as disobeyed; the echo of it
in after time, whereby, though perhaps feeble as warning, it becomes
powerful as punishment, might be silenced, and the strength of the
protection pass away in the lightness of the lash. Therefore it has
received the power of enlisting external and unmeaning things in
its aid, and transmitting to all that is indifferent its own authority
to reprove or reward; so that, as we travel the way of life, we have
the choice, according to our working, of turning all the voices of
nature into one song of rejoicing, and all her lifeless creatures into
a glad company, whereof the meanest shall be beautiful in our eyes
by its kind message, or of withering and quenching her sympathy
into a fearful withdrawn silence of condemnation, or into a crying
out of her stones, and a shaking of her dust against us. Nor is it
any marvel that the theoretic faculty should be overpowered by
this momentous operation, and the indifferent appeals and inherent
glories of external things in the end overlooked, when the perfection
of God's works is felt only as the sweetness of his promises, and
their admirableness only as the threatenings of his power.

But it is evident that the full exercise of this noble function of § 11. How it is
the Associative faculty is inconsistent with absolute and incon- tapresajons^o^^
trovertible conclusions on subjects of theoretic preference. For it

is quite impossible for any individual to distinguish in himself the
unconscious underworking of indefinite association peculiar to him
individually, from those great laws of choice under which he is
comprehended with all his race. And it is well for us that it is so,
the harmony of God's good work is not in us interrupted by this
mingling of universal and peculiar principles: for by these such
difference is secured in the feelings as shall make fellowship itself
more delightful, by its inter-communicate character; and such
variety of feeling also in each of us separately as shall make us
capable of enjoying scenes of different kinds and orders, instead of
morbidly seeking for some perfect epitome of the Beautiful in one.
And also that deadening by custom of theoretic impressions to
which I have above alluded, is counter-balanced by the pleasantness
of acquired association; and the loss of the intense feeling of the
youth, which " had no need of a remoter charm, by thought sup-
plied, or any interest unborrowed from the eye," is replaced by
the gladness of conscience, and the vigour of the reflecting and
imaginative faculties, as they take their wide and aged grasp of the
great relations between the earth and its dead people.

§ 12. And what In proportion therefore to the value, constancy, and efficiency of

in the examin- of positive opinions on the subject of beauty. For every one of us

has peculiar sources oi enjoyment necessarily opened to him in
certain scenes and things, sources which are sealed to others; and
we must be wary on the one hand of confounding these in ourselves
with ultimate conclusions of taste, and so forcing them upon all as
authoritative, and on the other of supposing that the enjoyments of
others which we cannot share are shallow or unwarrantable, because
incommunicable. I fear, for instance, that injthe former portion of
this work I may have attributed too much community and authority
to certain affections of my own for scenery inducing emotions of
wild, impetuous, and enthusiastic characters, and too little to those
which I perceive in others for things peaceful, humble, meditative,
and solemn. So also between youth and age there will be found
differences of seeking, which are not wrong, nor of false choice in
either, but of different temperament; the youth sympathising more
with the gladness, fulness, and magnificence of things, and the grey

hairs with their completion, suflSciency, and repose. And so,
neither condemning the delights of others, nor altogether distrustful
of our own, we must advance, as we live on, from what is brilliant
to what is pure, and from what is promised to what is fulfilled, and
from what is our strength to what is our crown, only observing in
all things how that which is indeed wrong, and to be cut up from
the root, is dislike, and not affection. For by the very nature of
these Beautiful qualities, which I have defined to be the signature
of God upon his worksj it is evident that in whatever we altogether
dislike, we see not all; that the keenness of our vision is to be
tested by the expansiveness of our love, and that as far as the
influence of association has voice in the question, though it is
indeed possible that the inevitable painfulness of an object, for
which we can render no sufficient reason, may be owing to its
recalling of a sorrow, it is more probably dependent on its accusa-
tion of a crime.

of typical beatjty :—first, of infinity, or the type
of diyine incomprehensibility.

§ L impossi- The subject being now in some measure cleared of embarrassment,
quat£iy^treating US briefly distinguish those qualities or types on whose combi-
the subject. nation is dependent the power of mere material loveliness. I pre-
tend neither to enumerate nor to perceive them all: for it may be
generally observed that whatever good there may be desirable by
man, more especially good belonging to his moral nature, there
will be a corresponding agreeableness in whatever external object
reminds him of such good, whether it remind him by arbitrary
association, or by typical resemblance; and that the infinite ways,
whether by reason or experience discoverable, by which matter in
some sort may remind us of moral perfections, are hardly within
any reasonable limits to be explained, if even by any single mind
they might all be traced. Yet certain palpable and powerful modes
there are, by observing which we may come at such general con-
clusions on the subject as may be practically useful, and more than
these I shall not attempt to obtain. i j

And first, I would ask of the reader to enter upon the subject
with me, as far as may be, as a little child, ridding himself of all
conventional and authoritative thoughts, and especially of such asso-
ciations as arise from his respect for Pagan art, or yphich are in any
way traceable to classical readings. I recollect that Mr. Alison
traces his first perceptions of beauty in external nature to this most
corrupt source, thus betraying so total and singular a want of natural
sensibility as may well excuse the deficiencies of his following

§ 2. With what
simplicity of
feeling to be
approached.

arguments. For there was never yet the child of any promise (so
far as the Theoretic faculties are concerned) but awaked to the sense
of beauty with the first gleam of reason ; and I suppose there are
few among those who love nature otherwise than by profession and at
second-hand, who look not back to their youngest and least-learned
days as those of the most intense, superstitious, insatiable, and
beatific perception of her splendours. And the bitter decline of
this glorious feeling, though many note it not, partly owing to the
cares and weight of manhood, which leave them not the time nor
the liberty to look for their lost treasure, and partly to the human
and divine affections which are appointed to take its place, yet has
formed the subject, not indeed of lamentation, but of holy thank-
fulness for the witness it bears to the immortal origin and end of
our nature, to one whose authority is almost without appeal in all
questions relating to the influence of external things upon the pure
human soul.

" Heaven lies about us in our infancy.
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy :
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy.

The youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended.
At length the man perceives it die away
And fade into the light of common day."

And if it were possible for us to recollect all the unaccountable
and happy instincts of the careless time, and to reason upon them
with the maturer judgment, we might arrive at more rapid and
right results than either the philosophy or the sophisticated practice
of art has yet attained. But we lose the perceptions before we
are capable of methodizing or comparing them.

One, however, of these child instincts, I believe that few forget, § 3. The child
the emotion, namely, caused by all open ground, or lines of any inglpacr^^^'^*"
spacious kind against the sky, behind which there might be conceived
the Sea. It is an emotion more pure than that caused by the sea
itself, for I recollect distinctly running down behind the banks of a
high beach to get their land line cutting against the sky, and re-

ceiving a more strange delight from this than from the sight of the
ocean. I am not sure that this feeling is common to all children
(or would be common, if they were all in circumstances admitting
it), but I have ascertained it to be frequent among those who
possess the most vivid sensibilities for nature; and I am certain
that the modification of it which belongs to our after years is
common to all, the love, namely, of a light distance appearing over
a comparatively dark horizon. This I have tested too frequently
to be mistaken by offering to indifferent spectators forms of equal
abstract beauty in half tint, relieved, the one against dark sky, the
other against a bright distance. The preference is invariably given
to the latter; and it is very certain that this preference arises
not from any supposition of there being greater truth in this than
the other, for the same preference is unhesitatingly accorded to the
same effect in nature herself. Whatever beauty there may result
from effects of light on foreground objects, from the dew of the grass,
the flash of the cascade, the glitter of the birch trunk, or the fair
daylight hues of darker things (and joyfulness there is in all of
of them), there is yet a light which the eye invariably seeks with
a deeper feeling of the beautiful, the light of the declining or
breaking day, and the flakes of scarlet cloud burning like watch
fires in the green sky of the horizon; a deeper feeling, I say, not
perhaps more acute, but having more of spiritual hope and longing,
less of animal and present life, more manifest, invariably, in those
of more serious and determined mind (I use the word serious, not
as being opposed to cheerful, but to trivial and volatile), but, I
think, marked and unfailing even in those of the least thoughtful
dispositions. I am willing to let it rest on the ■ determination of
every reader, whether the pleasure which he has received from
these effects of calm and luminous distance be not the most singular
and memorable of which he has been conscious; whether all that is
dazzling in colom', perfect in form, gladdening in expression, be not
of evanescent and shallow appealing, when compared with the still
small voice of the level twilight behind purple hills, or the scarlet
arch of dawn over the dark troublous-edged sea.

Let us try to discover that which effects of this kind possess or
suggest, peculiar to themselves, and which other effects of light

§ 5. Wliereto
tliis instinct is
traceable.

and colour possess not. There must be something in them of a
peculiar character, and that, whatever it be, must be one of the
primal and most earnest motives of beauty to human sensation.

Do they show finer characters of form than can be developed by
the broader daylight? Not so; for their power is almost inde-
pendent of the forms they assume or display: it matters little
whether the bright clouds be simple or manifold, whether the
mountain line be subdued or majestic; the fairer forms of earthly
things are by them subdued and disguised, the round and muscular
growth of the forest trunks is sunk into skeleton lines of quiet
shade, the purple clefts of the hill side are labyrinthed in the dark-
ness, the orbed spring and whirling wave of the torrent have given
place to a white, ghastly, interrupted gleaming. Have they more
perfection or fulness of colour ? Not so; for their effect is often-
times deeper when their hues are dim, than when they are blazoned
with crimson and pale gold: and assuredly, in the blue of the rainy
sky, in the many tints of morning flowers, in the sunlight on
summer foliage and field, there are more sources of mere sensual
colour-pleasure than in the single streak of wan and dying light.
It is not then by nobler form, it is not by positiveness of hue, it is
not by intensity of light (for the sun itself at noonday is effectless
upon the feelings), that this strange distant space possesses its
attractive power. But there is one thing that it has, or suggests,
which no other object of sight suggests in equal degree, and that is
—Infinity. It is of all visible things the least material, the least
finite, the farthest withdrawn from the earth prison-house, the most
typical of the nature of God, the most suggestive of the glory of his
dwelling-place. For the sky of night, though we may know it
boundless, is dark; it is a studded vault, a roof that seems to shut
us in and down; but the bright distance has no limit, we feel its
infinity, as we rejoice in its purity of light.

Now not only is this expression of infinity in distance most § 6. infinity,
precious wherever we find it, however solitary it may be, and how- inlrr'^''*''^'^'^
ever unassisted by other forms and kinds of beauty, but it is of
that value that no such other forms will altogether recompense us
for its loss; and, much as I dread the enunciation of anything that
may seem like a conventional rule, I have no hesitation in asserting,

that no work of any art, in which this expression of infinity is
possible, can be perfect, or supremely elevated, without it, and that,
in proportion to its presence, it will exalt and render impressive
even the most tame and trivial themes. And I think if there be
any one grand division, by which it is at all possible to set the pro-
ductions of painting, so far as their mere plan or system is concerned,
on our right and left hands, it is this of light and dark background,
of heaven light or of object light. For I know not any truly great
painter of any time, who manifests not the most intense pleasure in
the luminous space of his backgrounds, or who ever sacrifices this
pleasure where the nature of his subject admits of its attainment;
as, on the other hand, I know not that the habitual use of dark
backgrounds can be shown as having ever been coexistent with
pure or high feeling, and, except in the case of Rembrandt (and
then under peculiar circumstances only), with any high power of
intellect. It is, however, necessary carefully to observe the fol-
lowing modifications of this broad principle.

The absolute necessity, for such I indeed consider it, is of no
more than such a mere luminous distant point as may give to the
feelings a species of escape from all the finite objects about them.
There is a spectral etching of Rembrandt, a Presentation of Christ
in the Temple, where the figure of a robed priest stands glaring by
its gems out of the gloom, holding a crosier. Behind it there is a
subdued window-light seen in the opening between two columns,
without which the impressiveness of the whole subject would, I
think, be incalculably brought down. I cannot tell whether I am
at present allowing too much weight to my own fancies and pre-
dilections, but, without so much escape into the outer air and open
heaven as this, I can take permanent pleasure in no picture.

And I think I am supported in this feeling by the unanimous
practice, if not the confessed opinion, of all artists. The painter
of portrait is unhappy without his conventional white stroke under
the sleeve, or beside the arm-chair; the painter of interiors feels
like a caged bird, unless he can throw a window open, or set the
door ajar; the landscapist dares not lose himself in forest without
a gleam of light under its farthest branches, nor ventures out in
rain unless he may somewhere pierce to a better promise in the

t!
a

ife

distance, or cling to some closing gap of variable blue above:
Escape, Hope, Infinity, by whatever conventionalism sought, the
desire is the same in all, the instinct constant, it is no mere point
of light that is wanted in the etching of Rembrandt above in-
stanced, a gleam of armour or fold of temple curtain would have
been utterly valueless; neither is it liberty, for though we cut
down hedges and level hills, and give what waste and plain we
choose, on the right hand and the left, it is all comfortless and un-
desired, so long as we cleave not a way of escape forward; and
however narrow and thorny and difficult the nearer path, it
matters not, so only that the clouds open for us at its close.
Neither will any amount of beauty in nearer form make us con-
tent to stay with it, so long as we are shut down to that alone; nor
is any form so cold or so hurtful but that we may look upon it
with kindness, so only that it rise against the infinite hope of light
beyond. The reader can follow out the analogies of this un-
assisted.

But although this narrow portal of escape be all that is abso- § 9. How the
lutely necessary, I think that tlie dignity of the painting increases menUs propw-'

and mightier painters of Italy, the practice is commonly to leave infinity,
their distance of pure and open sky, of such simplicity that it in no-
wise shall interfere with, or draw the attention from, the interest
of the figures; and of such purity that, especially towards the
horizon, it shall be in the highest degree expressive of the infinite
space of heaven. I do not mean to say that they did this with any
occult or metaphysical motives. They did it, I think, with the
unpretending simplicity of all earnest men; they did what they
loved and felt; they sought what the heart naturally seeks, and
gave what it most gratefully receives; and I look to them as in all
points of principle (not, observe, of knowledge or empirical attain-
ment) as the most irrefragable authorities, precisely on account of
the child-like innocence, which never deemed itself authoritative,
but acted upon desire, and not upon dicta, and sought for sym-
pathy not for admiration.

And so we find the same simple and sweet treatment, the open sk}"-, § lo. Examples

abundant landscape, in Giotto, Taddeo Gaddi, Laurati, Angelico,
Benozzo, Ghirlandajo, Francia, Perugino, and the young RafFaelle;
the first symptom of conventionality appearing in Perugino, who,
though with intense feeling of light and colour he carried the
glory of his luminous distance far beyond all his predecessors,
began at the same time to use a somewhat morbid relief of his
figures against the upper sky. This he has done in the Assump-
tion of the Florentine Academy, in that of I'Annunziata, and of the
Gallery of Bologna; in all which pictures the lower portions are
incomparably the finest, owing to the light distance behind the
heads. Raffaelle, in his fall, betrayed the faith he had received
from his father and his master, and substituted for the radiant sky
of the Madonna del Cardellino, the chamber-wall of the Madonna
della Sediola, and the brown wainscot of the Baldacchino. Yet it
is curious to observe how much of the dignity even of his later
pictures depends on such portions as the green light of the lake,
and sky behind the rocks, in the St. John of the tribune; and how
the repainted distortion of the Madonna dell' Impannata is re-
deemed into something like elevated character, merely by the light
of the linen window from which it takes its name.

That which was done by the Florentines in pure simplicity of
heart, the Venetians did through love of the colour and splendour
of the sky itself, even to the frequent sacrificing of their subject to
the passion of its distance. In Carpaccio, John Bellini, Giorgione,
Titian, Veronese, and Tintoret, the preciousness of the luminous
sky, so far as it might be at all consistent with their subject, is
nearly constant; abandoned altogether in portraiture only, seldom
even there, and never with advantage. Titian and Veronese, who
had less exalted feeling than the others, afford a few instances of
exception : the latter overpowering his silvery distances with fore-
ground splendour; the former sometimes sacrificing them to a
luscious fulness of colour, as in the Flagellation in the Louvre, by
a comparison of which with the unequalled majesty of the Entomb-
ment opposite, the applicability of the general principle may at once
be tested.

But of the value of this mode of treatment there is a farther and
more convincing proof than its adoption either by the innocence of

§12. Among
the painters of
landscape.

the Florentine or the ardour of the Venetian; namely, that when
retained or imitated from them by the landscape painters of the
seventeenth century, when appearing in isolation from all other
good, among the weaknesses and paltrinesses of Claude, the man-
nerisms of Gaspar, and the caricatures and brutalities of Salvator,
it yet redeems and upholds all three, conquers all foulness by its
purity, vindicates all folly by its dignity, and puts an uncom-
prehended power of permanent address to the human heart upon
the lips of the senseless and the profane. ^

Now although I doubt not that the general value of this treatment § 13. other
will be acknowledged by all lovers of art, it is not certain that the the power of
point to prove which I have brought it forward will be as readily
conceded; namely, the inherent power of all representations of
infinity over the human heart. For there are, indeed, countless
associations of pure and religioiis kind, which combine with each
other to enhance the impression when presented in this particular
form, whose power I neither deny nor am careful to distinguish,
seeing that they all tend to the same point, and have reference to
heavenly hopes; delights they are in seeing the narrow, black,
miserable earth fairly compared with the bright firmament; reach-
ings forward unto the things that are before, and joyfulness in the
apparent, though unreachable, nearness and promise of them. But
there are other modes in which infinity may be represented, which
are confused by no associations of the kind, and which would, as

' In one of the smaller rooms of the Pitti Palace, over the door, is a Temptation of
St. Anthony, by Salvator, wherein such power as the artist possessed is fully manifested,
and less offensively than is usual in his sacred subjects. It is a vigorous and ghastly
thought, in that kind of horror which is dependent on scenic effect perhaps unrivalled,
and I shall have occasion to refer to it again in speaking of the powers of Imagination.
I allude to it here, because the sky of the distance affords a remarkable instance of the
power of light at present under discussion. It is formed of flakes of black cloud, with
rents and openings of intense and lurid green, and at least half of the impressiveness of
the picture depends on these openings. Close them, make the sky one mass of gloom,
and the spectre will be awful no longer. It owes to the light of the distance both its
size and its spirituality. The time would fail me, if I were to name the tenth part of
the pictures which occur to me, whose vulgarity is redeemed by this circumstance
alone: and yet let not the artist trust to such morbid and conventional use of it as may
be seen in the common blue and yellow effectism of the present day. Of the value of
moderation and simplicity in the use of this, as of all other sources of pleasurable
emotion, I shall presently have occasion to speak farther.

being in mere matter, appear trivial and mean, but for their incal-
culable influence on the forms of all that we feel to be beautiful.
The first of these is the curvature of lines and surfaces, wherein it
at first appears futile to insist upon any resemblance or suggestion
of infinity, since there is certainly, in our ordinary contemplation
of it, no sensation of the kind. But I have repeated again and
again that the ideas of beauty are instinctive, and that it is only
upon consideration, and even then in doubtful and disputable way,
that they appear in their typical character. Neither do I intend at
all to insist upon the particular meaning which they appear to my-
self to bear, but merely on their actual and demonstrable agreeable-
ness: so that in the present case, while I assert positively, and have
no fear of being able to prove, that a curve of any kind is more
beautiful than a right line, I leave it to the reader to accept or not,
as he pleases, that reason of its agreeableness which is the only one
that I can at all trace; namely, that every curve divides itself
infinitely by its changes of direction.

That all forms of acknowledged beauty are composed exclusively
of curves will, I believe, be at once allowed; but that which there
will be need more especially to prove is, the subtlety and constancy
of curvature in all natural forms whatsoever. I believe that, except
in crystals, in certain mountain forms admitted for the sake of
sublimity or contrast (as in the slope of debris), in rays of light, in
the levels of calm water and alluvial land, and in some few organic
developements, there are no lines nor surfaces of nature without
curvature; though as we before saw in clouds, more especially in
their under lines towards the horizon, and in vast and extended
plains, right lines are often suggested which are not actual.
Without these we could not be sensible of the value of the contrast-
ing curves; and while, therefore, for the most part the eye is fed
in natural forms with a grace of curvature which no hand nor in-
strument can follow, other means are provided to give beauty to
those surfaces which are admitted for contrast, as in water by its
reflection of the gradations which it possesses not itself. In freshly
broken ground which Nature has not yet had time to model, in
quarries and pits which are none of her cutting, in those convulsions
and evidences of convulsion of whose influence on ideal landscape

§ 15. How con-
stant in external
nature.

I shall presently liave occasion to speak, and generally in all ruin
and disease, and interference of one order of being with another (as
in the browsing line of park trees), the curves vanish, and violently
opposed or broken and unmeaning lines take their place.

What curvature is to lines, gradation is to shades and colours. § 16. The
It 'is their infinity, and divides them into an infinite number of datim.
degrees. Absolutely without gradation no natural surface can
possibly be, except under circumstances of so rare conjunction as
to amount to a lusus naturas: for we have seen that few surfaces
are without curvature, and every curved surface must be gradated
by the nature of light; and for the gradation of the few plane
surfaces that exist, means are provided in local colour, aerial per-
spective, reflected lights, &c., from which it is but barely conceivable
that they should ever escape. For instances of the complete absence
of gradation we must look to man's work, or to his disease and
decrepitude. Compare the gradated colours of the rainbow with
the stripes of a target, and the gradual deepening of the youthful
blood in the cheek with an abrupt patch of rouge, or with the
sharply drawn veins of old age.

Gradation is so inseparable a quality of all natural shade, that § 17. How
the eye refuses in painting to understand a shadow which appears
without it; while, on the other hand, nearly all the gradations of
nature are so subtle, and between degrees of tint so slightly
separated, that no human hand can in any wise equal, or do any-
thing more than suggest the idea of them. In proportion to the
space over which gradation extends, and to its invisible subtlety, is
its grandeur: and in proportion to its narrow limits and violent
degrees, its vulgarity. In Correggio, it is morbid in spite of its
refinement of execution, because the eye is drawn to it, and it is
made the most observable character of the picture: whereas natural
gradation is for ever escaping observation to that degree that the
greater part of artists in working from nature see it not, but either
lay down such continuous lines and colours as are both disagreeable
and impossible; or, receiving the necessity of gradation as a principle
instead of a fact, use it in violently exaggerated measure, and so
lose both the dignity of their own work, and, by the constant
dwelling of their eyes upon exaggerations, their sensibility to that

of the natural forms. So that we find the majority of painters
divided between the two evil extremes of insufficiency and affecta-
tion ; and only the greatest men capable of making gradation con-
tinuous and yet extended over enormous spaces and within degrees
of narrow difference, as in the body of a strong light.

From the necessity of gradation results what is commonly given
as a rule of art, though its authority as a rule obtains only from its
being a fact of nature, that the extremes of high light and pure
colour can exist only in points. The common rules respecting
sixths and eighths, held concerning light and shade, are entirely
absurd and conventional; according to the subject and the effect of
light, the greater part of the picture will be, or ought to be, light
or dark: but that principle which is not conventional is, that of all
light, however high, there is some part that is higher than the rest;
and that of all colour, however pure, there is some part that is
purer than the rest; and that generally of all shade, however deep,
there is some part deeper than the rest, though this last fact is
frequently sacrificed in art, owing to the narrowness of its means.
But on the right gradation or focusing of light and colour depends,
in great measure, the value of both. Of this I have spoken suf-
ficiently in pointing out the singular constancy of it in the works of
Turner. (Part II. Sec. II. Chap. II. § 17.) And it is generally
to be observed that even raw and valueless colour, if rightly and
subtly gradated, will, in some measure, stand for light; and that
the most transparent and perfect hue will be, in some measure, un-
satisfactory if entirely unvaried. I believe the early skies of
Raffaelle owe their luminousness more to their untraceable and
subtle gradation than to inherent quality of hue. j j

Such are the expressions of infinity which we find in creation, of
which the importance is to be estimated rather by their frequency
than by their distinctness. Let, however, the reader bear constantly
in mind that I insist not on his accepting any interpretation of mine,
but only on his dwelling so long on those objects which he perceives
to be beautiful, as to determine whether the qualities to which I
trace their beauty be necessarily there or not. Farther expressions
of infinity there are in the mystery of nature, and, in some measure,
in her vastness; but these are dependent on our own imperfections.

§ 19. Infinity
not rightly Im-
plied by vast-
ness.

and therefore, though they produce sublimity, they are unconnected
with beauty. For that which we foolishly call vastness is, rightly
considered, not more wonderful, not more impressive, than that
which we insolently call littleness: and the inifinity of God is not
mysterious, it is only unfathomable; not concealed, but incompre-
hensible ; it is a clear infinity, the darkness of the pure unsearch-
able sea.

rai 'conceptSa' "t^^g^j" says Hooker, God only excepted, besides the
of divine Unity, nature wliich they have in themselves, receive externally some per-
fection from other things." Hence the appearance of separation or
isolation in anything, and of self-dependence, is an appearance of
imperfection: and all appearances of connection and brotherhood
are pleasant and right, both as significative of perfection in the
things united, and as typical of that Unity which we attribute to
God, and of which our true conception is rightly explained and
limited by Dr. Brown in his xcii.nd lecture; that Unity which
consists not in his own singleness or separation, but in the necessity
of his inherence in all things that be, without which no creature of
any kind could hold existence for a moment. Which necessity of
divine essence I think it better to speak of as Comprehensiveness,
than as Unity; because unity is often understood in the sense of
oneness or singleness, instead of universality; whereas the only
unity which by any means can become grateful or an object of
hope to men, and whose types therefore in material things can be
beautiful, is that on which turned the last words and prayer of
Christ before his crossing of the Kedron brook. " Neither pray I
for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through
their word; that they all may be one, as thou. Father, art in me,
and I in thee." jl

§ 2. The glory And SO there is not any matter, nor any spirit, nor any creature,
t^tr UnUy! ^ ^^^ ^^ capable of a unity of some kind with other creatures; and
in that unity is its perfection and theirs, and a pleasure also for the
beholding of all other creatures that can behold. So the unity of

spirits is partly in their sympathy, and partly in their giving and
taking, and always in their love: and these are their delight and
their strength; for their strength is in their co-working and army
fellowship, and their delight is in the giving and receiving of
alternate and perpetual good; their inseparable dependency on each
other's being, and their essential and perfect depending on their
Creator's. And so the unity of earthly creatures is their power
and their peace: not like the dead and cold peace of undisturbed
stones and solitary mountains; but the living peace of trust, and
the living power of support; of hands that hold each other and
are still. And so the unity of matter is, in its noblest form, the
organization of it which builds it up into temples for the spirit; and
in its lower form, the sweet and strange affinity which gives to it
the glory of its orderly elements, and the fair variety of change and
assimilation that turns the dust into the crystal, and separates the
waters that be above the firmament from the waters that be beneath:
and, in its lowest form, it is the working and walking and clinging
together that gives their power to the winds, and its syllables and
soundings to the air, and their weight to the waves, and their
burning to the sunbeams, and their stability to the mountains, and
to every creature whatsoever operation is for its glory and for
others' good.

Now of that which is thus necessary to the perfection of all
things, all appearance, sign, type, or suggestion must be beautiful,
in whatever matter it may appear. The appearance of some species
of unity is, in the most determined sense of the word, essential to
the perfection of beauty in lines, colours, or forms.

But of the appearances of unity, as of unity itself, there are § 3. The seve-
several kinds, which it will be found hereafter convenient to consider unity"^^Sub-
separately. Thus there is the Unity of different and separate gf'

things, subjected to one and the same influence, which may be quence and of
called Subjectional Unity; and this is the unity of the clouds, as
they are driven by the parallel winds, or as they are ordered by
the electric currents; this the unity of the sea waves, this of the
bending and undulation of the forest masses; and in creatures
capable of will it is the unity of will or of impulse. And there is
Unity of Origin, which we may call Original Unity; whicli is of

things arising from one spring and source, and speaking always of this
their brotherhood; and this in matter is the unity of the branches
of the trees, and of the petals and starry rays of flowers, and of the
beams of light; and in spiritual creatures it is their filial relation
to Him from whom they have their being. And there is Unity
of Sequence, which is that of things that form links in chains, and
steps in ascents, and stages in journeys; and this, in matter, is the
unity of communicable forces in their continuance from one thing
to another; and it is the passing upwards and downwards of
beneficent effects among all things, the melody of sounds, the con-
tinuity of lines, and the orderly succession of motions and times;
and in spiritual creatures it is their own constant building up, by
true knowledge and continuous reasoning, to higher perfection, and
the singleness and straight-forwardness of their tendencies to more
complete communion with God. And there is the Unity of Mem-
bership, which we may call Essential Unity, which is the unity of
things separately imperfect into a perfect whole; and this is the
great unity of which other unities are but parts and means; it is in
matter the harmony of sounds and consistency of bodies, and among
spiritual creatures their love and happiness and very life in God.

Now of the nature of this last kind of unity, the most important
whether in moral or in those material things with which we are at
present concerned, there is this necessary to be observed; that it
cannot exist between things similar to each other. Two or more
equal and like things cannot be members one of another, nor can
they form one, or a whole thing. Two they must remain, both in
nature and in our conception, so long as they remain alike, unless
they are united by a third different from both. Thus the arms,
which are like each other, remain two arms in our conception.
They could not be united by a third arm; they must be united by
something which is not an arm, and which, imperfect without them
as they without it, shall form one perfect body. Nor is unity even
thus accomplished, without a difference and opposition of direction
in the setting on of the like members. Therefore, among all things
which are to have unity of membership one iwith another, there
must be difference or variety; and though it is possible that many
like things may be made members of one body, yet it is remarkable

f !

'■j

/1"

§ 4. Unity of
Membership.
How secured.

that this structure appears characteristic of the lower creatures,
rather than the higher, as the many legs of a caterpillar, and the
many arms and suckers of the radiata; and that, as we rise in order
of being, the number of similar members becomes less, and their
structure commonly seems based on the principle of the unity of
two things by a third, as Plato states it in the Timaeus, § 11.

Hence, out of the necessity of Unity, arises that of Variety; a § 5. Variety,
necessity often more vividly, though never so deeply felt, because ^^^ required,
lying at the surfaces of things, and assisted by an influential prin-
ciple of our nature, the love of change, and by the power of contrast.
But it is a mistake which has led to many unfortunate results, in
matters respecting art, to insist on any inherent agreeableness of
variety, without reference to a farther end. For it is not even true
that variety as such, and in its highest degree, is beautiful. A
patched garment of many colours is by no means so agreeable as
one of a single and continuous hue; the splendid colours of many
birds are eminently painful from their violent separation, and inor-
dinate variety, while the pure and colourless swan is, under certain
circumstances, the most beautiful of all feathered creatures. * A
forest of all manner of trees is poor, if not disagreeable in effect ^;
a mass of one species of tree is sublime. It is therefore only
harmonious and chordal variety, that variety which is necessary to
secure and extend unity (for the greater the number of objects
which by their differences become members of one another, the
more extended and sublime is their unity), which is rightly agree-
able ; and so I name not Variety as essential to beauty, because it
is only so in a secondary and casual sense. ®

' Compare Cliap. IX. § 5. note. ® Spenser's various forest is the Forest of Error.

* It must be matter of no small wonderment to practical men, to observe how grossly
the nature and connection of Unity and Variety have been misunderstood and mis-
stated by those Avriters upon taste who have been guided by no experience of art,
most singularly perhaps by Mr. Alison, who, confounding Unity with Uniformity, and
leading his readers through thirty pages of discussion respecting Uniformity and
Variety, the intelligibility of which is not by any means increased by his supposing
Uniformity to be capable of existence in single things, at last substitutes for these
two terms, sufficiently contradictory already, those of Similarity and Dissimilarity, the
reconciliation of which opposites in one thing we must, I believe, leave Mr. Alison to
accomplish.

and its influence pleasantness of variety resulting from it, sometliing has already been
beauty. jy^ § 4.); only as there I was opposing the idea that our

being familiar with objects was the cause of our delight in them, so
here I have to oppose the contrary position that their strangeness
is the cause of it. For neither familiarity nor strangeness has more
operation on, or connection with, impressions of one sense than of
another; and they have less power over the impressions of sense,
generally, than over the intellect in its joyful accepting of fresh
knowledge, and dull contemplation of that it has long possessed.
Only in their operation on the senses they act contrarily at different
times; as for instance, the newness of a dress, or of some kind of
unaccustomed food, may make it for a time delightful, but as the
novelty passes away, so also may the delight, yielding to disgust or
indifference; which in their turn, as custom begins to operate, may
pass into affection and craving, and that which was first a luxury,
and then a matter of indifference, become a necessity ^: whereas in
subjects of the intellect, the chief delight they convey is dependent
upon their being newly and vividly comprehended; and as they
become subjects of contemplation they lose their value, and become
tasteless and unregarded, except as instruments for the reaching of
others; only that though they sink down into the shadowy, effect-
less, heap of things indifferent, which we pack, and crush down, and
stand upon, to reach things new, they sparkle afresh at intervals as
we stir them by throwing a new stone into the heap, and letting the
newly admitted lights play upon them. And, both in subjects of
the intellect and the senses, it is to be remembered that the love of
change is a weakness and imperfection of our nature, and implies in
it the state of probation; and that it is to teach us that things about
us here are not meant for our continual possession or satisfaction,
that ever such passion of change was put in us as that " custom lies
upon us with a weight, heavy as frost, and deep almost as life;"
and only such weak thews and baby grasp given to our intellect as
that " the best things we do are painful, and the exercise of them
grievous, being continued without intermission, so as in those very
actions whereby we are especially perfected in this life we are not

' Kol rb ravrh irpdrreiv iroWdKis ydii' . ... rh ykp aivqqis rjSti koi to fifTafid^Aftv
fiSv ' us yoLp yiyverai ixera^iWdy. — Arist. Rhet. 1. 2. 20.

able to persist." And so it will be found that they are the weakest- § 7 The love of
minded and the hardest-hearted men that most love variety and mSd and'evii.
change: for the weakest-minded are those who both wonder most
at things new, and digest worst things old; in so far that everything
they have lies rusty, and loses lustre for want of use,-neither do
they make any stir among their possessions, nor look over them to
see what may be made of them, nor keep any great store, nor are
householders with storehouses of things new and old; but they catch
at the new-fashioned garments, and let the moth and thief look after
the rest: and the hardest-hearted men are those that least feel the
endearing and binding power of custom, and hold on by no cords
of affection to any shore, but drive with the waves that cast up
mire and dirt. And certainly it is not to be held that the percep-
tion of beauty, and desire of it, are greatest in the hardest heart and
weakest brain; but the love of variety is so, and therefore variety
can be no cause of the beautiful, except, as I have said, when it is
necessary for the perception of unity. Neither is there any better
test of beauty than its surviving or annihilating the love of change;
a test which the best judges of art have need frequently to use; for
there is much that surprises by its brilliancy, or attracts by its sin-
gularity, that can hardly but by course of time, though assuredly
it will by course of time, be winnowed away from the right and
real beauty whose retentive poAver is for ever on the increase, a
bread of the soul for which the hunger is continual.

Receiving, therefore, variety only as that which accomplishes § s. The con-
unity, or makes it perceived, its operation is found to be very riety"towards
precious, both in that which I have called Unity of Subjection, and of Sub-
Unity of Sequence, as well as in Unity of Membership; for although
things in all respects the same may, indeed, be subjected to one
influence, yet the power of the influence, and their obedience to it,
are best seen by varied operation of them on their individual differ-
ences ; as in clouds and waves there is a glorious unity of rolling,
wrought out by the wild and wonderful differences of their absolute
forms; which differences, if removed, would leave in them only mul-
titudinous and petty repetition, instead of the majestic oneness of
shared passion. And so in the waves and clouds of human multi-
tude when they are filled with one thought; as we find frequently

in the works of the early Italian men of earnest purpose, who
despising, or happily ignorant of, the sophistications of theories and
the proprieties of composition, indicated by perfect similarity of
action and gesture on the one hand, and by the infinite and truthful
variation ©f expression on the other, the most sublime strength,
because the most absorbing unity, of multitudinous passion that ever
human heart conceived. Hence, in the cloister of St. Mark's, the
intense, fixed, statue-like silence of ineffable adoration upon the
spirits in prison at the feet of Christ, side by side, the hands lifted,
and the knees bowed, and the lips trembling together ^; and in St.
Domenico of Fiesole®, that whirlwind rush of the angels and the
redeemed souls round about him at his resurrection, in which we
hear the blast of the horizontal trumpets mixed with the dying
clangour of their ingathered wings. The same great feeling occurs
throughout the works of the serious men, though most intensely in
Angelico; and it is well to compare with it the vileness and false-
ness of all that succeeded, when men had begun to bring to the cross
foot their systems instead of their sorrow. Take as the most
marked and degraded instance, perhaps, to be any where found,
Bronzino's treatment of the same subject (Christ visiting the spirits
in prison), in the picture now in the Tuscan room of the Uffizii;
which, vile as it is in colour, vacant in invention, void in light and
shade, a heap of cumbrous nothingnesses, and sickening offensive-
nesses, is of all its voids most void in this, that the academy models
therein huddled together at the bottom, show not so much unity or
community of attention to the academy model with the flag in its
hand above, as a street crowd would to a fresh-staged charlatan.
Some point to the God who has burst the gates of death, as if the
rest were incapable of distinguishing him for themselves; and

» Fi-a Angelico's fresco, in a cell of the upper cloister. He treated the subject fre-
quently. Another characteristic example occurs in the Vita di Cristo of the Academy,
a series now unfortunately destroyed by the picture cleaners. Simon Memmi in Santa
Maria Novella has given another very beautiful instance. In Giotto the principle is
universal, though his multitudes are somewhat more dramatically and powerfully varied
in gesture than Angelico's. In Mino da Piesole's altar-piece in the church of St. Aui-
brogio at Florence, close by Cosimo Eosselli's fresco, there is a beautiful example in
marble.

others turn their backs upon him, to show their unagitated faces
to the spectator.

In Unitj of Sequence, the effect of variety is best exemplified §9. And to-
by the melodies of music, wherein, by the differences of the notes, se^quen^".^*^^
they are connected with each other in certain pleasant relations.
This connection, taking place in quantities, is Proportion, respecting
which certain general principles must be noted, as the subject is one
open to many errors, and obscurely treated of by writers on art.

Proportion is of two distinct kinds: Apparent when it takes place § lo. The na-
between quantities for the sake of connection only, without any tion.ist° o°f
ultimate object or casual necessity; and Constructive, when it has pQ^^o^^
reference to some function to be discharged by the quantities,
depending on their proportion. From the confusion of these two
kinds of proportion have arisen the greater part of the erroneous
conceptions of the influence of either.

Apparent Proportion, or the sensible relation of quantities, is one
of the most important means of obtaining unity amongst things
which otherwise must have remained distinct in similarity ; and as
it may consist with every other kind of unity, and persist when
every other means of it fails, it may be considered as lying at the
root of most of our impressions of the beautiful. There is no sense
of rightness or wrongness connected with it; no sense of utility,
propriety, or expediency. These ideas enter only where the pro-
portion of quantities has reference to some function to -be performed
by them. It cannot be asserted that it is right or that it is wrong
that A should be to B, as B to C; unless A, B, and C have some
desirable operation dependent on that relation. But nevertheless it
may be highly agreeable to the eye that A, B, and C, if visible
things, should have visible connection of ratio, even though nothing
be accomplished by such connection. On the other hand. Con-
structive Proportion, or the adaptation of quantities to functions, is
agreeable, not to the eye, but to the mind, which is cognizant of the
function to be performed. Thus the pleasantness or rightness of
the proportions of a column depends not on the mere relation of
diameter and height (which is not proportion at all, for proportion
is between three terms at least); but on three other involved terms,
the strength of materials, the weight to be borne, and the scale of

the building. The proportions of a wooden column are wrong in a
stone one, and of a small building wrong in a large one ^; and this
owing solely to mechanical considerations, which have no more con-

' It seems ncrer to have been rightly understood, even hy the more intelligent among
our architccts, that Proportion is in any way connected with positive size ; it seems to
be held among them that a small building may be expanded to a large one merely by
proportionally expanding all its parts : and that the harmony will be equally agreeable
on whatever scale it be rendered. Now this is true of apparent proportion, but utterly
false of constructive; and, as much of the value of architectural proportion is con-
structive, the error is often productive of the most painful results. It may be best
illustrated by observing the conditions of proportion in animals. Admiration has often
been thoughtlessly claimed for the strength, supposed gigantic, of insects and smaller
animals; as being capable of lifting weights, leaping distances, and surmounting obsta-
cles, of proportion apparently overwhelming. Thus the Formica Herculanea will lift
in its mouth, and brandish like a baton, sticks thicker than itself and six times its
length, all the while scrambling over crags of about the proportionate height of the
Cliffs of Dover, three or four in a minute. There is nothing extraordinary in this, nor
any exertion of strength necessarily greater than human, in proportion to the size of the
body. For it is evident that if the bulk and strength of any creature be expanded or
I diminished in proportion to each other, the distance through which it can leap, the time

it can maintain exertion or any other third terra resultant, remains constant; that is,
diminish weight of powder and of ball proportionately, and the distance carried is con-
stant, or nearly so. Thus, a grasshopper, a man, and a giant 100 feet high, supposing
their muscular strength equally proportioned to their size, can or could all leap, not
proportionate distance, but the same or nearly the same distance; say, four feet the
grasshopper, or forty-eight times his length; six feet the man, or his length exactly;
ten feet the giant, or the tenth of his length; some allowance being made for the
greater resistance of the air to the smaller animal, and other slight disadvantages.
Hence all small animals can, proportionally, perform feats of strength and agility,
exactly so much greater than those possible to large ones, as the animals themselves are
smaller; and to enable an elephant to leap like a gi'asshopper, he must be endowed
I with strength a million times greater in to his size. Now the consequence of

this general mechanical law is, that as we increase the scale of animals, their means of
power, whether muscles of motion or bones of support, must be inci'eased in a more
than proportionate degree, or they become utterly unwieldy and incapable of motion.
And there is a limit to this increase of strength. If the elephant had legs as long as a
spider's, no combination of animal matter that could be hide-bound would have strength
enough to move them. To support the megatherium, we must have a humerus a foot
in diameter, though perhaps not more than two feet long, and that in a vertical position
under him ; while the gnat can hang on the window frame, and poise himself to sting,
in the middle of crooked stilts like threads, stretched out to ten times the breadth of
his body on each side. Increase the size of the megatherium a little more, and no
phosphate of lime will bear him : he would crush his own legs to powder. (Compare
Sir Charles Bell, Bridgewater Treatise on the Hand, p. 296., and the note.) Hence
there is not only a limit to the size of animals, in the conditions of matter, but to their
activity also, the largest being always least capable of exertion ; and this would be the
case to a far greater extent, but that nature beneficently alters her proportions as she
increases her scale; giving slender frames to the smaller tribes, and ponderous strength

nection with ideas of beauty, than the relation between the arms of
a lever adapted to the raising of a given weight; and yet it is highly
agreeable to perceive that such constructive proportion has been
duly observed, as it is agreeable to see that anything is fit for its
purpose or for ours, and also that it has been the result of intelli-
gence in the artificer of it; so that we sometimes feel a pleasure in
apparent non-adaptation, if it be a sign of ingenuity, as in the
unnatural and seemingly impossible lightness of Gothic spires and
roofs.

Now, the errors against which I would caution the reader in this
matter are three. The first is, the overlooking or denial of the
power of Apparent Proportion, of which power neither Burke, nor
any other writer whose works I have met with, tal?es cognizance.
The second is, the attribution of heauty to the appearances of Con-
structive Proportion. The third, denial, with Burke, of any value
or agreeableness in Constructive Proportion.

Now, the full proof of the influence of Apparent Proportion, I §11. The value
must reserve for illustration by diagram; one or two instances, pr^,ort^onin
however, may be given at present, for the better understanding of curvature,
its nature.

We have already asserted that all curves are more beautiful
than right lines. All curves, however, are not equally beautiful,

to the larger. So in vegetables, compare the stalk of an ear of oat, and the trunk of a
pine, the mechanical structure being in both the same. So also in waves, of which the
large never can be mere exaggerations of the small, but have different slopes and curva-
tures. So in mountains, and all things else, necessarily, and from ordinary mcchanical
laws. "Whence in architecture, according to the scale of the building, its proportions
mmt be altered constructively, and ought to be so apparently even where the con-
structive expedients are capable of disguise: and I have no hesitation in calling that
unmeaning exaggeration of parts in St. Peter's, of flutings, volutes, friezes, &c., in the
proportions of a smaller building, a vulgar blunder, and one that destroys all the
majesty that the building ought to have had ; and still more I should so call all imita-
tions and adaptations of large buildings on a small scale. The true test of right pro-
portion is, that it shall itself inform us of the scale of the building, and be such that
even in a drawing it sliall instantly induce the conception of the actual size, or size
intended. I know not what Fuscli means by that aphorism of his : —

" Disproportion of parts is the element of hugeness; proportion, of grandeur. All
Gothic styles of Architecture are huge. The Greek alone is grand."

When a building is vast, it ought to look so; and the proportion is right which
exhibits its vastness. Nature loses no size by her proportion; her buttressed mountains
have more of Gothic than of Greek in them.

and their differences of beauty depend on the different proportions
borne to each other by those infinitely small right lines of which
they may be conceived as composed.

When these lines are equal and contain equal angles, there can
be no connection nor unity of sequence in them. The resulting
curve, the circle, is therefore the least beautiful of all curves.

When the lines bear to each other some certain proportion; or
when, the lines remaining equal, the angles vary; or when by any
means whatsoever, and in whatever complicated modes, such
differences as shall imply connection are established between the
infinitely small segments, the resulting curves become beautiful.
The simplest of the beautiful curves are the conic, and the various
spirals; but it is difficult to trace any ground of superiority or infe-
riority among the infinite numbers of the higher curves. I believe
that almost all are beautiful in their own nature, and that their
comparative beauty depends on the constant quantities involved in
their equations. Of this point I shall speak hereafter at greater
length.

§ 12. How pro- The universal forces of nature, and the individual energies of the

turaHoms!" matter submitted to them, are so appointed and balanced, that they
are continually bringing out curves of this kind in all visible forms,
and that circular lines become nearly impossible under any circum-
stances. The acceleration, for instance, of velocity, in streams that
descend from hill-sides, gradually increases their power of erosion,
and in the same degree the rate of curvature in the descent of the
slope, until at a certain degree of steepness this descent meets, and
is concealed by, the straight line of the detritus. The junction of
this right line with the plain is again modified by the farther bound-
ing of the larger blocks, and by the successively diminishing scale
of landslips caused by the erosion at the bottom. So that the whole
contour of the hill is one of curvature; first, gradually increas-
ing in rapidity to the maximum steepness of which the particular
rock is capable, and then decreasing in a .decreasing ratio, until it
arrives at the plain level. This type of form, modified of course
more or less by the original boldness of the mountain, and depend-
ent on its age, its constituent rock, and the circumstances of its
exposure, is yet in its general formula applicable to all. So the

curves of all things in motion, and of all organic forms, most rude
and simple in the shell spirals, and most complicated in the mus-
cular lines of the higher animals.

This influence of Apparent Proportion, a proportion, be it ob-
served, which has no reference to ultimate ends, but which is itself,
seemingly, the end of operation to many of the forces of nature, is
therefore at the root of all our delight in any beautiful form what-
soever. For no form can be beautiful which is not composed of
curves whose unity is secured by relations of this kind.

Not only howe^'-er in curvature, but in all associations of lines § 13. Apparent
whatsoever, it is desirable that there should be reciprocal relation,
and the eye is unhappy without perception of it. It is utterly vain
to endeavour to reduce this proportion to finite rules, for it is as
various as musical melody, and the laws to which it is subject are
of the same general kind; so that the determination of right or
wrong proportion is as much a matter of feeling and experience as
the appreciation of good musical composition. Not but that there
is a science of both, and principles which may not be infringed;
but that within these limits the liberty of invention is infinite, and
the degrees of excellence infinite also. Whence the curious error of
Burke, in imagining that because he could not fix upon some one
given proportion of lines as better than any other, therefore pro-
portion had no value or influence at all. It would be as just to
conclude that there is no such thing as melody in music, because
no one melody can be fixed upon as best.

The argument of Burke on this subject is summed up in the § 14 Error of
following words:—"Examine the head of a beautiful horse, find matter,
what proportion that bears to his body and to his limbs, and what
relations these have to each other; and when you have settled
these proportions as a standard of beauty, then take a dog or cat,
or any other animal, and examine how far the same proportions
between their heads and their necks, between those and the body,
and so on, are found to hold; I think we may safely say, that they
differ in every species, yet that there are individuals found in a
great many species so differing, that have a very striking beauty.
Now if it be allowed that very different, and even contrary, forms
and dispositions are consistent with beauty, it amounts, I believe.

to a concession^ that no certain measures operating from a natural
principle are necessary to produce it, at least so far as the brute
species is concerned."

In this argument there are three very palpable fallacies. The
first is, the rough application of measurement to the heads, necks,
and limbs, without observing the subtle differences of proportion
and position of parts in the members themselves; for it would be
strange if the different adjustment of the ears and brow in the dog
and horse, did not require a harmonizing difference of adjustment
in the head and neck. The second fallacy is that above specified,
the supposition that proportion cannot be beautiful if susceptible of
variation; whereas the whole meaning of the term has reference to
the adjustment and functional correspondence of infinitely variable
quantities. And the third error is, the oversight of the very im-
portant fact, that, although " different and even contrary forms and
dispositions are consistent with beauty," they are by no means con-
sistent with equal degi^ees of beauty; so that, while we find in all
animals such proportion and harmony of form as gift them with
positive agreeableness consistent with the station and dignity of
each, we perceive, also, a better proportion in some (as the horse,
eagle, lion, and man, for instance), expressing the nobler functions
and more exalted powers of the animals.
§ 15. Construe- And this allowed superiority of some animal forms is, in itself,
itrinfluence In argument against the second error above named, that of attributing
the sensation of beauty to the perception of Expedient or Con-
structive Proportion. For everything that God has made is equally
well constructed with reference to its intended functions. But all
things are not equally beautiful. The megatherium is absolutely
as well proportioned, in the adaptation of parts to purposes, as the
horse or the swan; but by no means so handsome as either. The
fact is, that the perception of expediency of proportion can but
rarely affect our estimates of beauty, for it implies a knowledge
which we very rarely and imperfectly possess, and the want of
which we tacitly acknowledge.

Let us consider that instance of the proportion of the stalk of a
plant to its head, given by Burke. In order to judge of the ex-
pediency of this proportion, we must know. First, the scale of the

plant; for the smaller the scale, the longer the stem may safely be:
Secondly, the toughness of the materials of the stem, and the mode
of their mechanical structure: Thirdly, the specific gravity of the
head: Fourthly, the position of the head which the nature of fruc-
tification requires: Fifthly, the accidents and influences to which
the situation for which the plant was created is exposed. Until we
know all this, we cannot say that proportion or disproportion exists:
and because we cannot know all this, the idea of expedient propor-
tion enters but slightly into our impression of vegetable beauty, but
rather, since the very existence of the plant proves that these pro-
portions have been observed, and we know that nothing but our
own ignorance prevents us from perceiving them, we take their
accuracy on trust, and are delighted by the variety of results which
the Divine intelligence has attained in the various involutions of
these quantities; and perhaps most when, to outward appearance,
such proportions have been neglected; more by the slenderness of
the campanula than the security of the pine.

What is obscure in plants is utterly concealed in animals, owing § 16. And ani-
to the greater number of means employed and functions performed.
To judge of Expedient Proportion in them, we must know all that
each member has to do, its bones, its muscles, and the amount of
nervous energy communicable to them; and yet, as we have more
experience and instinctive sense of the strength of muscles than of
wood, and more practical knowledge of the use of a head or a foot
than of a flower or a stem, we are much more likely to presume
upon our judgment respecting proportions here; and are not afraid
to assert that the plesiosaurus and camelopard have necks too long,
that the turnspit has legs too short, and the elephant a body too
ponderous.

But the painfulness arising from the idea of this being the case
is occasioned partly by our sympathy with the animal, partly by
our false apprehension of incompletion in the Divine work'; nor
in either case has it any connection with impressions of that typical
beauty of which we are at present speaking; though some, perhaps,
with that vital beauty which will hereafter come under discussion.

' For the just and severe reproof of which, compare Sir Charles Bell, On the Hand,
p. 31, 32.

1st, That Apparent Proportion, or the melodious connection of
quantities, is a cause of unity, and therefore one of the sources of
all beautiful form.

2ndly, That Constructive Proportion is agreeable to the mind
when it is known or supposed, and that its seeming absence is
painful in a like degree; but that this pleasure and pain have
nothing in common with those dependent on Ideas of Beauty.

Farther illustrations of the value of Unity I shall reserve for our
detailed examination, as the bringing them forward here would
interfere with the general idea of the subject-matter of the Theoretic
faculty which I wish succinctly to convey.

artist, no test more unfailing of the greatness of artistical treatment, ij,g ^^e neces-
than that of the appearance of repose: yet there is no c[uality whose
semblance in matter is more difficult to define or illustrate. Never- sources,
theless, I believe that our instinctive love of it, as well as the cause
to which I attribute that love (although here also, as in the former
cases, I contend not for the interpretation, but for the fact), will be
readily allowed by the reader. As opposed to passion, change,
fulness, or laborious exertion. Repose is the especial and separating
characteristic of the eternal mind and power. It is the I am " of
the Creator opposed to the " I become " of all creatures ; it is the
sign alike of the supreme knowledge which is incapable of surprise,
the supreme power which is incapable of labour, the supreme
volition which is incapable of change; it is the stillness of the
beams of the eternal chambers laid upon the variable waters of
ministering creatures. And as we saw before that the infinity
which was a type of the Divine nature on the one hand, became
yet more desirable on the other from its peculiar address to our
prison hopes, and to the expectations of an unsatisfied and un-
accomplished existence; so the types of this third attribute of the
Deity might seem to have been rendered farther attractive to mortal
instinct, through the infliction upon the fallen creature of a curse
necessitating a labour once unnatural and still most painful; so that
the desire of rest planted in the heart is no sensual nor unworthy
one, but a longing for renovation and for escape from a state whose
every phase is mere preparation for another equally transitory, to

one in which permanence shall have become possible through per-
fection, Hence the great call of Christ to men, that call on which
St. Augustine fixed as the essential expression of Christian hope, is
accompanied by the promise of rest ^; and the death bequest of
Christ to men is peace.

§ 2. Repose, Repose, as it is expressed in material things, is either a simple
how expressed j • x • ^t. re

or else it is repose proper, the rest of things in which there is vitality
or capability of motion actual or imagined; and with respect to
these the expression of repose is greater in proportion to the amount
and sublimity of the action which is not taking place, as well as to
the intensity of the negation of it. Thus we do not speak of repose
in a pebble, because the motion of a pebble has nothing in it of
energy or vitality, neither its repose of stability. But having once
seen a great rock come down a mountain side, we have a noble
sensation of its rest, now bedded immovably among the fern;
because the power and fearfulness of its motion were great, and its
stability and negation of motion are now great in proportion. Hence
the imagination, which delights in nothing more than in the en-
hancing of the characters of repose, effects this usually by either
attributing to things visibly energetic an ideal stability, or to things
visibly stable an ideal activity or vitality. Thus Wordsworth
speaks of the Cloud, which in itself has too much of changefulness
for his purpose, as one

" That heareth not the loud winds when they call,
And moveth altogether if it move at all."

And again the children, which, that it may remove from them the
child-restlessness, the imagination conceives as rooted flowers,

" Beneath an old grey oak, as violets, lie."
On the other hand, the scattered rocks, which have not, as such,

Thus, as we saw that unity demanded for its expression what at § 3. The neces-
first might have seemed its contrary, variety, so Repose demands for of anlmpUer
its expression the implied capability of its opposite. Energy; and ^"ergy.
this even in its lower manifestations, in rocks and stones and trees.
By comparing the modes in which the mind is disposed to regard
the boughs of a fair and vigorous tree, motionless in the summer
air, with the effect produced by one of the same boughs hewn square
and used for threshold or lintel, the reader will at once perceive
the connection of vitality with repose, and the part they both bear
in beauty.

But that which in lifeless things ennobles them by seeming to in- § 4. Mental
dicate life, ennobles higher creatures by indicating the exaltation of nobig^."'
their earthly vitality into a Divine vitality; and raising the life of
sense into the life of faitli: faith, whether we receive it in the sense
of adherence to resolution, obedience to law, regardfulness of promise,
in which from all time it has been the test, as the shield, of the true
being and life of man; or in the still higher sense of trustfulness
in the presence, kindness, and word of God, in which form it has
been exhibited under the Christian dispensation. For, whether in
one or other form,—whether the faithfulness of men whose path
is chosen and portion fixed, in the following and receiving of that
path and portion, as in the Thermopylae camp; or the happier
faithfulness of children in the good giving of their Father, and of
subjects in the conduct of their King, as in the " Stand still and see
the salvation of God" of the Red Sea shore,—there is rest and
peacefulness, the " standing still," in both, the quietness of action
determined, of spirit unalarmed, of expectation unimpatient: beau-
tiful even when based only, as of old, on the self-command and self-
possession, the persistent dignity or the uncalculating love, of the
creature ^; but more beautiful yet when the rest is one of humility

The longing for confirmed tranquillity
Inward and outward, humble, yet sublime.
The life where hope and memory are as one.

instead of pride, and the trust no more in tlie resolution we have
taken, but in the hand we hold.

Hence I think that there is no desire more intense or more
exalted than that which exists in all rightly disciplined minds for the
evidences of repose in external signs : and what I cautiously said
respecting infinity, I say fearlessly respecting repose; that no work
of art can he great without it, and that all art is great in proportion
to the appearance of it. It is the most unfailing test of beauty,
whether of matter or of motion; nothing can be ignoble that pos-
sesses it, nothing right that has it not; and in strict proportion to
its appearance in the work is the majesty of mind to be inferred in
the artificer. Without regard to other qualities, we may look to
this for our evidence; and by the search for this alone we may
be led to the rejection of all that is base, and the accepting of all
that is good and great, for the paths of wisdom are all peace. We
shall see, by this light, three colossal images standing up side by
side, looming in their great rest of spirituality above the whole
world-horizon, Phidias, Michael Angelo, and Dante; and then, se-
parated from their great religious thrones only by less fulness and
earnestness of faith. Homer and Shakspeare; and from these we
may go down step by step among the mighty men of every age,
securely and certainly observant of diminished lustre in every ap-
pearance of restlessness and effort, until the last trace of true inspi-
ration vanishes in tottering affectation or tortured insanity. There
is no art, no pursuit whatsoever, but its results may be classed by
this test alone. Everything of evil is betrayed and winnowed away
by it; glitter, confusion, or glare of colour; inconsistency of
thought; forced expression; evil choice of subject; redimdance of
materials, pretence, overcharged decoration, or excessive division of

§ 5. Its uni-
versal value as
ii test of art.

Earth quiet and unchanged ; the human soul
Consistent in self-rule; and heaven revealed
To meditation, in that quietness."

But compare carefully (for this is put into tlie mouth of one diseased in thought and
erring in seeking) the opening of the ninth book ; and observe the difference between
the mildew of inaction—the slumber of Death; and the patience of tlie Saints—the
rest of the Sabbath Eternal. (Hev. xiv, 13,)

parts : and this in everything. In architecture, in music, in acting,
in dancing, in whatsoever art, great or mean, there are yet degrees
of greatness or meanness entirely dependent on this single quality
of repose.

madequate; needless, because 1 suppose that every reader, however and Theseus,
limited his experience of art, can supply many for himself; and in-
adequate, because no number of them could illustrate the full ex-
tent of the influence of the expression. I believe, however, that, by
comparing the convulsions of the Laocoon with the calmness of the
Elgin Theseus, we may obtain a general idea of the effect of the in-
fluence, as shown by its absence in one, and presence in the other,
of two works which, as far as artistical merit is concerned, are in
some measure parallel; not that I believe, even in this respect, the
Laocoon is justifiably comparable with the Theseus. I suppose that
no group has exercised so pernicious an influence on art as this;
a subject ill chosen, meanly conceived, and unnaturally treated, re-
commended to imitation by subtleties of execution and accumulation
of technical knowledge.^

' I would also have the reader compare with the meagre lines and contemptible tor-
tures of the Laocoon, the awfulness and quietness of M. Angelo's treatment of a subject
in most respects similar (the Plague of the Tiery Serpents), but of which the choice was
justified both by the place which the event holds in the typical system he had to
arrange, and by the grandeur of the plague itself, in its multitudinous grasp, and its
mystical salvation; sources of sublimity entirely absent in the death of the Dardau
priest. It is good to see how his gigantic intellect reaches after repose, and truthfully
finds it, in the falling hand of the near figure, and in the deathful decline of that whose
hands are held up even in their venomed coldness to the cross ; and though irrelevant
to our present purpose, it is well also to note how the grandeur of this treatment
results, not merely from choice, but from the gi-eater knowledge and more faithful
rendering of truth. For whatever knowledge of the human frame there may be in the
Laocoon, there is certainly none of the habits of serpents. The fixing of the snake's
head in the side of the principal figure is as false to nature as it is poor in composition
of line. A large serpent never wants to bite, it wants to hold; it seizes therefore
always where it can hold best, by the extremities, or throat; it seizes once and for ever,
and that before it coils; following up the seizure with a cast of its body round the
victim, as invisibly swift as the twist of a whip-lash round any hard object it may^
strike : and then it holds fast, never moving the jaws or the body; if the prey has any
power of struggling left, it throws round another coil, without quitting the hold with
the jaws. If Laocoon had had to do with real serpents, instead of pieces of tape with'
lieads to them, he would have been held still, and not allowed to throw his arms or
legs about. It is most instnictive to observe the accuracy of Michael Angelo, in the
rendering of these circumstances; the binding of the arms to the body, and the knotting

§ 7. and in In Christian art, it would be well to compare tlie feeling of tlie
finer among the altar tombs of the middle ages, with any monu-
mental works after Michael Angelo; perhaps more especially with
works of Roubilliac or Canova.

In the Cathedral of Lucca, near the entrance door of the north
transept, there is a monument by Jacopo della Querela to Ilaria di
Caretto, the wife of Paolo Guinigi. I name it not as more beau-
tiful or perfect than other examples of the same period; but as
furnishing an instance of the exact and right mean between the
rigidity and rudeness of the earlier monumental effigies, and the
morbid imitation of life, sleep, or death, of which the fashion has
taken place in modern times. ^ She is lying on a simple couch with

of the whole mass of agony together, until we hear the ci-ashing of the bones beneath
the grisly sliding of the engine folds. Note also in all the figures the expression of
another circumstance; the torpor and cold numbness of the limbs induced by the
serpent venom, which, though justifiably overlooked by the sculptor of the Laocoon, as
well as by Virgil, in consideration of the rapidity of the death by crushing, adds infi-
nitely to the power of the Florentine's conception, and would have been better hinted
by Virgil, than that sickening distribution of venom on the garlands. In fact, Virgil
has missed both of truth and impressiveness every way: the " morsu depascitur" is
unnatural butchery, the " perfusus veneno" gratuitous foulness, the " clamores hor-
rendos" impossible degradation. Compare carefully the remarks on this statue in Sir
Charles Bell's Essay on Expression (third edition, p. 192), where he has most wisely
and incontrovertibly deprived the statue of all claim to expression of energy and forti-
tude of mind, and shown its common and coarse intent of mere bodily exertion and
agony; while he has confirmed Payne Knight's just condemnation of the passage in
Virgil. Observe, however, that no fault is to be found with the uniting of the poisonous
and crushing powers in the serpents; this is, both in Virgil and Michael Angelo, a
liealthy operation of the imagination, since though those two powers are not, I believe,
united in any known serpent, yet in the essence or idea of serpent they are; nor is
there anything contradictory in them or incapable of perfect unity. But in Virgil it is
unhealthy operation of the imagination which destroys the verity both of the venom
and the crushing, by attributing impossible concomitants to both by supposing in the
poison an impossible quantity uselessly directed, and leaving the victim capability of
crying out, under the action of the coils. |

If the reader wishes to see the opposite view of the subject, let him compare
Winckclraann; and Schiller, Letters on ^Esthetic Culture.

' Whenever, in monumental work, the sculptor reaches a deceptive appearance of life
or death, or of concomitant details, ho has gone too far. The statue should be felt to
be a statue, not look like a dead or sleeping body ; it should not convey the impression
of a corpse, nor of sick and outwearied flesh, but it should be the marble image of
death or weariness. So the concomitants should be distinctly marble, severe and monu-
mental in their lines; not shroud, not bed-clothes, not actual armour nor brocade ; not
a real soft pillow, not a downright hard stuffed mattress ; but the mere type and sug-
gestion of these, and the ruder, often the nobler. Not that they are to be unnatural;

a hound at her feet; not on the side, but with the head laid straight
and simply on the hard pillow, in which, let it be observed, there is
no effort at deceptive imitation of pressure. It is understood as a
pillow, but not mistaken for one. The hair is bound in a flat braid
over the fair brow, the sweet and arched eyes are closed, the ten-
derness of the loving lips is set and quiet; there is that about them
which forbids breath; something which is not death nor sleep, but
the pure image of both. The hands are not lifted in prayer, neither
folded, but the arms are laid at length upon the body, and the hands
cross as they fall. The feet are hidden by the drapery, and the
forms of the limbs concealed, but not their tenderness.

If any of us, after staying for a time beside this tomb, could see,
through his tears, one of the vain and unkind encumbrances of the
grave, which in these hollow and heartless days, feigned sorrow
builds to foolish pride, he would, I believe, receive such a lesson of
love as no coldness could refuse, no fatuity forget, and no insolence
disobey.

such lines as are given should be true, and clear of the hardness and mannered rigidity
of the strictly Gothic types; but lines so few and grand as to appeal to the imagination
only, and always to stop short of realization. A monument by a modern Italian
sculptor has been lately placed in one of the side chapels of Santa Ci'oce, forcible as
portraiture, and delicately finished, but looking as if the person had been restless all
night, and the artist admitted to a faithful study of the disturbed bed-clothes in the
morning.

> + J

§ 1. Symmetry, "We shall not be long detained by the consideration of this, the
foumj in'o^f'^ fourth Constituent of beauty, as its nature is universally felt and
ganic nature. understood. In all perfectly beautiful objects, there is found the
opposition of one part to another, and a reciprocal balance, in
animals commonly between opposite sides (note the disagreeableness
occasioned by the exception in flat-fish, having the eyes on one
side of the head); wdiile in vegetables the opposition is less
distinct, as in the boughs on opposite sides of trees, and the leaves
and sprays on each side of the boughs; and in dead matter less
l^erfect still, often amounting only to a certain tendency towards a
balance, as in the opposite sides of valleys and alternate windings of
streams. In things in which perfect symmetry is from their nature
impossible or improper, a balance must be at least in some measure
expressed before they can be beheld with pleasure. Hence the
necessity of what artists require as opposing lines or masses in com-
position, the propriety of which, as well as their value, depends
chiefly on their inartificial and natural invention. Absolute equality
is not required, still less absolute similarity. A mass of subdued
colour may be balanced by a point of a powerful one, and a long
and latent line overpowered by a short and conspicuous one. The
only error against which it is necessary to guard the reader, with
respect to symmetry, is, the confounding of it with proportion,
though it seems strange that the two terms could ever have been
used as synonymous. Symmetry is the opposition of equal quantities
to each other; proportion, the connection of unequal quantities with
each other. The property of a tree sending out equal boughs on
oj)posite sides is symmetrical; its sending out shorter and smaller

towards the top, proportional. In the human face, its balance of
opposite sides is symmetry; its division upwards, proportion.

Whether the agreeahleness of symmetry be in any way referable § 3. To what
to its expression of the Aristotelian ia-orijs, that is to say, of abstract if ^ferabic.^"^^*
justice, I leave the reader to determine: I only assert respecting
it, that it is necessary to the dignity of every form, and that by
the removal of it we shall render the other elements of beauty
comparatively ineffectual: though, on the other hand, it is to be
observed that it is rather a mode of arrangement of qualities than a
quality itself; and hence symmetry has little power over the mind,
unless all the other constituents of beauty be found together with it.
A form may be symmetrical and ugly, as many Elizabethan orna-
ments, and yet not so ugly as it would have been if unsymmetrical,
but bettered always by increasing degrees of symmetry; as in star
figures, wherein there is a circular symmetry of many like members,
whence their frequent use for the plan and ground of ornamental
designs. So also it is observable that foliage in which the leaves
are concentrically grouped, as in the chestnuts, and many shrubs,
rhododendrons, for instance, is far nobler in its effects than any
other, so that the sweet chestnut most fondly and frequently occurs
in the landscape of Tintoret and Titian, beside which all other land-
scape grandeur vanishes. And even in the meanest things the rule
holds, as in the kaleidoscope, wherein agreeableness is given to
forms altogether accidental, merely by their repetition and reciprocal
opposition. Which orderly balance and arrangement are essential
to the perfect operation of the more earnest and solemn qualities of
the Beautiful, as being heavenly in their nature, and contrary to
the violence and disorganization of sin; so that the seeking of them,
and submission to them, are characteristic of minds that have been
subjected to high moral discipline, and constant in all the great
religious painters, to the degree of being an offence and a scorn to
men of less tuned and tranquil feeling. Equal ranks of saints are § 4. Especially
placed on each side of the picture; if there be a kneeling figure on reHgious ait.
one side, there is a corresponding one on the other; the attend-
ant angels beneath and above are arranged in like order; and
the balance is preserved even in actions necessitating variety of
grouping, as always by Giotto; and by Ghirlandajo in the intro-

duction of liis cliorus-like side figures; and by Tintoret most
eminently in his noblest 'vvork, the Crucifixion, where not only the
grouping, but the arrangement of light, is absolutely symmetrical.
Where there is no symmetry, the effects of passion and violence
are increased, and many very sublime pictures derive their sublimity
from the want of it, but they lose proportionally in the diviner
quality of beauty. In landscape the same sense of symmetry is
preserved, as we shall presently see, even to artificialness, by the
greatest men; and it is one of the principal faults in the landscapes
of the present day, that the symmetry of nature is sacrificed to
irregular picturesqueness. Of this, however, hereafter.

It may at first appear strange that I have not, in my enumeration § i. the influ-
of the Types of Divine attributes, included that which is certainly ^s a sacred
the most visible and evident of all, as well as the most distinctly
expressed in Scripture; God is light, and in Him is no darkness
at all. But 1 could not logically class the presence of an actual
substance or motion with mere conditions and modes of being;
neither could I logically separate from any of these, that which is
evidently necessary to the perception of all. And it is also to be
observed, that, though the love of light is more instinctive in the
human heart than any other of the desires connected with beauty,
we can hardly separate its agreeableness in its own nature from the
sense of its necessity and value for the purposes of life; neither the
abstract painfulness of darkness from the sense of danger and pow-
erlessness connected with it. And note also that it is not all light,
but light possessing the universal qualities of beauty, diffused or
infinite rather than in points; tranquil, not startling and variable;
pure, not sullied or oppressed; which is indeed pleasant and per-
fectly typical of the Divine nature.

Observe, however, that there is one quality, the idea of which § 2. The idea
has been just introduced in connection with light, which might have ne^d wiUHt
escaped us in the consideration of mere matter, namely Purity:
and yet I think that the original notion of this quality is altogether
material, and has only been attributed to colour when such colour
is suggestive of the condition of matter from which we originally
received tbe idea. For I see not in the abstract how one colour
should be considered purer than another, except as more or less
compounded: whereas there is certainly a sense of purity or im-

purity in the most compound and neutral colours, as well as in the
simplest; a quality difficult to define, and which the reader will
probably be surprised by my calling the type of Energy, with which
it has certainly little traceable connection in the mind.

I believe, however, if we carefully analyze the nature of our
ideas of impurity in general, we shall find them refer especially to
conditions of matter in which its various elements are placed in a
relation incapable of healthy or proper operation; and most dis-
tinctly to conditions in which the negation of vital or energetic
action is most evident; as in corruption and decay of all kinds,
wherein particles which once, by their operation on each other,
produced a living and energetic whole, are reduced to a condition
of perfect passiveness, in which they are seized upon and appro-
priated, one by one, piecemeal, by whatever has need of them,
without any power of resistance or energy of their own. And thus
there is a peculiar painfulness attached to any associations of
inorganic with organic matter, such as appear to involve the in-
activity and feebleness of the latter; so that things which are not
felt to be foul in their own nature become so in association with
things of greater inherent energy: as dust or earth, which in a
mass excites no painful sensation, excites a most disagreeable one
when strewing or staining an animal's skin; because it implies a
decline and deadening of the vital and healthy power of the skin.
But all reasoning about this impression is rendered difficult, because
the ocular sense of impurity connected with corruption is enhanced
by the offending of other senses and by the grief and horror of it
in its own nature, as the special punishment and evidence of sin:
and on the other hand, the ocular delight in purity is mingled, as I
before observed, with the love of the mere element of light, as a
type of wisdom and of truth; whence it seems to me that we
admire the transparency of bodies; though probably it is still rather
owing to our sense of more perfect order and arrangement of
particles, and not to our love of light, that we look upon a piece of
rock crystal as purer than a piece of marble, and on the marble as
purer than a piece of chalk. And let it be observed, also, that the
most lovely objects in nature are only partially transparent. I
suppose the utmost possible sense of beauty is conveyed by a feebly

§ 3. Originally
(ierived from
conditions of
matter.

§ 4. Associated
ideas adding to
the power of the
impi'ession. In-
fluence of clear-
ness.

translucent, smooth, but not lustrous surface of white, and pale §5. Perfect
warm red, subdued by the most pure and delicate grejs, as in the face, in wimt
jfiner portions of the human frame; in wreaths of snow, and in white
plumage under rose light so Viola of Olivia in Twelfth Night, and
Homer of Atrides wounded. ® And I think that transparency and
lustre, both beautiful in themselves, are incompatible with the
highest beauty; because they destroy form, on the full perception
of which more of the divinely typical character of the object
depends than upon its colour. Hence, in the beauty of snow and
.of flesh, so much translucency is allowed as is consistent with the
full explanation of the forms; while we are suffered to receive
more intense impressions of light and transparency from other
objects which nevertheless, owing to their necessarily unperceived
form, are not perfectly nor affectingly beautiful. A fair forehead
outshines its diamond diadem. The sparkle of the cascade with-
draws not our eyes from the snowy summits in their evening
silence.

It may seem strange to many readers that I have not spoken of § 6. Purity
purity in that sense in which it is most freq^uently used, as a type cai'yTty^pe^of
of sinlessness. I do not deny that the frequent metaphorical use «^"I'-'ssncss.

> The reader will observe that I am speaking at present of mei'c material qualities.
If he Avould obtain perfect ideas respecting loveliness of luminous sui-face, let him
closely observe a swan with its wings expanded in full light five minutes before sunset.
The human cheek or the rose leaf is perhaps hardly so pure, and the forms of snow,
though individually as beautiful^ are less exquisitely combined.

So Spenser of Shamefacedness, an exquisite piece of glowing colour, and sweetly of
Belphoebe; so the roses and lilies of all poets. Compare the making of the image of
Florimell

" The substance whereof she the body made
Was purest snow, in massy mould congealed,
Which she had gathered in a shady glade
Of the Riphsean hills.

The same she tempered with fine mercury,
And mingled them with perfect vermily."
With Una he perhaps overdoes the white a little. She is two degrees of comparison
above snow. Compare his questioning in the Hymn to Beauty, about that mixture
made of colours fair; and goodly temperament of pure complexion :
" Hath white and red in it such wondrous power
That it can pierce through the eyes into the heart ? "
Where the distinction between typical and vital beauty is veiy gloriously carried out.

of it in Scripture may have, and ouglit to have, much influence on
the sympathies with which we regard it; and that probably the
immediate agreeableness of it to most minds arises far more from
this source than from that to which I have chosen to attribute it.
But, in the first place, if it be indeed in the signs of Divine and
not of human attributes that beauty consists, I see not how the idea
of sin can be formed with respect to the Deity; for it is an idea of
a relation borne by us to him, and not in any way to be attached
to his abstract nature; while the Love, Mercifulness, and Justice
of God I have supposed to be symbolized by other qualities of
beauty, and I cannot trace any rational connection between them
and the idea of Spotlessness in matter; nor between this idea and
any of the virtues which make up the righteousness of man, except
perhaps those of truth and openness, which have been above spoken
of as more expressed by the transparency than the mere purity of
matter. So that I conceive the use of the terms purity, spotless-
ness, &c., in moral subjects, to be merely metaphorical; and that it
is rather that we illustrate these virtues by the desirableness of
material purity, than that we desire material purity because it is
illustrative of these virtues.

I repeat, then, that the only idea which I think can be legitimately
connected with purity of matter, is this of vital and energetic con-
nection among its particles; as that of foulness is essentially con-
nected with dissolution and death. Thus the purity of the rock,
contrasted with the foulness of dust or mould, is expressed by the
epithet " living," very singularly given to rock, in almost all
languages (singularly, because life is almost the last attribute one
would ascribe to stone, but for this visible energy and connection
of its particles); and so to flowing water, opposed to stagnant.
And I do not think that, however pure a powder or dust may be,
the idea of beauty is ever connected with it; for it is not the mere
purity, but the active condition of the substance which is desired;
so that as soon as it shoots into crystals, or gathers into efilorescence,
a sensation of active or real purity is received which was not felt
in the calcined caput mortuum.

§ 7. Energr,
how expressed
l)y purity of
matter,

And again, in colour, I imagine that the quality which we term
purity is dependent on the full energizing of the rays that compose

it; of which if in compound hues any are overpowered and killed
by the rest, so as to be of no value nor operation, foulness is the
consequence; while so long as all act together, whether side by
side, or from pigments seen one through the other, so that all the
colouring matter employed may come into play in the harmony
desired, and none be quenched nor killed, purity results. And so
in all cases I suppose that pureness is made to us desirable, because
expressive of that constant presence and energizing of the Deity by
Avhich all things live and move, and have their being; and that
foulness is painful as the accompaniment of disorder and decay, and
always indicative of the withdrawal of Divine support. And the
practical analogies of life, the invariable connection of outward
foulness with mental sloth and degradation, as well as with bodily
lethargy and disease, together with the contrary indications of
freshness and purity belonging to every healthy and active organic
frame (singularly seen in the effort of the young leaves when first
their inward energy prevails over the earth, pierces its corruption,
and shakes its dust away from their own white purity of life), all
these circumstances strengthen the instinct by associations countless
and irresistible. And then, finally, with the idea of purity comes § Spiritu-
that of spirituality; for the essential characteristic of matter is its expressed,
inertia, whence, by adding to it purity or energy, we may in some
measure spiritualize even matter itself. Thus in the Apocalyptic
descriptions it is the purity of every substance that fits it for its
place in heaven; the river of the water of life, that proceeds out of
the throne of the Lamb, is clear as crystal, and the pavement of
the city is pure gold like unto clear glass. ^

^ I have not spoken here of any of the associations connected with warmth or cool-
ness of colour; they are partly connected with Vital beauty, compare Chap, XIV.
§ 22, 23., and partly with impressions of the sublime, the discussion of which is foreign
to the present subject: purity, however, it is which gives colour to both; for neither
warm nor cool colour can be beautiful, if impure.

Neither have I spoken of any questions relating to melodies of colour; a subject of
separate science, whose general principle has been already slated in the Seventh Chapter
respecting unity of Sequence. Those qualities only are here noted which give absolute
beauty, whether to separate colour or to melodies of it; for all melodies are not beau-
tiful, but only those which are expressive of certain pleasant or solemn emotions; the
rest are startling, or curious, or cheerful, or exciting, or sublime, but not beautiful; and
so in music. And all questions relating to this grandeur, cheerfulness, or other charac-
teristic impression of colour, must be considered under the head of Ideas of Relation.

Of objects which, in respect of the qualities hitherto considered,
appear to have equal claims to regard, we find, nevertheless, that
certain are preferred to others in consequence of an attractive
power, usually expressed by the terms " chasteness, refinement, or
elegance:" and it appears also that things which in other respects
have little in them of natural beauty, and are of forms altogether
simple and adapted to simple uses, are capable of much distinction
and desirableness in consequence of these qualities only. It is of
importance to discover the real nature of the ideas thus expressed.

Something of the peculiar meaning of the words is referable to
the authority of fashion and the exclusiveness of pride, owing to
which that which is the mode of a particular time is submissively
esteemed, and that which by its costliness or its rarity is of difiicult
attainment, or in any way appears to have been chosen as the best
of many things (which is the original sense of the words elegant
and exquisite), is esteemed for the witness it bears to the dignity of
the chooser: but neither of these ideas is in any way connected
with constant beauty; neither do they account for that agreeable-
ness of colour and form which is especially termed chasteness, and
which it would seem to be a characteristic of rightly trained minds
in all things to prefer, and of common minds to reject.

There is however another character of artificial productions to
which these terms have partial reference, which it is of some impor-
tance to note; that of finish, exactness, or refinement: which are
commonly desired in'the works of men, owing both to their difficulty
of accomplishment and consequent expression of care and power

§ L Meaning
of tlie terms
Cliasteness and
Refinement.

§ 2. How rcfer-
alile to tempo-
rary fasliions;

; *

f !
4*

:1i

§ 3. How to the
perception of
Completion.

(compare Chapter on Ideas of Power, Part I. Sec. I.), and from their
greater resemblance to the working of God, whose " absolute ex-
actness," says Hooker, " all things imitate, by tending to that which
is most exquisite in every particular." And there is not a greater
sign of the imperfection of general taste, than its capability of con-
tentment with forms and things which, professing completion, are
yet not exact nor complete; as in the vulgar with wax and clay
and china figures, and in bad sculptors with an unfinished and
clay-like modelling of surface, and curves and angles of no precision
or delicacy; and in general, in all common and unthinking persons
with an imperfect rendering of that which might be pure and fine :
as churchwardens are content to lose the sharp lines of stone carving
under clogging obliterations of whitewash; and as the modern
Italians scrape away and polish white all the sharpness and glory of
the carvings on their old churches, as most miserably and pitifully
on St. Mark's at Venice, and the Baptisteries of Pistoja and Pisa,
and many others. So also the delight of vulgar painters in coarse
and slurred painting, merely for the sake of its coarseness ^: as of

' It is to be carefully noted that when rude execution is evidently not the result of
imperfect feeling and desire (as in these men above named it is), but either of im-
patient thought which there was necessity to note swiftlj', or agitated thought which it
was well to note with a certain wildness of manner, as pre-eminently and in both kinds
the case with Tintorct, and in lower and more degraded modes witiv liubens, and
generally in the sketches and first thoughts of great masters, there is received a very
noble pleasure, connected both with ideas of power (compare again Part I. Sec. II.
Chap. I.) and with certain actions of the imagination of which we shall speak presently.
But this pleasure is not received from the beauty of the work, for nothing can be per-
fectly beautiful unless complete, but from its simplicity and sufficiency to its immediate
purpose, where the pui-pose is not of beauty at all, as often in things rough hewn ; pre-
eminently, for instance, in the stones of the foundations of the Pitti and Strozzi Palaces,
whose noble rudeness is to be opposed both to the useless polish and the barbarous
rustications of modern times, although indeed this instance is not to be received without
exception, for the majesty of these rocky buildings depends also in some measure upon
the real beauty and finish of the natural curvilinear fractures, opposed to the coarseness
of human chiselling. And again, as respects works of higher art, the pleasure of their
hasty or imperfect execution is not indicative of their beauty, but of their majesty and
fulness of thought and vastness of power. Shade is only beautiful when it magnifies
and sets forth the forms of fair things; so negligence is only noble when it is, as Fuseli
hath it, " the shadow of energy." Which that it may be, secure the substance and the
shade will follow; but let the artist beware of stealing the manner of giant intellects
when he has not their intention, and of assuming large modes of treatment when he has
little thoughts to treat. There is wide difference between indolent impatience of labour
and intellectual impatience of delay; large difference between leaving things unfinished

§ 4. Finish, by Spagiioletto, Salvator, or Murillo, opposed to the divine finish which
fsTee^nl^rSen- greatest and mightiest of men disdained not, but rather wrouglit
out with painfulness and life-spending; as Leonardo and Michael
Angelo (for the latter, however many things he left unfinished, did
finish, if at all, with a refinement that the eye cannot follow, but the
feeling only, as in the Pieta of Genoa); and Perugino always, even
to the gilding of single hairs among his angel tresses; and the
young Raffaelle, when he was heaven-taught; and Angelico, and
Pinturicchio, and John Bellini, and all other such serious and loving
Only it is to be observed that this finish is not a part nor

constituent of beauty, but the full and ultimate rendering of it; so
that it is an idea only connected with the works of men, for all the
works of the Deity are finished with the same, that is, infinite, care
and completion: and so what degrees of beauty exist among them
can in no way be dependent upon this source, inasmuch as there
are between them no degrees of care. And therefore, as there
certainly is admitted a difference of degree in what we call chaste-
ness, even in Divine work (compare the hollyhock or the sunflower
with the vale lily), we must seek for it some other explanation and
source than this.

And if, bringing down our ideas of it from complicated objects to
simple lines and colours, we analyse and regard them carefully, I
think we shall be able to trace them to an under-current of con-
stantly agreeable feeling, excited by the appearance in material
things of a self-restrained liberty; that is to say, by the image of
that acting of God with regard to all his creation, wherein, though
free to operate in whatever arbitrary, sudden, violent, or inconstant
ways he will, he yet, if we may reverently so speak, restrains in
himself this his omnipotent liberty, and works always in consist-
ent modes, called by us laws. And this restraint or moderation,
according to the words of Hooker, " that which doth moderate the

§ 5. Modera-
tion, its nature
and value.

because we have more to do, and because we are, satisfied with what we have done.
Tintoret, who prayed hard, and hardly obtained, that he might be permitted, the charge
of his colours only being borne, to paint a newly built house from base to battlement,
was not one to shun labour ; it is the pouring in upon him of glorious thoughts, in
inexpressible multitude, that his sweeping hand follows so fast. It is as easy to know
the slightness of earnest haste from the slightness of blunt feeling, indolence, or
affectation, as it is to know the dust of a race, from the dust of dissolution.

foi'ce and power, that which doth appoint the form and measure of
working, the same we term a Law "), is in the Deity not restraint,
such as it is said of creatures, but, as again says Hooker, " the
very being of God is a law to his working," so that every appearance
of painfuhiess or want of power and freedom in material things is
wrong and ugly; for the right restraint, the image of Divine
operation, is, both in them and in men, a willing and not painful
stopping short of the utmost degree to which their power might
reach, and the appearance of fettering or confinement is the cause
of ugliness in the one, as the slightest painfuhiess or effort in restraint
is a sign of sin in the other.

I have put this attribute of beauty last, because I consider it the § 6. it is the
girdle and safeguard of all the rest, and in this respect the most
essential of all; for it is possible that a certain degree of beauty
may be attained even in the absence of one of its other constituents,
as sometimes in some measure without symmetry or without unity.
But the least appearance of violence or extravagance, of tlie want
of moderation and restraint, is, I think, destructive of all beauty
whatsoever in everything, colour, form, motion, language, or
thought; giving rise to that which in colour we call glaring, in
form inelegant, in motion ungraceful, in language coarse, in thought
undisciplined, in all unchastened; which qualities are in everything
most painful, because the signs of disobedient and irregular opera-
tion. And herein we at last find the reason of that which has been § 7. How found
so often noted respecting the subtlety and almost invisibility of curves and
natural curves and colours, and why it is that we look on those
lines as least beautiful which fall into wide and far license of
curvature, and as most beautiful which approach nearest (so that
the curvilinear character be distinctly asserted) to the government
of the right line; as in the pure and severe curves of the draperies
of the religious painters. And thus in colour it is not red, but rose
colour, which is most beautiful; neither such actual green as we
find in summer foliage partly, and in our painting of it constantly,
but such grey green as that into which nature modifies her distant
tints, or such pale green and uncertain as we see in sunset sky, and
in tlie clefts of the glacier and the chrysoprase, and the sea-foam:
and so of all colours; not that they may not sometimes be deep and

full, but that there is a solemn moderation even in their very
fulness, and a holy reference, beyond and out of their own nature,
to great harmonies by which they are governed, and in obedience
to which is their glory. Whereof the ignorance is shown in all
evil colonrists by the violence and positiveness of their hues, and
by dulness and discordance consequent; for the very brilliancy and
real power of all colour is dependent on the chastening of it, as of
a voice on its gentleness, and as of action on its calmness, and as
§ 8. How diffi. all moral vigour on self-command. And therefore as that virtue
raeitfyS^eisen- wliich men last, and with most difficulty, attain unto, and which
tiai to all good, many attain not at all, and yet that which is essential to the
conduct and almost to the being of all other virtues; since neither
imagination, nor invention, nor industry, nor sensibility, nor energy,
nor any other good having, is of full avail without this of self-
command, whereby works truly masculine and mighty are pro-
duced, and by the signs of which they are separated from that lower
host of things brilliant, magnificent, and redundant, and farther yet
from that of the loose, the lawless, the exaggerated, the insolent,
and the profane; I would have the necessity of it foremost among
all our inculcating, and the name of it largest among all our
inscribing, in so far that, over the doors of every school of Art, I
would have this one word, relieved out in deep letters of pure gold,
—Moderation.

I HAVE now enumerated and, in some measure, explained those § i. The sub-
characteristics of mere matter by which I conceive it becomes agree- ''pieteiy trea^

able to the Theoretic faculty, under whatever form, dead, orean- J'®*^ admitting of

succeeding volume to examine, and illustrate by examples, the mode
in which these characteristics appear in every division of creation,
in stones, mountains, waves, clouds, and all organic bodies; be-
ginning with vegetables, and then taking instances in the range of
animals from the mollusc to man; examining how one animal form
is nobler than another, by the more manifest presence of these
attributes, and chiefly endeavouring to show how much there is of
admirable and lovely, even in what is commonly despised. At
present I have only to mark the conclusions at which we have as
yet arrived respecting the rank of the Theoretic faculty, and then
to pursue the inquiry farther into the nature of vital beauty.

As I before said, I pretend not to have enumerated all the sources
of material beauty, nor the analogies connected with them; it is
probable that others may occur to many readers, or to myself as I
proceed into more particular inquiry, but I am not careful to
collect all evidence within reach on the subject. I desire only to
assert and prove some certain principles, and by means of these to
show something of the relations which the material works of God
bear to the human mind, leaving the subject to be fully pursued,
as it only can be, by the ardour and affection of those whom it
may interest.

§2. Typical
Beauty not
created for
man's sake.

§ 3. But de-
grees of it ad-
mitted for his
salie.

§ 4. "What m-
couragement
hence to be re-
ceived.

stamped upon matter for our teacliing or enjoyment only, but as
the necessary perfection of God's working, and the inevitable stamp
of his image on what he creates. For it would be inconsistent with
his Infinite perfection to w^ork imperfectly in any place, or in any
matter; wherefore we do not find that flowers and fair trees, and
kindly skies, are given only where man may see them and be fed
by them; but the spirit of God works everywhere alike, where
there is no eye to see, covering all lonely places with an equal
glory; using the same pencil and outpouring the same splendour,
in the caves of the waters where the sea snakes swim, and in the
desert where the satyrs dance, among the fir trees of the stork, and
the rocks of the conies, as among those higher creatures whom he
has made capable witnesses of his working. Nevertheless, I think
that the admission of different degrees of this glory and image of
himself upon creation, has the look of something meant especially
for us; for although, in pursuance of the appointed system of
Government by universal laws, these same degrees exist where we
cannot witness them, yet the existence of degrees at all seems at
first unlikely in Divine work ; and I cannot see reason for it unless
that palpable one of increasing in us the understanding of the
sacred characters by showing us the results of their comparative
absence. For I know not that if all things had been equally
beautiful, we could have received the idea of beauty at all; or if
we had, certainly it had become a matter of indifference to us, and
of little thought; whereas, through the beneficent ordaining of
degrees in its manifestation, the hearts of men are stirred by its
occasional occurrence in its noblest form, and all their energies are
awakened in the pursuit of it, and endeavour to arrest it or recreate
it, for themselves. But whatever doubt there may be respecting
the exact amount of modification of created things admitted with
reference to us, there can be none respecting the dignity of that
faculty by which we receive the mysterious evidence of their divine
origin. The fact of our deriving constant pleasure from whatever
is a type or semblance of divine attributes, and from nothing but
that which is so, is the most glorious of all that can be demonstrated
of human nature; it not only sets a great gulf of specific separation
between us and the lower animals, but it seems a promise of a com-

munion ultimately deep, close, and conscious, with the Being whose
darkened manifestations we here feebly and unthinkingly delight
in. Probably to every higher order of intelligence more of his
image becomes palpable in all around them, and the glorified spirits
and the angels have perceptions as much more full and rapturous
than ours, as ours than those of beasts and creeping things. And
receiving it, as we must, for a universal axiom that " no natural
desire can be entirely frustrate," and seeing that these desires are
indeed so unfailing in us that they have escaped not the reasoners
of any time, but were held divine of old, and in even heathen
countries may we not see in these visionary pleasures, lightly as
we too often regard them, cause for thankfulness, ground for liope,
anchor for faith, more than in all the other manifold gifts and
guidances, wherewith God crowns the years, and hedges the paths
of Men?

' 'H Se reAeia evSaifiouia Sewprjrt/fjj r'ls iartv ivepyeia.....ro7s fJi,fi> yap 0eois awas 6

Plos /xaKtipios, TOis 8' avOpcivois, ecp' oaov bfioiaifna ri Tr}s TOiavTijs euepyelas virdpxei. rwv
S' ^'fwv oJSec euSai/UOfc?, eTreidij ovSajxij Koivuvit flewpi'ay, —Arist. Eth. lib. 10.

§ 1. Tninsitioii I PROCEED more particularly to examine the nature of that second
vitTi Braut^jl^^ Beauty of which I spoke in the third, chapter, as consisting

in " the appearance of felicitous fulfilment of function in living
things." I have already noticed the example of very pure and high
typical beauty which Is to be found in the lines and gradations of
unsullied snow; if, passing to the edge of a sheet of it, upon the
Lower Alps, early in May, we find, as we are nearly sure to find,
two or three little round openings pierced in it, and through these
emergent, a slender, pensive, fragile flower whose small, dark,
purple-fringed bell hangs down and shudders over the icy cleft that
it has cloven, as if partly wondering at its own recent grave, and
partly dying of very fatigue after its hard-won victory; we shall
be, or we ought to be, moved by a totally different impression of
loveliness from that which we receive among the dead ice and the
idle clouds. There is now uttered to us a call for sympathy, now
offered to us an image of moral purpose and achievement, which,
however unconscious or senseless the creature' may indeed be that
so seems to call, cannot be heard without affection, nor contemplated
without worship, by any of us whose heart is rightly tuned, or whose
mind is clearly and surely sighted.

Throughout the whole of the organic creation every being in a
perfect state exhibits certain appearances or evidences of happiness;
and is in its nature, its desires, its modes of nourishment, habitation,

^ t

Hi
J'

and death, illustrative or expressive of certain moral dispositions or
principles. Now, jfirst, in the keenness of the sympathy which we
feel in the happiness, real or apparent, of all organic beings, and
which, as we shall presently see, invariably prompts us, from the
joy we have in it, to look upon those as most lovely which are most
happy; and secondly, in the justness of the moral sense which
rightly reads the lesson they are all intended to teach, and classes
them in orders of worthiness and beauty according to the rank and
nature of that lesson, whether it be of warning or example, in those
that wallow or in those that soar; in our right accepting and read-
ing of all this, consists, I say, the ultimately perfect condition of that
noble Theoretic faculty, whose place in the system of our nature
I have already partly vindicated with respect to typical, but which
can only fully be established with respect to vital beauty.

Its first perfection, therefore, relating to Vital Beauty, is the §2. The per-
kindness and unselfish fulness of heart, which receives the utmost Theoretic fiicul-
amount of pleasure from the happiness of all things. Of which in
high degree the heart of man is incapable; neither what intense ty, is charity,
enjoyment the angels may have in all that they see of things that
move and live, and in the part they take in the shedding of God's
kindness upon them, can we know or conceive: only in proportion
as we draw near to God, and are made in measure like unto him,
can we increase this our possession of Charity, of which the entire
essence is in God only. But even the ordinary exercise of this
faculty implies a condition of the whole moral being in some measure
right and healthy, and to the entire exercise of it there is necessary
the entire perfection of the Christian character; for he who loves
not God, nor his brother, cannot love the grass beneath his feet and
the creatures which live not for his uses, filling those spaces in the
universe which he needs not; while on the other hand, none can
love God, nor his human brother, without loving all things which
his Father loves; nor without looking upon them, every one, as in
that respect his brethren also, and perhaps worthier than he, if, in
the under concords they have to fill, their part is touched more
truly. It is good to read of that kindness and humbleness of
St. Francis of Assisi, who spoke never to bird nor to cicala, nor
even to wolf and beast of prey, but as his brother; and so we find

are moved the minds of all good and mighty men, as in the lesson
that we have from the Mariner of Coleridge, and yet more truly
and rightly taught in the Hartleap Well,

" Never to blend our pleasure, or our pride.
With sorrow of the meanest thing tliat feels ;"

and again in the White Doe of Rylstone, with the added teaching,
that anguish of our own—

" Is tempered and allayed by sympathies,
Aloft ascending and descending deep,
Even to the inferior kinds."

So that I know not of anything more destructive of the whole
Theoretic faculty, not to say of the Christian character and human
intellect, than those accursed sports in which man makes of himself,
cat, tiger^ serpent, chaitodon, and alligator in one; and gathers into
one continuance of cruelt}'^, for his amusement, all the devices that
brutes sparingly and at intervals use against each other for their
necessities.

As we pass from those beings of Avhose happiness and pain we are
certain, to those in which it is doubtful, or only seeming, as possibly
in plants, (though I would fain hold, if I might, " the faith, that
every flower enjoys the air it breathes,") yet our feeling for them
has in it more of sympathy than of actual love, as receiving from
them in delight far more than we can give; for love, I think, chiefly
grows in giving; at least its essence is the desire of doing good, or
giving happiness. Still the sympathy of very sensitive minds
usually reaches so far as to the conception of life in the plant, and
so to love, as with Shakspeare always, as he has taught us in the
sweet voices of Ophelia and Perdita, and Wordsworth always, as
of the dalfodils, and the celandine: )

" It doth not love the shower, nor seek the <|old.
Tliis neither is its courage, nor its choice, i
But its necessity in being old :"

and so all other great poets ^; nor do I believe that any mind, how-
ever rude, is without some slight perception or acknowledgment of

§ 3. Only with
respect to
I)l;ints, less
attection than
sympathy.

if:
•fj

1:1

■

i • 'J

Uii
H

joyfulness in breathless things, as most certainly there are none but
feel instinctive delight in the appearances of such enjoyment.

For it is matter of easy demonstration, that setting the characters § 4. Which is
of typical beauty aside, the pleasure afforded by every organic form theTi!^earance°
is in proportion to its appearance of healthy vital energy. In a
rose-tree, setting aside all the considerations of gradated flushing
of colour, and fair folding of line, which its flowers share with the
cloud or the snow-wreath, we find, in and through all this, certain
signs pleasant and acceptable as signs of life and strength in the
plant. Every leaf and stalk is seen to have a function, to be con-
stantly exercising that function, and as it seems^ solely for the good
and enjoyment of the plant. It is true that reflection will show us
that the plant is not living for itself alone, that its life is one of
benefaction, that it gives as well as receives; but no sense of this
whatsoever mingles with our perception of physical beauty in its
forms. Those forms appear to be necessary to its health; the
symmetry of its leaflets, the smoothness of its stalks, the vivid green
of its shoots, are looked upon by us as signs of the plant's own hap-
piness and perfection; they are useless to us, except as they give
us pleasure in our sympathizing with that of the plant; and if we
see a leaf withered, or shrunk, or worm-eaten, we say it is ugly,
and feel it to be painful, not because it hurts us^ but because it
seems to hurt the plant, and conveys to us an idea of pain and
disease and failure of life in it.

That the amount of pleasure we receive is in exact proportion to
the appearance of vigour and sensibility in the plant, is easily proved
by observing the elfect of those which show the evidences of it in
the least degree, as, for instance, any of the cacti not in flower.
Their masses are heavy and simple, tlieir growth slow; their various
parts, if they are ramified, jointed on one to another, as if they were
buckled or pinned together instead of growing out of each other:
and the fruit imposed upon the body of the plant, so that it looks
like a swelling or disease. All these circumstances so concur to
deprive the plant of vital evidences, that we receive from it more
sense of pain than of beauty; and yet, even here, the sharpness or
the angles, the symmetrical order and strength of the spines, the
fresh and even colour of the body, are looked for earnestly as signs

of healthy condition; our pain is increased by their absence, and
indefinitely increased if blotches, and other appearances of decay,
interfere with that little life which the plant seems to possess.

The same singular characters belong in animals to the crustacea,
as to the lobster, crab, scorpion, &c., and in great measure deprive
them of the beauty which we find in higher orders; so that we are
reduced to look for their beauty to single parts and joints, and not
to the whole animal.

Now I wish particularly to impress upon the reader that all these
sensations of beauty in the plant arise from our unselfish sympathy
with its happiness, and not from any view of the qualities in it which
may bring good to us, nor even from our acknowledgment in it of
any moral condition beyond that of mere felicity; for such an
acknowledgment belongs to the second operation of the Theoretic
faculty (compare § 2.), and not to the sympathetic part which we are
at present examining; so that we even find that in this respect, the
moment we begin to look upon any creature as subordinate to some
purpose out of itself, some of the sense of organic beauty is lost.
Thus, when we are told that the leaves of a plant are occupied in
decomposing carbonic acid, and preparing oxygen for us, we begin
to look upon it with some such indifference as upon a gasometer.
It has become a machine; some of our sense of its happiness is
gone; its emanation of inherent life is no longer pure. The bend-
ing trunk, waving to and fro in the wind above the waterfall, is
beautiful because it is happy, though it is perfectly useless to us. ^
The same trunk, hewn down and thrown across the stream, has lost
its beauty. It serves as a bridge,—it has become useful; and its
beauty is gone, or what it retains is purely typical, dependent on
its lines and colours, not on its functions. Saw it into planks, and,
though now adapted to become permanently useful, its beauty is
lost for ever, or to be regained only when decay and ruin shall have
withdrawn it again from use, and left it to receive from the hand
of nature the velvet moss and varied lichen, which may again
suggest ideas of inherent happiness, and tint its mouldering sides
with hues of life.

§ 5. This sym-
pathy is unself-
ish, and docs
not regard uti-
lity.

Liih

%ti

If,

I ji

'■PF

There is something, I think, peculiarly beautiful and instructive
in this unselfishness of the Theoretic faculty, and in its abhorrence
of all utility to one creature which is based on the pain or destruc-
tion of any other; for in such services as are consistent with the
essence and energy of both it takes delight, as in the clothing of
the rock by the herbage, and the feeding of the herbage by the
stream.

But still clearer evidence of its being indeed the expression of § 6. Especially

is to be found in the way in which we regard the bodily frame of
animals: of which it is to be noted first, that there is not anything
which causes so intense and tormenting a sense of ugliness as any
scar, wound, monstrosity, or imperfection which seems inconsistent
with the animal's ease and health; and that although in vegetables,
where there is no immediate sense of pain, we are comparatively
little hurt by excrescences and irregularities, but are sometimes even
delighted with them, and fond of them, as children of the oak-apple,
and sometimes look upon them as more interesting than the un-
injured conditions, as in the gnarled and knotted trunks of trees;
yet the slightest approach to any thing of the kind in animal form
is regarded with intense horror, merely from the sense of pain it
conveys. And, in the second place, it is to be noted that whenever § 7. And it is
we dissect the animal frame, or conceive it as dissected, and sub- ev-jpn^es oT
stitute in our thoughts the neatness of mechanical contrivance for mcdianism.
the pleasure of the animal; the moment we reduce enjoyment to
ingenuity, and volition to leverage, that instant all sense of beauty
ceases. Take, for instance, the action of the limb of the ostrich,
which is beautiful so long as we see it in its swift uplifting along
the Desert sands, and trace in the tread of it her scorn of the horse
and his rider, but would infinitely lose of its impressiveness, if we
could see the spring ligament playing backwards and forwards in
alternate jerks over the tubercle at the hock joint. Take again the
action of the dorsal fin of the shark tribe. So long as we observe
the consistent energy of motion in the whole frame, the lash of the
tail, bound of body, and instantaneous lowering of the dorsal, to
avoid the resistance of the water, as it turns, there is high sense of
organic power and beauty. But when we dissect the dorsal, and

find that its superior ray is supported in its position by a peg in a
notch at its base^ and that, when the fin is to be loAvered, tlie peg
has to be taken out, and, when it is raised, put in again; although
we are filled with wonder at the ingenuity of the mechanical con-
trivance, all our sense of beauty is gone, and not to be recovered
until we again see the fin playing on the animal's body, apparently
by its own will alone, with the life running along its rays. It is
by a beautiful ordinance of the Creator that all these mechanisms
are concealed from sight, though open to investigation; and that in
all which is outwardly manifested, we seem to see his presence
rather than his workmanship, and the mysterious breath of life
rather than the adaptation of matter.

If therefore, as I think appears from all evidence, it is the sense
of felicity which we first desire in organic form, those forms will
be the most beautiftil (always, observe, leaving typical beauty out
of the question) which exhibit most of power, and seem capable of
most quick and joyous sensation. Hence we find gradations of
beauty, from the impenetrable hide and sIoav movement of the
elephant and the rhinoceros, from the foul occupation of the vulture,
from the earthy struggling of the worm, to the brilliancy of the
moth, the buoyancy of the bird, the swiftness of the fawn and the
horse, the fair and kingly sensibility of man.

Thus far then, the Theoretic faculty is concerned with the hap-
piness of animals, and its exercise depends on the cultivation of the
faculty, as con- afFections only. Let us next observe how it is concerned with the

is justice of moral functions of annnals, and therefore how it is dependent on the
cultivation of every moral sense. There is not any organic creature
but, in its history and habits, will exemplify or illustrate to us some
moral excellence or deficiency, or some point of God's providential
government, which it is necessary for us to know. Thus the
functions and the fates of animals are distributed to them, with a
variety which exhibits to us the dignity and results of almost every
passion and kind of conduct: some filthy and slothful, pining and
unhappy; some rapacious, restless, and cruel; some ever earnest
and laborious, and, I think, unhappy in their endless labour;
creatures, like the bee, that heap up riches and caimot tell who
shall gather them, and others employed, like angels, in endless

§ 8. The second
perfection of
the Theoretic

offices of love and praise. Of wliicli, when in right condition of
mind, we esteem tliose most beautiful, whose functions are the most
noble, whether as some, in mere energy, or as others, in moral
honour: so that we look with hate on the foulness of the sloth, and
the subtlety of the adder, and the rage of the hyasna; with the
honour due to their earthly wisdom we invest the earnest ant and
unwearied bee; but we look with full perception of sacred function
to the tribes of burning plumage and choral voice. ^ And so what
lesson we might receive for our earthly conduct from the creeping
and laborious things, was taught us by that earthly King who made
silver to be in Jerusalem as stones (yet thereafter was less rich
toward God). But from the lips of a heavenly King, who had not
where to lay his head, we were taught what lesson we have to learn
from those higher creatures who sow not, nor reap, nor gather into
barns, for their Heavenly Father feedeth them.

There are many hindrances in the way of our looking with this § 9, now im-
rightly balanced judgment on the moral functions of the animal
tribes, owing to the inde})endenf and often opposing characters of
typical beauty, as it seems, arbitrarily distributed among them; so
that the most fierce and cruel creatui'cs are often clothed in the
liveliest colours, and strengthened by the noblest forms; with this
only exception, that so far as I know, there is no high beauty in
any slothful animal; but even among those of prey, its characters
exist in exalted measure upon those that range and pursue, and are
in equal degree withdrawn from those that lie subtly and silently in
the covert of the reed and fens. But we should sometimes check
the repugnance or sympathy with which the ideas of their de-
structiveness or innocence accustom us to regard the animal tribes,
as well as those meaner likes and dislikes which arise, I think, from
the greater or less resemblance of animal powers to our own; and
pursue the pleasures of typical beauty down to the scales of the
alligator, the coils of the serpent, and the joints of the beetle; and
again, on the other hand, sometimes regardless of the impressions
of typical beauty, accept from each creature, great or small, the

more important lessons taught by its position in creation as sufferer
or cliastiser, as lowlj or liaving dominion, as of foul liabit or lofty
aspiration; and from the several perfections which all illustrate or
possess, courage, perseverance, industry, or intelligence, or, higher
yet, love, and patience, and fidelity, and rejoicing, and never wearied
praise. That these moral perfections indeed are causes of beauty in
proportion to their expression, is best proved by comparing those
features of animals in which they are more or less apparent; as, for
instance, the eyes, of which we shall find those ugliest which have
in them no expression nor life whatever, but a corpse-like stare, or
an indefinite meaningless glaring, as (in some lights) those of owls
and cats, and mostly of insects and of all creatures in which the eye
seems rather an external optical instrument, than a bodily member
through which emotion and virtue of soul may be expressed (as
preeminently in the chama3leon), because the seeming want of sen-
sibility and vitality in a creature is the most painful of all wants.
And, next to these in ugliness, come the eyes that gain vitality
indeed, but only in the expression* of intense malignity, as in the
serpent and alligator; and next, to whose malignity is added the
virtue of subtlety and keenness, as of the lynx and hawk; and then,
by diminishing the malignity and increasing the expressions of com-
prehensiveness and determination, we arrive at those of the lion and
eagle; and at last, by destroying malignity altogether, at the fair
eye of the herbivorous tribes, wherein the superiority of beauty
consists always in the greater or less sweetness and gentleness,
primarily, as in the gazelle, camel, and ox; and in the greater or less
intellect, secondarily, as in the horse and dog; and finally, in gen-
tleness and intellect both in man. And again, taking the mouth,
another source of expression, we find it ugliest where it has none,
as mostly in fish; or perhaps where, without gaining {much in ex-
pression of any kind, it becomes a formidable destructive jinstrument,
as again in the alligator; and then, by some increase of expression,
we arrive at bird's beaks, wherein there is much obtained by the
different ways of setting on the mandibles (compare the bills of the
duck and the eagle); and thence we reach the finely developed lips
of the carnivora (which nevertheless lose their beauty in the actions
of snarling and biting), and from these we pass to the nobler because

§ 10. The ill-
fluetice of moral
expression.

gentler and more sensible, of tlie horse, camel, and fawn, and so
again up to man: only the principle is less traceable in the mouths
of the lower animals, because they are only in slight measure
capable of expression, and chiefly used as instruments, and that of
low function; whereas in man the mouth is given most definitely
as a means of expression, beyond and above its lower functions.
(See the remarks of Sir Charles Bell on this subject in his Essay
on Expression; and compare the mouth of the negro head given
by him (page 28. third edition) with that of RafFaelle's St. Catherine.)
I shall illustrate the subject farther hereafter, by giving the mouth
of one of the demons of Orcagna's Inferno, with projecting incisors,
and that of a fish and a swine, in opposition to pure graminivorous
and human forms; but at present it is sufficient for my purpose to
insist on the single great principle, that, wherever expression is
possible, and uninterfered with by characters of typical beauty,
which confuse the subject exceedingly as regards the mouth, for
the typical beauty of the carnivorous lips is on a grand scale, while
it exists in very low degree in the beaks of birds; wherever, I say,
these considerations do not interfere, the beauty of the animal form
is in exact proportion to the amount of moral or intellectual virtue
expressed by it; and wherever beauty exists at all, there is some
kind of virtue to which it is owing; as the majesty of the lion's eye
is owing not to its ferocity but to its seriousness and seeming
intellect, and of the lion's mouth to its strength and sensibility, and
not its gnashing of teeth, nor wrinkling in its wrath; and farther
be it noted, that of the intellectual or moral virtues, the moral are
those which are attended with most beauty; so that the gentle eye
of the gazelle is fairer to look upon than the more keen glance of
men, if it be unkind.

Of the parallel effects of expression upon plants there is little to § ii. As also
be noted, as the mere naming of the subject cannot but bring count- p'^"^®*
less illustrations to the mind of every reader: only this, that, as we
saw they were less susceptible of our sympathetic love, owing to
the absence in them of capability of enjoyment, so they are less
open to the affections based upon the expression of moral virtue,
owing to their want of volition; so that even on those of them
which are deadly and unkind we look not without pleasure, the

more because this their evil operation cannot be by them outwardly
expressed, but only by us empirically known; so that of the outward
seemings and expressions of plants, there are few but are in some
way good and therefore beautiful, as of humility, and modesty, and
love of places and things, in the reaching out of their arms, and
clasping of their tendrils; and energy of resistance, and patience of
suffering, and beneficence one toward another in shade and protec-
tion ; and to us also in scents and fruits (for of their healing virtues,
however important to us, there is no more outward sense nor seem-
ing than of their properties mortal or dangerous).

Whence, in fine, looking to the whole kingdom of organic nature,
we find that our full receiving of its beauty depends, first on the
sensibility, and then on the accuracy and faithfulness, of the heart
in its moral judgments; so that it is necessary that we should not
only love all creatures well, but esteem them in that order which
is according to God's laws and not according to our oAvn human
passions and predilections; not looking for swiftness, and strength,
and cunning, rather than for patience and kindness, still less de-
lighting in their animosity and cruelty one toward another: neither,
if it may be avoided, interfering with the working of nature in any
way; nor, when we interfere to obtain service, judging from the
morbid conditions of the animal or vegetable so induced; for we
see every day the power of general taste destroyed in those who are
interested in particular animals, by their delight in the results of
their own teaching, and by the vain straining of curiosity for new
forms such as nature never intended; as the false types for instance,
which we see earnestly sought for by the fanciers of rabbits and
pigeons, and constantly in horses, substituting for the true land
balanced beauty of the free creature some morbid development of a
single power, as of swiftness in the racer, at the expense, in certain
measure, of the animal's healthy constitution and fineness of form;
and so the delight of horticulturists in the spoiling of plants; so that
in all cases we are to beware of such opinions as seem in any way
referable to human pride, or even to the grateful or pernicious in-
flaence of things upon ourselves; and to cast the mind free, and
out of ourselves, humbly, and yet always in that noble position of

pause above the other visible creatures, nearer God than they,
which we autlioritatively hold, thence looking down upon them, and
testing the clearness of our moral vision by the extent, and fulness,
and constancy of our pleasure in the light of God's love as it
embraces them, and the harmony of his holy laws, that for ever
bring mercy out of rapine, and religion out of wrath.

§L The beauty Hitheeto we have observed the conclusions of the Theoretic
of fulfilment of . pi* ?

appointed func- laculty With respect to the relations oi happiness, and oi moi^e or less

But we must pursue the inquiry farther yet, and observe what
impressions of beauty are connected with more or less perfect ful-
filment of the appointed function by different individuals of the
same species. We are now no longer called to pronounce upon
worthiness of occupation or dignity of disposition; but both employ-
ment and capacity being known, and the animal's position and duty
fixed, we have to regard it in that respect alone, comparing it with
other individuals of its species, and to determine how far it worthily
executes its office; whether, if scorpion, it have poison enough, or
if tiger, strength enough, or if dove, innocence enough, to sustain
rightly its place in creation, and come up to the perfect idea of
dove, tiger, or scorpion.

In the first or sympathetic operation of the Theoretic faculty, it
will be remembered, we receive pleasure from the signs of mere
happiness in living things. In the second theoretic operation of
comparing and judging, we constituted ourselves such judges of the
lower creatures as Adam was made by God when they were brought
to him to be named; and we allowed of beauty in them as they
reached, more or less, to that standard of moral perfection by which
we test ourselves. But in the third place we are to come down
again from the judgment seat, and, taking it for granted that every
creature of God is in some way good, and has a duty and specific
operation providentially accessary to the wellbeing of all, w^e are to

I .1

4» t

look, in this faitli, to that employment and nature of each, and to
derive pleasure from their entire perfection and fitness for the duty
they have to do, and in their entire fulfilment of it; and so we are
to take pleasure and find beauty in the magnificent binding together
of the jaws of the ichthyosaurus for catching and holding, and in
the adaptation of the lion for springing, and of the locust for de-
stroying, and of the lark for singing, and in every creature for the
doing of that which God has made it to do. Which faithful
pleasure in the perception of the perfect operation of lower creatures
I have placed last among the perceptions of the Theoretic faculty
concerning them, because it is commonly last acquired, both owing
to the humbleness and trustfulness of heart which it demands, and
because it implies a knowledge of the habits and structure of every
creature, such as we can but imperfectly possess.

The perfect idea of the form and condition in which all the § 2. The twn
properties of the species are fully developed, is called the Ideal of ^vord ideal,
the species. The question of the nature of ideal conception of ^fj^®

species, and of the mode in which the mind arrives at it, has been imagination,
the subject of so much discussion, and source of so much embarrass-
ment, chiefly owing to that unfortunate distinction between Idealism
and Healism which leads most people to imagine the Ideal opposed
to the Real, and therefore false^ that I think it necessary to request
the reader's most careful attention to the following positions.

Any work of art which represents, not a material object, but the
mental conception of a material object, is, in the primary sense of
the word, ideal. That is to say, it represents an idea and not a
thing. Any work of art which represents or realizes a material
object is, in the primary sense of the term, unideal.

Ideal works of art, therefore, in this first sense, represent the
result of an act of imagination, and are good or bad in proportion
to the healthy condition and general power of the imagination whose
acts they represent.

Unideal works of art (the studious production of which is termed
Realism) represent actual existing things, and are good or bad in
proportion to the perfection of the representation.

All entirely bad works of art may be divided into those which,
professing to be imaginative, bear no stamp of imagination, and are

therefore false; and those which, professing to be representative of
matter, miss of the representation, and are therefore nugatory.

It is the habit of most observers to regard art as representative of
matter, and to look only for the entireness of representation; and it
was to this view of art that I limited the arguments of the former
sections of the present work, wherein, having to oppose the con-
clusions of a criticism entirely based upon the realist system, I was
compelled to meet that criticism on its own grounds. But the
greater part of works of art, more especially those devoted to the
expression of ideas of beauty, are the results of the agency of
imagination, their worthiness depending, as above stated, on the
healthy condition of the imagination.

Hence it is necessary for us, in order to arrive at conclusions
respecting the worthiness of such works, to define and examine the
nature of the imaginative faculty, and to determine, first, what are
the signs or conditions of its existence at all; and secondly, what
are the evidences of its healthy and efficient existence, upon which
examination I shall enter in the Second Section of the present
Part.

But there is another sense of the word Ideal besides this, and it
is that WMth which we are here concerned. It is evident that, so
long as we apply the word to that art which represents ideas and
not things, we may use it as truly of the art which represents an
idea of Caliban, and not real Caliban, as of the art which represents
an idea of Antinous, and not real Antinous. For that is as much
imagination which conceives the monster, as which conceives the
man. If, however, Caliban and Antinous be creatures of the same
species, and the form of the one contain not the fully developed
types or characters of the species, while the form of the other pre-
sents the greater part of them, then the latter is said to be a form
more ideal than the other, as a nearer approximation to the general
idea or conception of the species.

Now it is evident that this use of the word Ideal is much less
accurate than the other from which it is derived; for it rests on the
assumption that the assemblage of all the characters of a species in
their perfect development cannot exist but in the imagination. For
if it can actually and in reality exist, it is not right to call it ideal

§4. This last
sense how inac-
curate, yet to
be retained.

or imaginary; it would be better to call it characteristic or general,
and to reserve tlie word Ideal for the results of the operation of the
imagination, either on the perfect or imperfect forms.

Nevertheless, the word Ideal has been so long and universally-
accepted in this sense, that it becomes necessary to continue the use
of it, so onlv that the reader will be careful to observe the distinction

in the sense, according to the subject matter under discussion. At
present then, using it as expressive of the noble generic form which
indicates the full perfection of the creature in all its functions, I
wish to examine how far this perfection exists, or may exist, in
nature, and, if not in nature,, how it is by us discoverable or
imaginable.

It is well, when we wish to arrive at truth, always to take §5. of ideal
familiar instances, wherein the mind is not likely to be biassed by the lower ani-
any elevated associations or favourite theories. Let us ask there-
fore, first, what kind of ideal form may be attributed to a limpet or
an oyster; that is to say, whether all oysters do or do not come up
to the entire notion or idea of an oyster. I apprehend that, of
those which are of full size and healthy condition, there will be
found many which fulfil the conditions of an oyster in every respect;
and that so perfectly, that we could not, by combining the features
of two or more together, produce a more perfect oyster than any
that Ave see. I suppose, also, that out of a number of healthy fish,
birds, or beasts, of the same species, it would not be easy to select
an individual as superior to all the rest; neither, by comparing two
or more of the nobler examples together, to arrive at the con-
ception of a form superior to that of either; but that, though the
accidents of more abundant food or more fitting habitation may
induce among them some varieties of size, strength, and colour, yet
the entire generic form would be presented by many, neither would
any art be able to add to or diminish from it.

It is, therefore, hardly right to use the word Ideal of the gencjric § 6. in what
forms of these creatures, of which we see actual examples; but if
M'e are to use it, then be it distinctly understood that its ideality
consists in the full development of all the powers and properties of
the creature as such, and is inconsistent with accidental or imperfect
developments, and even wath great variation from average size; the

ideal size being neither gigantic nor diminutive, but tlie utmost
grandeur and entireness of proportion at a certain point above the
mean size; for as more individuals always fall short of generic size
than rise above it, the generic is above the average or mean size.
And this perfection of the creature invariably involves the utmost
possible degree of all those properties of beauty, both typical and
vital, which it is appointed to possess.

Let us next observe the conditions of ideality in vegetables. Out
of a large number of primroses or violets, I apprehend that, although
one or two might be larger than all the rest, the greater part would
be very sufficient primroses and violets; and that we could, by no
study nor combination of violets, conceive of a better violet than
many in the bed. And so generally of the blossoms and separate
members of all vegetables.

But among the entire forms of the complex vegetables, as of oak-
trees, for instance, there exists very large and constant difference;
some being what we hold to be fine oaks, as in parks and places
where they are taken care of, and have their own way, and some are
but poor and mean oaks, which have had no one to take care of
them, but have been obliged to maintain themselves.

That which we have to determine is, whether ideality be pre-
dicable of the fine oaks only, or whether the poor and mean oaks also
may be considered as ideal, that is, coming up to the conditions of
oak, and the general notion of oak.

Now there is this difference between the positions held in creation
by animals and plants, and thence in the dispositions with which
plants and ani- regard them; that the animals, being for the most part loco-
motive, are capable both of living where they choose, and of ob-
taining what food they want, and of fulfilling all the conditions
necessary to their health and perfection. I'or which reason they
are answerable for such health and perfection, and we should be
displeased and hurt, if we did not find it in one individual as well
as another.

§ 8, The dif-
ference of posi-
tion between

But the case is evidently different with plants. They are intended
fixedly to occupy many places comparatively unfit for them, and to
fill up all the spaces where greenness, and coolness, and ornament,
and oxygen are wanted, and that with very little reference to their

comfort or convenience. Now it would be hard upon tlie plant, if,
after being tied to a particular spot, where it is indeed much
wanted, and is a great blessing, but where it lias enough to do to
live; whence it cannot move to obtain what it needs or likes, but
must stretch its unfortunate arms here and there for bare breath
and light, and split its way among rocks, and grope for sustenance
in unkindly soil; it would be hard upon the plant, I say, if under
all these disadvantages, it were made answerable for its appearance,
and found fault with because it was not a fine plant of the kind.
And it seems to be that., in order that no unkind comparisons may § 9. Admits of
be drawn between one and another, there are not appointed to idea/o/tiic^*^
plants the fixed number, position, and proportion of members which former,
are ordained in animals (and any variation from which in these is
unpardonable), but a continually varying number and position, even
among the more freely growing examples, admitting therefore all
kinds of license to those which have enemies to contend with; and
that without in any way detracting from their dignity and per-
fection.

So then there is in trees no perfect form which can be fixed upon
or reasoned out as ideal; but that is always an ideal oak which,
liowever poverty-stricken, or hunger-pinched, or tempest-tortured,
is yet seen to have done, under its appointed circumstances, all that
could be expected of oak.

The ideal, therefore, of the park oak is that which was described
in the conclusion of the former part of this work; full size, united
terminal curve, equal and symmetrical range of branches on each
side. The wild oak may be anything, gnarled, and leaning, and
shattered, and rock-encumbered, and yet ideal, so only that, amidst
all its misfortunes, it maintain the dignity of oak; and, indeed, I
look upon this kind of tree as more ideal than the other, in so far as
by its efforts and struggles, more of its nature, enduring power,
patience in waiting for, and ingenuity in obtaining, what it needs, is
brought out, and so more of the essence of oak exhibited, than
under more fortunate conditions.

And herein, then, we at last find the cause of that fact which we § lo. ideal form
have twice already noted, that the exalted or seemingly improved destroyed'by
condition, whether of plant or animal, induced by human inter- ci^itivation.

ference^ is not the true and artistical ideal of it.* It has been well
shown bj Dr. Herbert that many plants are found alone on a
certain soil or subsoil in a wild state, not because such soil is
favourable to them, but because they alone are capable of existing
on it, and because all dangerous rivals are by its inhospitality
removed. Now if we withdraw the plant from this position, which
it hardly endures, and supply it with the earth, and maintain about
it the temperature, that it delights in; withdrawing from it, at the
same time, all rivals which, in such conditions, nature would have
thrust upon it, we shall indeed obtain a magnificently developed
example of the plant, colossal in size, and splendid in organization;
but we shall utterly lose in it that moral ideal which is dependent
on its right fulfilment of its appointed functions. It was intended
and created by the Deity for the covering of those lonely spots
where no other plant could live; it has been thereto endowed with
courage, and strength, and capacities of endurance; its character
and glory are not therefore in the gluttonous and idle feeding of
its own over-luxuriance, at the expense of other creatures utterly
destroyed and rooted out for its good alone, but in its right doing
of its hard duty, and forward climbing into those spots of forlorn
hope where it alone can bear witness to the kindness and presence
of the Spirit that cutteth out rivers among the rocks, as He covers
the valleys with corn: and there, in its vanward place, and only
there, where nothing is withdrawn for it, nor hurt by it, and where
nothing can take part of its honour, nor usurp its throne, are its
strength, and fairness, and price, and goodness in the sight of God
to be truly esteemed.

The first time that I saw the Soldanella alpina, before spoken
of, it was growing, of magnificent size, on a sunny Alpine pasture,
among bleating of sheep and lowing of cattle, associated with

§ 11. Instance
in the Solda-
nella and Ha-
il uncul us.

' I speak not here of those conditions of vegetation which have especial reference to
man, as of seeds and fmits, whose sweetness and fai-ina seem in great measure given,
not for the plant's sake, but for his, and to which therefore the interraption in the
harmony of creation of which he was the cause is extended, and their sweetness and
larger measure of good to be obtained only by his redeeming labour. His curse has
fallen on the com and the vine ; and the wild barley misses of its fulness, that he may cat
bread by the sweat of his brow.

a profusion of Geum montanum, and Ranunculus pyrengeus. I
noticed it only because new to me, nor perceived any peculiar
beauty in its cloven flower. Some days after, I found it alone,
among the rack of the higher clouds, and howling of glacier winds;
and, as I described it, piercing through an edge of avalanche,
which, in its retiring, had left the new ground brown and lifeless,
and as if burned by recent fire; the plant was poor and feeble,
and seemingly exhausted with its efforts, but it was then that I
comprehended its ideal character, and saw its noble function and
order of glory among the constellations of the earth.

The Ranunculus glacialis might perhaps by cultivation be
blanched from its wan and corpse-like paleness to purer white, and
won to more branched and lofty development of its ragged leaves.
But the ideal of the plant is to be found only in the last, loose
stones of the moraine, alone there; wet Avith the cold, unkindly
drip of the glacier water, and trembling as the loose and steep
dust to which it clings yield ever and anon, and shudders and
crumbles away from about its root.

And if it be asked how this conception of the utmost beauty of § 12. The boau-
ideal form is consistent with what we formerly argued respecting feiidty^how^"'^
the pleasantness of the appearance of felicity in the creature, let it such idea\
be observed, and for ever held, that the right and true happiness
of every creature is in this very discharge of its function, and in
those efforts by which its strength and inherent energy are de-
veloped ; and that the repose of which we also spoke as necessary
to all beauty, is, as was then stated, repose not of inanition, nor of
luxury, nor of irresolution, but the repose of magnificent energy
and being ; in action, the calmness of trust and determination ; in
rest, the consciousness of duty accomplished and of victory won;
and this repose and this felicity can take place as well in the midst
of trial and tempest, as beside the waters of comfort; they perish
only when the creature is either unfaithful to itself, or is afflicted
by circumstances unnatural and malignant to its being, and for the
contending with which it was neither fitted nor ordained. Hence
that rest which is indeed glorious is of the chamois couched
breathless on his granite bed, not of the stalled ox over his fodder;
and that happiness which is indeed beautiful is in the bearing of

those trial tests which are appointed for the proving of every
creature, whether it be good, or whether it be evil; and in the
fulfilment to the uttermost of every command it has received, and
the out-carrying to the uttermost of every power and gift it has
gotten from its God.

Therefore the task of the painter, in his pursuit of ideal form, is
to attain accurate knowledge, so far as may be in his power, of
the peculiar virtues, duties, and characters of every species of
being; down even to the stone, for there is an ideality of stones
according to their kind, an ideality of granite and slate and marble,
and it is in the utmost and most exalted exhibition of such indi-
vidual character, order, and use, that all ideality of art consists.
The more cautious he is in assigning the right species of moss to
its favourite trunk, and the right kind of weed to its necessary
stone; in marking the definite and characteristic leaf, blossom,
seed, fracture, colour, and inward anatomy of everything, the more
truly ideal his work becomes. All confusion of species, all careless
rendering of character, all unnatural and arbitrary association, are
vulgar and unideal in proportion to their degree.

It is to be noted, however, that nature sometimes in a measure
herself conceals these generic differences, and that when she dis-
plays them it is commonly on a scale too small for human hand to
follow: the pursuit and seizure of the generic differences in their
concealment, and the display of them on a larger and more palpa-
ble scale, is one of the wholesome and healthy operations of the
imagination of which we are presently to speak.'

Generic differences, being often exhibited by art in different
manner from that of their natural occurrence, are, in this respect,
more strictly and truly ideal in art than in reality.

§ 14. How con-
nected with the
Imaginative
faculties.

This only remains to be noted, that, of all creatures whose
existence involves birth, progress, and dissolution, ideality is pre-
dicable all through their existence, so that they be perfect with
reference to their supposed period of being. Thus there is an ideal
of infancy, of youth, of old age, of death, and of decay. But when
the ideal form of the species is spoken of or conceived in general

§ 15, Ideality,
how belonging
to ages and
conditions.

terms, the form is understood to be of that period when the generic
attributes are perfectly developed, and previous to the commence-
ment of their decline. At which period all the characters of vital
and typical beauty are commonly most concentrated in them,
though the arrangement and proportion of these characters vary
at different periods; youth having more of the vigorous beauty,
and age of the reposing; youth of typical outward fairness, and
age of expanded and setherialized moral expression ; the babe,
again in some measure atoning in gracefulness for its want of
strength; so that the balanced glory of the creature continues in
solemn interchange, perhaps even

" Filling more and more with crystal light,
As pensive evening deepens into night."

Hitherto, however, we have confined ourselves to the examination
of ideal form in the lower animals, and we have found that, to
arrive at it, no exertion of fancy is required in combining forms,
but only simple choice among those naturally presented, together
Avith careful study of the habits of the creatures. I fear we shall
arrive at a very different conclusion, in considering the ideal form
of man.

Having thus passed gradually tlirough all the orders and fields of
creation^ and traversed that goodlj line of God's happy creatures
who " leap not, but express a feast, where all the guests sit close,
and nothing wants," without finding any deficiency which human
invention might supply, nor any harm which human interference
might mend, we come at last to set ourselves face to face with
ourselves; expecting that in creatures made after the image of
God, we are to find comeliness and completion more exquisite than
in the fowls of the air and the things that pass through the paths
of the sea.

But behold now a sudden change from all former experience.
No longer among the individuals of the race is there equality or
likeness, a distributed fairness and fixed type visible in each; but
evil diversity, and terrible stamp of various degradation; features
seamed by sickness, dimmed by sensuality, convulsed by passion,
pinched by poverty, shadoAved by sorrow, branded with remorse;
bodies consumed with sloth, broken down by labour, tortured by
disease, dishonoured in foul uses; intellects without power, hearts
without hope, minds earthly and devilish; our bones full of the
sin of our youth, the heaven revealing our iniquity, the earth
rising up against us, the roots dried up beneath, and the branch
cut off above; well for us only, if, after beholding this our natural
face in a glass, we desire not straightway to forget what manner
of men we be.

Herein there is at last something, and too much for that short-
stopping intelligence and dull perception of ours to accomplish.

§ 1. Condition
of the human
creature en-
tirely different
from that of the
lower animals.

§ 2. What room
here for ideali-
zation.

wlietlier in earnest fact, or in the seeking for the outward image of
beauty:—to undo the devil's work; to restore to the body the
grace and the power which inherited disease has destroyed; to
restore to the spirit the purity, and to the intellect the grasp, that
they had in Paradise. Now, first of all, this work, be it observed,
is in no respect a work of imagination. Wrecked we are, and
nearly all to pieces; but that little good by which we are to redeem
ourselves is to be got out of the old wreck, beaten about and full
of sand though it be; and not out of that desert island of pride on
which the devils split first, and we after them: and so the only
restoration of the body that we can reach is not to be coined out of
our fancies, but to be collected out of such uninjured and bright
vestiges of the old seal as we can find and set together : and the
ideal of the good and perfect soul, as it is seen in the features, is
not to be reached by imagination, but by the seeing and reaching
forth of the better part of the soul to that of which it must first
know the sweetness and goodness in itself, before it can much
desire, or rightly find, the signs of it in others.

I say much desire and rightly find, because there is not any soul
so sunk as not in some measure to feel the impression of mental
beauty in the human features, and detest in others its own likeness,
and in itself despise that which of itself it has made.

Now, of the ordinary process by which the realization of ideal § 3. How the
bodily form is reached, there is explanation enough in all treatises the bodily ideal
on art, and it is so far well comprehended that I need not stay long reached,
to consider it. So far as the sight and knowledge of the human
form, of the purest race, exercised from infancy constantly, but not
excessively, in all exercises of dignity, not in straining dexterities,
but in natural exercises of running, casting, or riding; practised in
endurance, not of extraordinary hardship, for that hardens and
degrades the body, but of natural hardship, vicissitudes of winter
and summer, and cold and heat, yet in a climate where none of
these are severe; surrounded also by a certain degree of right
luxury, so as to soften and refine the forms of strength; so far as
the sight of all this could render the mental intelligence of what is
noble in human form so acute as to be able to abstract and combine,
from the best examples so produced, that which was most perfect

in each, so far the Greek conceived and attained the ideal of
humanity: and on the Greek modes of attaining it, chiefly dwell
those writers whose opinions on this subject I have collected;
wholly losing sight of what seems to me the most important branclv
of the inquiry, namely, the influence, for good or evil, of the mind
upon the bodily shape, the wreck of the mind itself, and the modes
by which we may conceive of its restoration.

The visible operation of the mind upon the body may be classed
under three heads.

First, the operation of the intellectual powers upon the features,
in the fine cutting and chiselling of them, and removal from them
of signs of sensuality and sloth, by which they are blunted and
deadened; and substitution of energy and intensity for vacancy
and insipidity (by which wants alone the faces of many fair women
are utterly spoiled and rendered valueless); and by the keenness
given to the eye and fine moulding and development to the brow,
of which effects Sir Charles Bell has well described the desirableness
and opposition to brutal types; only this he has not sufliciently
observed, that there are certain virtues of the intellect in measure
inconsistent with each other, as perhaps great subtlety with great
comprehensiveness, and high analytical with high imaginative
power: or that at least, if consistent and compatible, their signs
upon the features are not the same, so that the outward form cannot
express both, without in a measure expressing neither; and so
there are certain separate virtues of the outward form correspondent
with the more constant employment or more prevailing capacity of
the brain, as the piercing keenness, or open and reflective compre-
hensiveness, of the eye and forehead : and that all these virtues of
form are ideal, only those the most so which are the signs of the
worthiest powers of intellect, though which these may be, we will
not at present stay to inquire.

Secondly, the operation of the moral feelings conjointly with the
intellectual powers on both the features and form. Now, the
operation of the right moral feelings on the intellect is always for
the good of the latter; for it is not possible that selfishness should
reason rightly in any respect, but must be blind in its estimation of
the worthiness of all things; neither anger, for that overpowers the

§ 4, Modifica-
tions of the
bodily ideal ow-
ing to influence
of mind. First,
of Intellect.

§5. Secondly,
of the Moral
Feelings.

reason or outcries it; neither sensuality, for that overgrows and
chokes it; neither agitation, for that has no time to compare things
together; neither enmity, for that must be unjust; neither fear,
for that exaggerates all things; neither cunning and deceit, for that
which is voluntarily untrue will soon be unwittingly so; but the
great reasoners are self-command, and trust unagitated, and deep-
looking Love, and Faith, which as she is above Reason, so she
best holds the reins of it from her high seat; so that they err
grossly who think of the right development even of the intellectual
type as possible, unless we look to higher sources of beauty first.
Nevertheless, though in their operation upon them the moral feelings
are thus elevatory of the mental faculties, yet in their conjunction
with them they seem to occupy, in their own fulness, such space
as to absorb and overshadow all else; so that, the simultaneous
exercise of both being in a sort impossible, we occasionally find the
moral part in fall development and action, without corresponding
expansion of the intellect (though never without healthy condition
of it), as in the condition described by "Wordsworth,

only, if we look far enough, we shall perhaps find that it is not
intelligence itself, but the immediate act and effort of a laborious,
struggling, and imperfect intellectual faculty, with which high
moral emotion is inconsistent; and though we cannot, while we
feel deeply, reason shrewdly, yet I doubt if, except when we feel
deeply, we can ever comprehend fully; so that it is only the
climbing and mole-like piercing, and not the sitting upon their
central throne, nor emergence into light, of the intellectual faculties,
which the full heart feeling allows not. Hence, therefore, in the
indications of the countenance, they are only the hard cut lines,
and rigid settings, and wasted hollows, speaking of past effort and
painfulness of mental application, which are inconsistent with ex-
pression of moral feeling, for all these are of infelicitous augury;
but not the full and serene development of habitual command in
the look, and solemn thought in the brow: only these, in their
unison with the signs of emotion, become softened and gradually

confounded with a serenity and authority of nobler origin. But of
the sweetness which that higher serenity (of happiness), and the
dignity which that higher authority (of divine law, and not human
reason) can and must stamp on the features, it would be futile to
speak here at length; for I suppose that both are acknowledged on
all hands, and that there is not any beauty but theirs to which
men pay long obedience: at all events, if not by sympathy dis-
covered, it is not in words explicable with what divine lines and
lights the exercise of godliness and charity will mould and gild the
hardest and coldest countenance, neither to what darkness their
departure will consign the loveliest. For there is not any virtue
the exercise of which, even momentarily, will not impress a new
fairness upon the features: neither on them only, but on the whole
body, both the intelligence and the moral faculties have operation ;
for even all the movements and gestures, however slight, are
different in their modes according to the mind that governs them ;
and on the gentleness and decision of just feeling there follows a
grace of action, and, through continuance of this, a grace of form,
which by no discipline may be taught or attained.

The third point to be considered with respect to the corporeal
expression of mental character is, that there is a certain period of
the soul-culture when it begins to interfere with some of the cha-
racters of typical beauty belonging to the bodily frame, the stirring
of the intellect wearing down the flesh, and the moral enthusiasm
burning its "vs^ay out to heaven, through the emaciation of the
earthen vessel; and that there is, in this indication of subduing of
the mortal by the immortal part, an ideal glory of perhaps a purer
and higher range than that of the more perfect material form. We
conceive, I think, more nobly of the weak presence of Paul, than
of the fair and ruddy countenance of Daniel.

Now, be it observed that, in our statement of these three direc-
tions of mental influence, we have several times been compelled to
stop short of definite conclusions, owing to the inconsistency, first,
of different kinds of intellect with each other; secondly, of the moral
faculties with the intellectual (and if we had separately examined
the moral emotions, we should have found certain inconsistencies
among them also); and again, of the soul-culture generally with the

§ 6. What beau-
ty is bestowed
by tliem.

§ 7. How the
Soul-culture in-
terferes harm-
fully with the
bodily ideal.

§ 8. The hicon-
sistency among
the effects of
the mental vir-
tues on the
form.

bodily perfections. Such inconsistencies we should find in the per-
fections of no other animal. The strength or swiftness of the Dog
is not inconsistent with his sagacity, nor is bodily labour in the
Ant and Bee destructive of their acuteness of instinct. And this
peculiarity of relation among the perfections of man is no result of
his fall or sinfulness, but an evidence of his greater nobility, and
of the goodness of God towards him. For the individuals of each § 9. is a sign o
race of lower animals, being not intended to hold among each other pose towards"
those relations of charity which are the privilege of humanity, are
not adapted to each other's assistance, admiration, or support, by
differences of power and function. But the Love of the human race
is increased by their individual differences, and the Unity of the
creature, as before we saw of all unity, made perfect by each having
something to bestow and to receive, bound to the rest by a thou-
sand various necessities and various gratitudes; humility in each
rejoicing to admire in his fellow that which he finds not in himself,
and each being in some respect the complement of his race. ^
Therefore, in investigating the signs of the ideal or perfect type of
humanity, we must not presume on the singleness of that type; and
yet, on the other hand, Ave must cautiously distinguish between
differences conceivably existing in a perfect state, and differences
resulting from immediate and present operation of the Adamite
curse. Of which the former are differences that bind, and the
latter that separate. For although we can suppose the ideal or

' " In another sense still the human race may be considered as one man only. While
each animal begins anew the work of its species, each human being does not begin anew
the work of mankind. He continues it, and cannot but continue it. He receives, on
his entrance into life, the heritage of all ages—he is the son of the whole human race.
Thousands of causes, thousands of persons have co-operated since the beginning of time
to make him what he is. Man, isolated either in time or space, is not traly man.
Absolute solitude transforms him into an animal, and much less than an animal, since
he wants its infallible instincts, or has only in their stead a powerless reason, indolent,
and as it were, shrouded. A man, then, does not come up to his type, does not per-
fectly exist, without his race; it is the race that makes him a man. And when we
pictm-e to ourselves a man existing by himself as man, and with all the attributes of his
race, we dream ; since a man purely individual and isolated is an impossibility. It is
not thus in any other department of the animal kingdom. A whole does not exist any-
where else as in our race ; but is it not wonderful that true individuality exists only in
the same race also, and that the sole being whose nature is developed fully only as one
of a race is also the only one who manifests the sentiment of liberty, morality, and the
consciousness implied in the word Me ?"— Vinet's (^Alex.) Vital Christianity.

perfect liuman heart, and the perfect human intelligence, equally
adapted to receive every right sensation, and pursue every order of
truth, yet as it is appointed for some to be in authority and others
in obedience, some in solitary functions and others in relative ones,
some to receive and others to give, some to teach and some to
discover; and as all these varieties of office are not only conceivable
as existing in a perfect state of man, but seem almost to be implied
by it, and at any rate cannot be done away with but by a total
change of his constitution and dependencies, of which the imagina-
tion can take no hold; so there are habits and capacities of ex-
pression induced by these various offices, which admit of many
separate ideals of equal perfection. There is an ideal of Authority,
of Judgment, of Affection, of Reason, and of Faith, neither can any
rence of Ideals, combination of these ideals be attained; not that the just judge is
to be supposed incapable of affection, nor the king incapable of
obedience, but as it is impossible that any essence short of the
Divine should at the same instant be equally receptive of all
emotions, those emotions which, by right and order have the most
usual victory, both leave the stamp of their habitual presence on
the body, and render the individual more and more susceptible of
them in proportion to the frequency of their prevalent recurrence.
Still less can the differences of age and sex, though seemingly of
more finite influence, be banished from any human conception.
David, ruddy and of a fair countenance, with the brook stone of
deliverance in his hand, is not more ideal than David leaning on
the old age of Barzillai, returning chastened to his kingly home.
And they who are as the angels of God in heaven, yet cannot be
conceived as so assimilated that their different experiences and
affections upon earth shall then be forgotten and effectless; the
child taken early to his place cannot be imagined to wear there such
a body, nor to have such thoughts, as the glorified apostle who has
finished his course and kept the faith on earth. And so whatever
perfections and likeness of love we may attribute to either the tried
or the crowned creatures, there is the difference of the stars in
glory among them yet; differences of original gifts, tliough not of
occupying till their Lord come, different dispensations of trial and
of trust, of sorrow and support, both in their own inward, variable

§ 10. Conse-
quent separa-
tion and difFe

hearts^ and in tlieir positions of exposure or of peace, of the gourd
shadow and the smiting sun, of calling at heat of day or eleventh
hour, of the house unroofed by faith, or the clouds opened by
revelation; differences in warning, in mercies, in sicknesses, in
signs, in time of calling to account; alike only they all are, by that
which is not of them, but the gift of God's unchangeable mercy.
" I will give unto this last even as unto thee."

Hence, then, it will follow, that we must not determinedly banish § 11. The effects

ideal, evervthins which can be ultimately traced to the Adamite distinguished
' _ ° ^ _ from signs of

Fall for its cause, but only the immediate operation and presence its immediate
of the degradmg power of sin. For there is not any part of our
nature, nor can there be through eternity, uninfluenced or unaffected
by the fall, and that not in any way of degradation, for the renew-
ing in the divinity of Christ is a nobler condition than that of
Paradise; and yet throughout eternity it must imply and refer to
the disobedience, and the corrupt state of sin and death, and the
suffering of Christ himself, which can we conceive of any redeemed
soul as for an instant forgetting, or as remembering without sorrow ?
Neither are the alternations of joy and such sorrow as by us is in-
conceivable, being only as it were a softness and silence in the pulse
of an infinite felicity, inconsistent with the state even of the unfallen;
for the angels, who rejoice over repentance, camiot but feel an un-
comprehended pain as they try and try again in vain, whether they
may not warm hard hearts with the brooding of their kind wings.
So that we have not to banish from the ideal countenance the §12. Which
evidences of sorrow, nor of past suffering, nor even of past and toS^bSshS
conquered sin, but only the immediate operation of any evil, or tlie
immediate coldness and hollowness of any good emotion. And
hence in that contest before noted, between the body and the soul,
we may often have to indicate the body as far conquered and out-
worn, and with signs of hard struggle and bitter pain upon it; and
yet without ever diminishing the purity of its ideal: and since it is
not in the power of any human imagination to reason out or conceive
the countless modifications of experience, suffering, and separated
feeling, which have modelled and written their indelible images, in
various order, upon every human countenance, so no right ideal can

be reached bj any combination of feature nor by any moulding and
melting of individual beauties together, and still less without model
or example at all; but there is a perfect ideal to he wrought out of
every face around us that has on its forehead the writing and the
seal of the angel ascending from the East \ by the earnest study
and penetration of the written history thereupon, and the banishing
of the blots and stains, wherein we still see, in all that is human,
the visible and instant operation of unconquered Sin.

Now I see not how any of the steps of the argument by which we
have arrived at this conclusion can be evaded, and yet it would be
difficult to state anything more directly opposite to the general
teaching and practice of artists. It is usual to hear portraiture
opposed to the pursuit of ideality, and yet we find that no face can
be ideal which is not a portrait. Of this general principle, however,
there are certain modifications which we must presently state; but
let us first pursue it a little farther and deduce its practical conse-
quences.

§ 13. Ideal form
is only to be
obtained by
portraiture.

These are, first, that the pursuit of idealism in humanity, as of
idealism in lower nature, can be successful only when followed
through the most constant, patient, and humble rendering of actual
models, accompanied with that earnest mental study of each, which
can interpret all that is written upon it, disentangle the hieroglyphics
of its sacred history, rend the veil of the bodily temple, and rightly
measure the relations of good and evil contending within it for
mastery ^; that everything done without such study must be shal-
low and contemptible; that generalization or combination of indi-
vidual character will end less in the mending than the losing of it,
and, except in certain histances of which we shall presently take
note, is valueless and vapid, even if it escape being painful from
its want of truth. And that habit of the old and great painters of
introducing portrait into all their highest works, I look to, not as
error in them, but as the very source and root of their superiority
in all things; for they were too great and too humble not to see in
every face about them that which was above them, and which no
fancies of theirs could match nor take place of; wherefore we find

§ 14. Instances
among the
greater of the
Ideal Masters.

the custom of portraiture constant with them, both portraiture of
study and for purposes of analysis, as with Leonardo; and actual,
professed, serviceable, hardworking portraiture of the men of their
time, as with RaflPaelle, and Titian, and Tintoret; and portraiture
of love, as with Fra Bartolomeo of Savonarola, and Simon Memmi
of Petrarch, and Giotto of Dante, and Gentile BelKni of a beloved
imagination of Dandolo, and with Raffaelle constantly; and por-
traiture for the sake of the nobility of personal character even in
their most imaginative v/orks, as was the practice of Ghirlandajo
perpetually, and Masaccio and Raffaelle, and manifestly of the men
of highest and purest ideal purpose, as again, Giotto, and in his
characteristic monkish heads, Angelico, and John Bellini (note
especially the St. Christopher at the side of that mighty picture of
St. Jerome, at Yenice): and so of all: which practice had indeed
a perilous tendency among men of debased mind, who used models
such as and where they ought not; or among men who looked not
at their models with intellectual or loving penetration, but took the
outside of them, or perhaps took the evil and left the good, as even
Titian has done in that academy study at Venice which is called a
St. John, and all workers whatsoever that I know of, after Raffaelle's
time, as Guido and the Caracci, and such others; but it is never-
theless the necessary and sterling basis of all ideal art, neither has
any great man ever been able to do without it, nor dreamed of
doing without it even to the close of his days.

And therefore there is not any greater sign of want of vitality § 15. Evil re-
and hopefulness in the schools of the present day, than that unhappy JJle^atShi
prettiness and sameness under which they mask, or rather for which modern times,
they barter, in their lentil thirst, all the birthright and power of
nature; which prettiness, wrought out and spun fine in the study,
till it hardly betters the blocks on Avhich dresses and hair are tried
in barbers' windows and milliners' books, cannot but be revolting
to any man who has his eyes, even in a measure, open to the
divinity of the immortal seal on the common features that he meets
in the highways and hedges hourly and momentarily, outreaching
all efforts of conception as all power of realization, were it Raffaelle's
three times over, even when the glory of the wedding garment is
not there.

If then individual humanity be taken as the basis of our con-
ception, its right ideal is to be reached, we have asserted, onlj by
the banishment of the immediate signs of sin upon the countenance
and body. How, therefore, are the signs of sin to be known and
separated ?

No intellectual operation is here of any avail. There is not any
reasoning by which the evidences of depravity are to be traced
in movements of muscle or forms of feature; there is not any
knowledge, nor experience, nor diligence of comparison that can
be of avail. Here, as throughout the operation of the Theoretic
faculty, the perception is altogether moral, an instinctive love and
§ 16. Ideal form clinging to the lines of light. Nothing but love can read the letters,
to be reached j^Q^i^i^g but Sympathy catch the sound; there is no pure passion

that can be understood or painted except by pureness of heart; the
foul or blunt feeling will see itself in everything, and set down
blasphemies; it will see Baalzebub in the casting out of devils; it
will find its God of flies in every alabaster box of precious ointment.
The indignation of zeal toward God it will take for anger against
man; faith and veneration it will miss, as not comprehending;
charity it will turn into lust; compassion into pride; every virtue
it will go over against, like Shimei, casting dust. But the right
Christian mind will, in like manner, find its own image wherever
it exists ; it will seek for what it loves, and draw it out of all dens
and caves, and it will believe in its being, often when it cannot see
it, and always turn away its eyes from beholding vanity; and so
it will lie lovingly over all the faults and rough places of the human
heart, as the snow from heaven does over the hard, and black, and
broken mountain rocks, following their forms truly, and yet catching
light for them to make them fair, and that must be a steep and
unkindly crag indeed which it cannot cover. ;

Now of this spirit there will always be little enough in the
world, and it cannot be given nor taught by men, and so it is of
little use to insist on it farther; only I may note some practical
points respecting the ideal treatment of human form, which may
be of some use. There is not the face, I have said, which the
painter may not make ideal if he choose; but that subtle feeling
which shall find out all of good that there is in any given coun-

§ 17. Practical
principles de-
ducible.

tenance is not, except by concern for otlier things than art, to be
acquired. But certain broad indications of evil there are which
the bluntest feeling may perceive, and which the habit of dis-
tinguishing and casting out would both ennoble the schools of art,
and lead, in time, to greater acuteness of perception with respect
to the less explicable characters of soul beauty.

Those signs of , evil which are commonly most manifest on the § 18. Expres-
human features are roughly divisible into these four kinds; the structive'^o/
signs of pride, of sensuality, of fear, and of cruelty. Any one of fg^^prWe'^'^*^'^'
which will destroy the ideal character of the countenance and body.

Now of these, the first, Pride, is perhaps the most destructive of
all the four, seeing it is the undermost and original vice of all: and
it is base also from the necessary foolishness of it, because at its
best, when grounded on a just estimation of our own elevation or
superiority above certain others, it cannot but imply that onr eyes
look downward only, and have never been raised above our own
measure; for there is not the man so lofty in his standing or
capacity, but he must be humble in thinking of the cloud habitation
and far sight of the angelic intelligences above him; and in per-
ceiving what infinity there is of things he cannot know, nor even
reach unto, as it stands compared with that little body of things he
can reach, and of which nevertheless he can altogether understand
not one; not to speak of that wicked and fond attributing of such
excellency as he may have to himself, and thinking of it as his own
getting, which is the real essence and criminality of Pride; nor of
those viler forms of it, founded on false estimation of things beneath
us and irrational contemning of them; but, taken at its best, it is
still base to that degree that there is no grandeur of feature which
it cannot destroy and make despicable, so that the first step towards
the ennobling of any face is the ridding it of its vanity; to which

aim there cannot be anything more contrary than that principle of § 19. Portrait*

to be the expression of vanity throughout, in face and in all cir-
cumstances of accompaniment; tending constantly to insolence of
attitude, and levity and haughtiness of expression, and worked out
farther in mean accompaniments of worldly splendour and possession;
together with hints or proclamations of what the person has done

or supposes himself to have done, which, if known, it is gratuitous
in the portrait to exhibit, and, if unknown, it is insolent in the
portrait to proclaim: whence has arisen such a school of portraiture
as must make the people of the nineteenth century the shame of
their descendants, and the hutt of all time. To which practices
are to be opposed both the glorious severity of Holbein, and the
mighty and simple modesty of RafFaelle, Titian, Giorgione, and
Tintoret, with whom armour does not constitute the warrior,
neither silk the dame. And from what feeling the dignity of that
portraiture arose is best traceable at Venice, where vre find their
victorious doges painted neither in the toil of battle nor the triumph
of return; nor set forth with thrones and curtains of state, but
kneeling, always crownless, and returning thanks to God for his
help ; or as priests interceding for the nation in its affliction. But
this feeling and its results have been so well traced by llio that I
need not spealt of it farther.

That second destroyer of ideal form, the appearance of Sensual
character, though not less fatal in its operation on modern art, is
more difficult to trace, owing to its peculiar subtlety. For it is not
possible to say by what minute differences the right conception of
the human form is separated from that which is luscious and foul:
for the root of all is in the love and seeking of the painter, who,
if of impure and feeble mind, will cover all that he touches with
clay staining, as Bandinelli puts a scent of common flesh about his
marble Christ, and as many, whom I will not here name, among
moderns; but if of mighty mind or pure, may pass through all
places of foulness, and none will stay upon him, as Michael Angelo;
or he will baptize all things and wash them with pure water, as
our own Stothard. Now, so far as this power is dependent on the
seeking of the artist, and is only to be seen in the work of good
and spiritually-minded men, it is vain to attempt to teach or illus-
trate it; neither is it here the place to show how it belongs to the
representation of the mental image of things, instead of things them-
selves, of which we are to speak in treating of the imagination;

but thus much may here be noted of broad, practical principle, that § 21. How con-

the purity of flesh painting depends, in very considerable measure, pu^ty ofeoioITr",

rest, compared with them, seem striving how best to illustrate
Spenser's stanza in its second clause —

" Of all God's works which doe this worlde adorn,
There is no one more faire, and excellent
Than is man's body both for power and forme
Whiles it is kept in sober government.
But none than it more foul and indecent
Distempered through misrule and passions bace."

§ 24. Degrees
of descent in
this respect:
Rubens, Cor-
reggio, and
Guido;

Of these last, however, with whom ideality is lost, there are some
worthier than others, according to that measure of colour they
reach, and power thej possess. Much may be forgiven to Rubens;
less, as I think, to Correggio, who has more of inherent sensuality,
wrought out with attractive and luscious refinement, and that alike
in all subjects; as in the Madonna of the Incoronazione, over the
high altar of San Giovanni at Parma, of which the head and upper
portion of the figure, now preserved in the library, might serve as
a model of attitude and expression to a ballet figurante ^: and again
in the lascivious St. Catherine of the Giorno, and in the Charioted
Diana (both at Parma), not to name any of his works of aim more
definitely evil. Beneath which again will fall the works devoid
alike of art and decency, as that Susannah of Guido, in our own
gallery; and so we may descend to the absolute clay of the
moderns, excepting always Etty; only noticing in all how much
of what is evil and base in subject or tendency, is redeemed by
what is pure and right in hue; so that I do not assert that the
purpose and object of many of the grander painters of the nude, as
of Titian for instance, were always elevated, but only that we, who
cannot paint the lamp of fire within the earthen pitcher, must take
§ 25. And mo- other weapons in our left hands. And it is to be noted also, that,
in climates where the body can be more openly and frequently
visited by sun and weather, the nude both comes to be regarded
in a way more grand and pure, as necessarily awakening no ideas
of base kind (as pre-eminently with the Greeks), and also from
that exposure receives a firmness and sunny elasticity very different
from the silky softness of the clothed nations of the north, where

' The Madonna turns her back to Christ, and bends her head over her shoulder to
receive the crown, the arms being folded with studied grace over the bosom.

every model necessarily looks as if accidentally undressed; and
hence, from tlie very fear and doubt witli which we approach the
nude, it becomes expressive of evil; and for that daring frankness
of the old men, which seldom missed of human grandeur, even
when it failed of holy feeling, we have substituted a mean, car-
peted, gauze-veiled, mincing sensuality of curls and crisping-pins,
out of which, I believe, nothing can come but moral enervation
and mental paralysis.

Respecting those two other vices of the human form, the ex- § 26. Thirdly,
pressions of Fear and Ferocity, there is less to be noted, as they only Feln'^^Vhe^
occasionally enter into the conception of character; only it is most jj^ttcr to be
necessary to make careful distinction between the conception of from Awe.
power, destructiveness, or majesty, in matter, influence, or agent,
and the actual fear of any of these: for it is possible to conceive
of terribleness, without being in a position obnoxious to the danger of
it, and so without fear; and the feeling arising from this contem-
plation of dreadfulness, ourselves being in safety, as of a stormy sea
from the shore, is properly termed Awe, and is a most noble passion;
whereas fear, mortal and extreme, may be felt respecting things
ignoble, as the falling from a window, and without any conception
of terribleness or majesty in the thing, or the accident dreaded;
and even when fear is felt respecting things sublime, as thunder,
or storm of battle, the tendency of it is to destroy all power of
contemplation of their majesty, and to freeze and contract all the
intellect into a shaking heap of clay; for absolute acute fear is of
the same unworthiness and contempt from whatever source it arise,
and degrades the mind and the outward bearing of the body alike,
even though it be among hail of heaven and fire running along the
ground. And so among the children of God, while there is always § 27. iioiy Fear,
that fearful and bowed apprehension of his majesty, and that sacred Jvom'^human
dread of all offence to him, which is called the Fear of God, yet of 'Jferror.
real and essen1;ial fear there is not any, but clinging of confidence
to him, as their Rock, Fortress, and Deliverer; and perfect love,
and casting out of fear; so that it is not possible that, while the
mind is rightly bent on him, there should be dread of anything
either earthly or supernatural; and the more dreadful seems the
height of his majesty, the less fear they feel that dwell in the shadow

of it (" Of whom shall I be afraid ?"), so that they are as David
was, " devoted to his fear ;" whereas, on the other hand, those who,
if they may help it, never conceive of God, hut thrust away all
thought and memory of him, and in his real terribleness and omnipre-
sence fear him not nor know him, yet are by real, acute, piercing,
and ignoble fear, haunted for evermore; fear inconceiving and des-
perate, that calls to the rocks, and hides in the dust; and hence the
peculiar baseness of the expression of terror, a baseness attributed
to it in all times, and among all nations, as of a passion atheistical,
brutal, and profane. So, also, it is always joined with ferocity,
which is of all passions the least human ; for of sensual desires there
is license to men, as necessity; and of vanity there is intellectual
cause, so that when seen in a brute it is pleasant, and a sign of
good wit; and of fear there is at times necessity and excuse, as
being allowed for prevention of harm; but of ferocity there is no
excuse nor palliation, but it is pure essence of tiger and demon, and
it casts on the hmnan face the paleness alike of the horse of Death,
and the ashes of Hell.

Therefore, of all subjects that can be admitted to sight, the ex-
pressions of fear and ferocity are the most foul and detestable; and
so there is in them I know not what sympathetic attractiveness for
minds cowardly and base, as the vulgar of most nations; and, as
they are easily rendered by men who can render nothing else, they
are often trusted in by the herd of painters incapable and profane,
as in that monstrous abortion of the first room of the Louvre, called
the Deluge, whose subject is pure, acute, mortal fear; and so gene-
rally in the senseless horrors of the modern French schools, spawn
of the guillotine; also there is not a greater test of grandeur or
meanness of mind than the expressions it will seek for and develope
in the features and forms of men in fierce strife; whether determi-
nation and devotion, and all the other attributes of that unselfishness
which constitutes heroism, as in the warrior of Agasias; and distress
not agitated nor unworthy, though mortal, as in the dying gladiator;
or brutal ferocity and butchered agony, of which the lowest and
least palliated examples are those battles of Salvator Rosa which
none but a man base-born, and thief-bred, could have conceived
without sickening; of which I will only name that example in the

i
f

a
I

§28. Ferocity
is joined always
with Fear. Its
iinpardonable-
ness.

§ 20. Such ex-
pressions how
sought by
powerless and
impious paint-

ers.

Pitti Palace, wlierein the chief figure in the foreground is a man
with his arm cut off at the shoulder, run through the other hand
into the breast with a lance, ^ And manifold instances of the same
feeling are to be found in the repainting of the various represent-
ations of the Inferno, so common through Italy; more especially
that of Orcagna's in the Campo Santo, wherein the few figures
near the top that yet remain untouched are grand in their severe
drawing and expressions of enduring despair, while those below, re-
painted by Solazzino, depend for their expressiveness upon torrents
of blood; so in the Inferno of Santa Maria Novella, and of the
Arena chapel, not to speak of the horrible images of the Passion,
by which vulgar Romanism has always striven to excite the languid
sympathies of its untaught flocks. Of which foulnesses let us reason
no farther, the very image and memory of them being pollution ;
only noticing this, that there has always been a morbid tendency in
Romanism towards the contemplation of bodily pain, owing to the
attribution of saving power to it; which, like every other moral
error, has been of fatal effect in art, leaving not altogether without
the stain and blame of it even the highest of the Romanist painters;
as Fra Angelico, for instance, who, in his Passion subjects, always
insists weakly on the bodily torture, and is unsparing of blood; and
Giotto, though his treatment is usually grander, as in that Cruci-
fixion over the door of the Convent of St. Mark's, where the blood
is hardly actual, but issues from the feet in a conventional form,
and becomes a crimson cord which is twined strangely beneath
about a skull; only what these holy men did to enhance, even
though in their means mistaken, the impression and power of the
sufferings of Christ, or of his saints, is always in a measure noble,
and to be distinguished with all reverence from the abominations of
the irreligious painters following; as of Camillo Procaccini, in one
of his martyrdoms in the Gallery of the Brera, at Milan, and other
such, whose names may be well spared to the reader.

' Compare Michelet, Du Pretre, de la Femme, de la Eamille, chap. iii. note. He
uses language too violent to be quoted ; but excuses Salvator by reference to the savage
character of the ^irty Years' "War. That this excuse has no validity may be proved by
comparing the painter's treatment of other subjects. See Sec. 11. Chap. IIL 8 19. note.

degree, is degradation to tlie human form. But of all passion it is
to be observed, that it becomes ignoble either when entertained
respecting unworthy objects, and therefore shallow or unjustifiable;
or when of impious violence, and so destructive of human dignity.
Thus Grief is noble or the reverse, according to the dignity and
worthiness of the object lamented, and the grandeur of the mind
enduring it. The sorrow of mortified vanity or avarice is simply
disgusting; even that of bereaved affection may be base if selfish
and unrestrained. All grief that convulses the features is ignoble,
because it is commonly shallow, and certainly temporary, as in
children; though in the shock and shiver of a strong man's features,
under sudden and violent grief, there may be something of sublime.
The grief of Guercino's Hagar, in the Brera Gallery at Milan, is
partly despicable, partly disgusting, partly ridiculous; it is not the
grief of the injured Egyptian, driven forth into the desert with the
destiny of a nation in her heart; but of a servant of all work
§31. It is never turned away for stealing tea and sugar. Common painters forget
exh^iteV~^at ^^^^^ passion is not absolutely, and in itself, great or violent, but
least on the face, q^Ij in proportion to the weakness of the mind it has to deal with;

and that, in exaggerating its outward signs, they are not exalting
the passion, but lowering the hero.^ 'i^liey think too much of
passions as always the same in their nature; forgetting that the
love of Achilles is different from the love of Paris, and of Alcestis
from that of Laodamia. The use and value of passion is not as a
subject of contemplation in itself, but as it breaks up the fountains
of the great deep of the human mind, or displays its mightiness and
ribbed majesty, as mountains are seen in their stability best among
the coil of clouds; whence, in fine, I think it is to be held, that all
passion which attains overwhelming power, so that it is not as re-
sisting, but as conquered, that the creature is contemplated, is unfit
for high art, and destructive of the ideal character of the counte-
nance : and, in this respect, I cannot but hold Raffaelle to have
erred in his endeavour to express passion of such acuteness in the
human face; as in the fragment of the Massacre of the Innocents

in our own gallery (wherein^ repainted though it be, I suppose the
purpose of the master is yet to be luiderstood); for if such subjects
are to be represented at all, their entire expression may be given
without degrading the face, as we shall presently see done with
unspeakable power by Tintoret'; and I think that all subjects of
the kind, all human misery, slaughter, famine, plague, peril, and
crime, are better in the main avoided, as of unprofitable and
hardening influence, unless so far as out of the suffering, hinted
rather than expressed, we may raise into nobler relief the eternal
enduring of fortitude and affection, of mercy and self-devotion; or
when, as by the threshing-floor of Oman, and by the cave of
Lazarus, the angel of the Lord is to be seen in the chastisement,
and his love to be manifested to the despair of men.

Thus, then, we have in some sort enumerated those evil signs § 30. Recapitu-
which are most to be shunned in the seeking of Ideal beauty
though it is not the knowledge of them, but the dread and hatred
of them, which will effectually aid the painter; as, on the other
hand, it is not by mere admission of the loveliness of good and
holy expression that its subtle characters are to be traced. Raffaelle
himself, questioned on this subject, made doubtful answer; he pro-
bably could not trace through what early teaching, or by what dies
of emotion the image had been sealed upon his heart. Our own
Bacon, who well saw the impossibility of reaching it by the com-
bination of many separate beauties, yet explains not the nature of
that " kind of felicity " to which he attributes success. I suppose
those who have conceived and wrought the loveliest things, have
done so by no theorizing, but in simple labour of love, and could
not, if put to a bar of rationalism, defend all points of what they
had done; but painted it in their own delight, and to the delight of
all besides, only always with that respect of conscience, and " fear
of swerving from that which is right, which maketh diligent
observers of circumstances, the loose regard whereof is the nurse of

" Let it be observed that it is always of beauty, not of human character in its lower
and criminal modifications, that we have been speaking. That variety of character,
therefore, which we have affirmed to be necessary, is the variety of Giotto and Angelico,
not of Hogarth. "Works concerned with the exliibitiou of general character arc to be
spoken of in tlie consideration of Ideas of Relation.

vulgar folly; no less tlian Solomon's attention thereunto was, of
natural furtherances, the most effectual to make him eminent above
others, for he gave good heed, and pierced everything to the very
ground."^

With which good heed, and watching of the instants when men
feel warmly and rightly,- as the Indians do for the diamond in their
washing of sand, and that with the desire and hope of finding true
good in men, and not with the ready vanity that sets itself to fiction
instantly, and carries its potter's wheel about with it always (off
which there will come only clay vessels of regular shape after all),
instead of the pure mirror that can show the seraph standing by the
human body—standing as signal to the heavenly land^: with this
heed and this charity, there are none of us that may not bring down
that lamp upon his path of which Spenser sang: —

" That Beauty is not, as fond men misdeem
An outward show of things, that only seem ;
But that fair lamp, from whose celestial ray
That light proceeds wliich kindleth lover's fire,
Shall never be extinguished nor decay.
But, when the vital spirits do expire,
Unto her native planet shall retire,
For it is heavenly born and cannot die,
Being a parcel of the purest sky."

Op tlie sources of Beauty open to us in the visible world, we have § i- There are
now obtained a view which, however scanty in its detail, is yet the emotion of
general in its range. Of no other sources than these visible ones, J^^Ti tiioL"'^
can we, by any effort in our present condition of existence, conceive, in things
For wdiat 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, 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
diff'erent from earthly gold the 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 sycomore
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
VOL. 11. K

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 thmgs
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. Consum-
mate beauty, therefore, is not to be found on earth, 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.

§2. What im-
perfection exists
in visible things.
How in a sort by
imagination re-
movable.

§3. Which,
however, affects
not our present
conclusions.

We have seen that this subject matter is referable to four general
heads. It is either the record of conscience, written in things ex-
ternal, 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 ap-
proving 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.

§ 4. The four
sources from
which the sense
of Beauty is
derived are all
divine.

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.

There remain, however, two points to be noticed before I can § b. what ob-
hope that this conclusion will be frankly accepted by the reader. made'toThk ^^
If it be the moral part of us to which Beauty addresses itself, how conclusion,
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 endeavour briefly to answer; not
that they can be satisfactorily treated without that examination of
the connection between all kind of greatness in art, on which I
purpose to enter in the following volume. For the right deter-
mination of these two questions is indeed the whole end and aim
of my labour (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 con-
sequence to the Christian world.

At present, however, I would only meet such objections as must
immediately arise in the reader's mind.

And first, it will be remembered that I have, throughout the §6. Typical
examination of Typical beauty, asserted our instinctive sense of it; SSiSty
the moral meaning of it being only discoverable by reflection. 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, darker and louder exactly in
proportion to the moral deficiency; of which the best proof and
measure are 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 fall 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 short coming, indefinable; an absence of the full out-pouring of
the sacred spirit that there is in Angelico; traceable, I doubt not,
to some deficiencies and avaricious flaws of his heart, whose con-
sequences 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'; and note also what Rio has sin-
gularly 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 what 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 wdiom, 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 partial
want of the sense of beauty itself, as in Rubens and Titian, ex-
hibited in the adoption of coarse types of feature and form; some-
times also (of which I could find instances in modern times), by 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

§7. How in-
terrupted by
false feelinfe'.

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 every thing; 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 desire
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.

But secondly, it is to be noted that it is neither by us ascertain- § 8. Greatness
111, • n PT -J.* . and truth are

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
labour 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 bj the counsel of God without purpose, nor maintained
without result: their interpretation we may accept, into their labour
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 short coming there will be of
their glory, and sure, of their punishment.

I believe I shall be able, incidentally, in succeeding investigations,
to prove this short coming, 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 not too severely de-
mand the practical proof (often in a measure impossible) of things
§9. The second which can hardly be doubted in their rational consequence. At
from "the coid-^ present, it would be useless to enter on an examination for which
we have no materials; and I proceed, therefore, shortly to reply to
that other objection urged against 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. I

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.

Although this gross and inconceivable falsity wall hardly be
accepted by any one in so many words, seeing that there are few
who do not receive, and know that they receive, at certain moments^

ness of Chris-
tian men to ex-
ternal beauty.

strength of some kind, or rebuke, from tlie 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 § lo. Reasons
an earnest mind, which, in its efforts at the raising of men from i^tifeInxitties'
utter loss and misery, has often but little time or disposition to take Tnxieties
heed of anything more than the mere life, and of those so occupied overwrought
it is not for us to judge; but 1 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 splendour
of the grass and glory of the flower, are less to be found in ardour
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 § ii. Evil cou-
schism and heresy from which the Christian church has ever gucrSneL.
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 everj 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 warn-
ing 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 inore curse, but
his servants shall serve him, and shall see his faceJ'^

§ 12. Theoria
the service of
Heaven.

I
i
£

We have hitherto been exclusively occupied with those sources of § i. A partial
pleasure which exist in the external creation, and which in any only of the
faithful copy of it must to a certain extent exist also. Se attempted.

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 coloured 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 received 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 rela-
tions, but only to obtain some certain tests by which we may
determine whether it be very Imagination or not, 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; some-
times 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.

Unfortunately, the works of metaphysicians will afford us in this
most interesting inquiry, no aid whatsoever. They who are con-
stantly endeavouring 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. • |

§ 2. The works
of the Meta-
physicians, how
nugatory with
respect to this
faculty.

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

§ 3. D. Stew-
art's definition,
how inadequate.

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 ordei- 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 inex-
plicable part which the metaphysician misses.

As might be expected from his misunderstanding of the faculty, § 4. This in-
he has given an instance entirely nugatory.' It would be difficult ^ ""6<itory.
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, where I can
find three expressions only in which this power is shown; the

' 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. Tho
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 some-
times, 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."

burnished with golden rind, hung amiable," of the Hesperian
fruit, the " lays forth her purple grape" of the vine, and the
"fringed hank with myrtle crowned" of the lake; and these are
not what Stewart meant, hut onlj that accumulation of howers,
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, hut utterly
inapplicable.

" On the other side,
Inccnsed with indignation, Satan stood
Unterrified, and like a comct burned,
Tliat 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
lie hack 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 afield, 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,
Kiding near her highest noon,
Like one that had been led astray
Through tlie heaven's 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 laugh'd, 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."

This knowledge, this intuitive and penetrative perception, is still
one of the forms, the highest, of imagination, but there is no com-
bination of images here.

We find, then, that the Imagination has three totally distinct § 6. The three
functions. It combines, and by combination creates new forms; X'^magina-
but the secret principle of this combination has not been shown by ■
the analysts. Again, it treats, or regards, both the simple images tive, Contem-
and its own combinations in peculiar ways; and, thirdly, it pene-
trates, analyses, and reaches truths by no other faculty discoverable.
These its three functions, I shall endeavour 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 tliis
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 j
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.

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, there-
fore, we must define the nature of these conceptions themselves.

After beholding and examining any material object, our know-
ledge 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, &c., of which length we cannot have accurate con-
ception, 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 visible at will,
as its being of such a colour, 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 know-
ledge of its form for immediate use, we sumnion up a vision or
image of the thing; we do not remember it in words, as we re-
member 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.

There are many questions respecting this faculty of conception of § 2. How con-
very great interest; such as the exact amount of aid that verbal verbal know-
Jsnowledge renders to visible knowledge (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 ascei-tain the fact by actual beholding (which I do not
assert, but can conceive to be possible); and again, what is that
indefinite and subtle 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^,
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 num-
ber 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 ®
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.

But over these images, vivid and distinct as nature herself, he § 3. How used
has a command which over nature he has not. He can summon composition,
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

^ 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 use hero
to insist.

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 Yerte 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.

The essential acts of Composition, properly so called, are the
following. The mind which desires the new feature summons up
before it those images which it supposes to be 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 " Mu-
lino " 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), See., it has mortised together a satisfactory result.

This process will be more and more rapid and effective, in pro-
portion to the artist's powers of conception and association, these

§ 4. Character-
istics of Cora-
position,

§5. What
powers are im-
plied by it.

distinctness of his powers of conception will give value, point, and of Fancy,
truth to every fragment that lie 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 asso-
ciation, 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 cap-
tivating and entertaining.

But all this time the imagination has not once shown itself. All § 6. imagina-
this (except the gift of fancy) may be taught; all this is easily m'^anifested?
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.

It has been said that in composition the mind can only take cog-
nizance 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
VOL. II. L

in eacli of the harmonizing parts which can only he 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.
§ 7. imagina- Now, the conceivable imperfections of any single feature are in-
irthrTO-rTtolv finite. It is impossible, therefore, to fix upon a form of imperfection
conception of ^jj ^he one, and try with this all the forms of imperfection of the

ponmt parts. Other Until One fits ; but the two imperfections must be co-relatively
and simultaneously conceived.

This is Imagination, properly so called; imagination associative,
the grandest mechanical power that the human intelligence pos-
sesses, 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 imper-
fections be conceived out of the infinite number conceivable, or
selected out of a number recollected), two ideas which are sepa^
rately lorong, 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 is 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.
§ 8. Material This operation of mind, so far as I can see, is absolutely ine,x-
taSatTon/' pHcable, 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." ^

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 indis-
tinguishable ; 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.

This operation would be wonderful enough, if it were concerned § 9. The grasp
with two ideas only. But a powerfully imaginative mind seizes Pagination
and combines at the same instant, not only two, but all the im-
portant 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."

§ 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 w,e conceive the
relation it bears to the whole animal; and as this relation is neces-
sary, 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 ima-
gination, as we shall presently see. (Chap. IH. § 30.)

I"-

t !

The matter, therefore, in which associative imagination can be §ii' How ma-
shown is that which admits of great license and variety of arrange™ nient of uncer*
ment, and in which a certain amount of relation only is req^uired; itg^jjefi^ency
as especially in the elements of landscape painting, in which best it illustrated,
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 neces-
sary 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, working probably on a received notion or rule (for the mi-»
imaginative 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 looks disagreeably long, he will
begin to ramify it; and, if there be another tree in the picturd
with two large branches, he knows that this, by all laws of com-»
position, ought to have three or four, or some difi^erent number;
and 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 uildulate or go back-^
wards and forwards, which accordingly he makes them do at
random; and because he knows that all forms ought to be con^
trasted, he makes one bend down while the other three go up.
The three that go up he knows must not go up without inter-
fering with each other, and so he makes two of them cross. He
thinks it also proper that there should be variety of character in

tliem; so he makes the oiie 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 un-
necessary, but draws them freely, and by chance. Having to put
on the foliage, he will malce it flow properly in the direction of the
tree's growth ; he will make all the extremities graceful; but will
be tormented 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 spo-
liation, 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.

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, colour, fractures, insertions, &c., 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 more difficult his progress. ;

The advance of the Imaginative artist is precisel;^ the reverse of
this. He owns no laws. He defies all restraint, jand cuts down
all hedges. There is nothing within the limits of natural pos-
sibility that he dares not do, or that he allows the necessity of
doing. The laws of nature he knows; these are to him no re-
straint. They are his own nature. All other laws or limits he
sets at utter defiance; his journey is over an untrodden and path-
less 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

§ 12. Laws of
art, the safe-
guard of the
unimaginative,

§ 13. Are by
the imaginative
painter despised.
Tests of Imagi-
nation.

step. Nothing can stop liim, notliing 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 ex-
plained, 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, though the rest will indeed
suffer, as being deprived of the proper development of a tree, and
as involving a blank space that wants occupation, yet 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.

This then is the first sign of the presence of real imagination as § 14. The mo-
opposed to composition. But here is another not less important. "rniiginative""

We have seen that as each part is selected and fitted by the treatment,
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, &c., 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 un-
limited 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 una-
vailable 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.

And now we find what noble sympathy and unity there are
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 pther turned to
good.

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 tho-
roughly understood. But if we are to give examples of either
the want or the presence of the Power, it is necessary to note the

§ 15. Imagina-
tion never re-
peats itself.

§ 16. Relation
of the Imagina-
tive faculty to
the Theoretic.

§ 17. Modifica-
tions of its ma-
nifestation.

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 dis-
cipline 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 ima-
gination, 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 endeavour 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.

Keeping these points in view, it is interesting to observe the § 18. Instance
different degrees and relations of the imagination, as accompanied iL^infttionf—
with more or less feeling or desire of harmony, vigour of conception, p^^^gj^ Caspar
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 ^neas blows loudly through its leaves ; but the total
want of invention in the cloud forms bears it down beyond redemp-
tion. The foreground tree of the La Riccia (compare Part II.
Sec. YI. Chap. I. § 6.) is another characteristic instance of absolute
nullity of imagination.
§ 19. Its pre- In Salvator, the imagination is vigorous, the composition dex^
tor^Niwio^^^^" terous and clever, as in the St. Jerome of the Brera Gallery, the
Poussin, Titian, Diogenes of the Pitti, and the pictures of the Guadagni Palace;

while all are rendered valueless by coarseness of feeling and habitual
non-reference to nature.

All the landscape of Nicolo Poussin is imaginative, but the de-
velopment of the power in Tintoret and Titian is so unapproachably
intense that the mind unwillingly rests elsewhere. The four land-
scapes which occur to me as the most magnificently characteristic
are: first, the Tlight into Egypt, of the Scuola di San Rocco (Tin-
toret) ; 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 S. Pietro Martire,
which I name last in spite of its importance, because there is some-
thing 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,
§ 13. I

I do not mean to set these four works above the rest of the
landscape of these masters; I name them only because the land-
scape 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.

refer to a work more accessible, tbe Cephalus and Procris of Turner
in the 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 1

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 con-
ception 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 every-
thing else depends; and if proof be required of the vital power
of still smaller features, let him remove the sunbeam that comes
throiigh beneath the faint mass of trees on the hill in the distance.

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.

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 pro-
fuseness 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 (k.nown 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 un-
imaginative shows its joints and knots, and is visibly composition.

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 ima-
gination 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 ima-
gination never deigns 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.^

§ 22. The sign
of imaginative
work is its ap-
pearance of ab-
solute truth.

For instance, the landscape above mentioned of Titian's St. Je-
rome 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.^

Again, it is impossible to tell whether the two nearest trunks of
the jEsacus 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 conthiued 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.

' It is said at Venice that Titian took the trees of the S. Pietro Martire 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 wood-cut 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.

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 choose 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 endeavour to understand, not only
its principles of selection, but its modes of apprehension with respect
to what it selects.

When Milton's Satan first " rears from off the pool his mighty
stature," the image of leviathan before suggested not being yet
abandoned, the eflPect on the fire-wave is described as of the up-
heaved monster on the ocean stream:

" On each hand the flames,
Driven backward, slope their pointed spires, and, rolled
In billows, leave i' the midst a horrid vale."

" As when the force
Of subterranean wind transports a hill
Torn from Pelorus, or the shattered side
Of thundering iEtna, whose combustible
And fuelled 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

§ 1. Imagina-
tion penetrative
is concerned, not
with the com-
bining, but the
apprehending of
things.

§ 2. Milton's
and Dante's
description of
flame.

we walk upon tliem too securely, and the fuel, sublimation, smoke,
and singeing seem to me images only of partial combustion; tliey
vary and extend tlie conception, but tliey lower tlie thermometer.
Look back, if you will, and add to the description the glimmering
of the livid flames; the sulphurous hail and red lightning; yet all
together, however they overwhelm us with horror, fail of making us
thoroughly, unendurably hot. The essence of intense flame has not
been given. Now hear Dante:

" Feriami '1 Sole in su 1' omero destro,
Che gia raggiando tutto 1' Occidente
Mutava in bianco aspetto di cilestro.

That is a slight touch; he has not gone to iEtna or 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.

Such is always the mode in which the highest imaginative faculty § 3. The Ima-
seizes its materials. It never stops at crusts or ashes, or outward byth^
images of any kind; it ploughs them all aside, and plunges into the innermost point,
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 therein, 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,
ludges, or describes, it affirms from within.^

' The reader -will find in the 86th paper of the Guardian some interesting passages
confinnatory of the view above given of the Imagination.

§ 4. It acts It may seem to the reader that I am incorrect in calling this pene-

wUhruTrLson- trating 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 sub-
mitted to itj 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 thou-
sand 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 iEschylus, 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 re-
ferred 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.

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 piii 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.

The unimaginative writer on the other hand, as he has never § 6. Absence of
pierced to the heart, so he can never touch it. If he has to paint i^w^shown?'
a passion, he remembers the external signs of it, he collects expres-
sions of it from other writers, he searches for similes, he composes,
exaggerates, heaps terra 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
scalj 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 get-
ting 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.

This freshness, however, is not to be taken for an infallible sign § 7. Distinction
of imagination, inasmuch as it results also from a vivid operation of n^timi"nd"''^''
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.^

The fancy sees the outside, and is able to give a portrait of the
outside, clear, brilliant, and full of detail.®

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 ns with some other quenching and chilling epitliet.
Now hear Fancy speak:

" Her lips were red, and one was tliin,
Compared with that was next her chin,
Some bee had stung it newly."'

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 colour,
the Imagination is seen in its awakening. Next Shelley:

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 hissed, I know not how oft. Wliere be your gibes
now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of meniment that were wont to set the
table on a roar ? "

Again, compare Milton's flowers in Lycidas with Perdita's. In
Milton it happens, I think, generally, and in ^the case before us

' I take this and the next instance from Leigh Hunt's admirable piece of criticism,
« Imagination and Fancy," which ought to be read with care, and to which, though
somewhat loosely arranged, I may refer for all the filling up and illustration that the
subject requires. With respect to what has just been said respecting want of imagi-
nation, compare his criticism of Addison's Cato, p. 28. I cannot, however, confirm his
judgment, nor admit his selection of instances, among painters: he has looked to their
manner only and habitual choice of subject, without feeling their power; and has given"
work to the coarseness, mindlessncss, and eclecticism of Guido and the Caracci, which,
in its poetical demand of tenderness, might have foiled Piuturicchio, of dignity Leonardo,
and of colour Giorgione.

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:

" 0 Proserpina,
For the flowers now, that, frighted, thou let'st full
From Dis's waggon ! daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets, dim,
But sAveeter than the lids of Juno's eyes.
Or Cytherea's breath ; pale primroses,
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phojbus 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."

So, I believe, it will be found throughout the operation of the §8. Fancy, bow
fancy, that it has to do wdth the outsides of things, and is content imaginatio^
therewith; of this there can be no doubt in such passages as that de-
scription 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:

The outward sliiver and coldness of fear is seized on^ and irregu-
larly 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:

" WIio is she that looketh forth as the morning j fair as the moon, clear as the sun,
apd ten-ible as an army with banners ? "

Now, if these be the prevailing characteristics of the two faculties,
it is evident that certain other collateral differences will result from
them. Taney, 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^, 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. 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 accompany-
ing 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 own 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; so that if there be in
any good and lofty work a flaw, 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 or as it was

' Fancy, in her third function, may, however, become serious, and gradually rise into
imagination in doing so. Compare Chap, IV. § 5.

§ 10. Want of
seriousness, the
bar to higli art
at the present
time.

meant, but always, if it may be, turned the wrong way, and mis-
understood : 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.

This, then, is one essential difference between imagination and § U. imagiua-
fancy; and another is like it and resultant from it, that the ima- Fancy, restless,
ginatioii 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.

Now these differences between the imagination and the fancy § 12. The de-
hold, not only in the way they lay hold of separate conceptions, but o^'pancyr'^^'""
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 circum-
stances from link to link; but the imagination, if it may, gets hold
of a moment or link in the middle that implies all the rest, and
fastens there. Hence Fuseli's aphorism t " 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 Dracliei), we
have an instance, miserably feeble indeed, but characteristic, and
suited to our present purpose, of the detailing, finishing actioti of
the fancy. The dragon is drawn from head to tail, vulture eyes,
serpent teeth, forked tongue, fiery crest, armour, 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.
§ 13. And sug- All the time we have never got into the dragon heart, we have
Jmasin'iition. 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 coimtry, 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, griding
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.
§ 14. This sus- Now, it is necessauy here very carefully to distinguish between
opposed To va-^ character of the work which depends on the imagination of the
cancy. 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 ima-
ginative works do this, yet it may be done also by works that have
in them no imagination at all. A few shapeless scratches or acci-
dental stains on a wall, or the forms of clouds, or any other com-
plicated 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 ascertain sublimity oAving to the play given

to the beholder's imaghiation, 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 mind 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. Now
observe in this work of Turner 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 unlike a serpent,
or 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 ^ 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 holloioness, I'inally 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 not, to walk his
way, and not ours, the trunks of the trees on the right are all
cloven into yawning ajid writhing lieads 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 expkined, corre-
sponding 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 endeavoured
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.

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 ima-
ginative 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 right conception in the help and
food they get from those of stronger thought; but a certain ima-
ginative 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 to
those who go to it in earnest and give it time; and this is pecu-
liarly the case when the imagination acts not merely on the imme-
diate subject, nor in giving a fanciful and peculiar character to
prominent objects, as we haA'^e 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.

In the centre of the gallery at Parma, there is a canvass of
Tintoret's, whose sublimity of conception and grandeur of colour
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: 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

§ 16. Imagina-
tion addresses
itself to Imagi-
nation

Instance, from
the works of
Tin tore t.

§ 16. The En.
tombment.

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 se-
pulchre, 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.

Let us take another instance. No subject has been more fre- § 17. The An-
quently 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 Sf^. Maria Novella. The background there, how-
ever, is altogether decorative; but, in the fresco of the corridor of
St. Mark's, the concomitant circumstances are of exceeding loveli-
ness. 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, a chamber with a single grated
window, through which a star-like beam of light falls into the
silence. All is exquisite in feeling, but not inventive nor imagi-
native. 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 rijsh 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 lie 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 sup-
porting column. This, I think, sufiiciently explains the typical
character of the whole. The ruined house is the Jewish dis-
pensation ; that obscurely arising in the dawning of the sky is the
Christian; but the corner-stone of the old building remains, though
the builders' tools lie idle beside it, and the stone which the builders
refused is become the Headstone of the Corner,
g §18. The Bap- In this picture, however, the force of the thought hardly atones

' ite"reatnle\if" f^r the painfulness of the scene and the turbulence of its feeling.

by various pain- fp^^g 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 ^ every order of feeling has been displayed in its treat-
ment ; 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;

» The pictiire is in the Guadagni Palace. It is one of the most important landscapes
Salvator ever painted. The figures arc studied from street beggars. On tlie other side
of the river, exactly opposite the point where the Baptism of Christ takes place, the
painter, with a refinement of feeling peculiarly his own, has introduced some rufiians
stripping off their shirts to bathe. He is fond of this incident. It occurs again in one
of the marines of the Pitti Palace, with the additional interest of a foreshortened figure,
swimming on its back, feet foremost, exactly in tlie stream of light to which the eye is
principally directed.

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 pre-
sence 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 Cristo, 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.

The river flows fiercely under the shadow of a great rock.^ §19. By Tin-
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 w^ater, and does not sink ; the
figure of St. John is indistinct, but close beside his raised right

J A farther examination of this picturc has made me doubt my intei-pretation of
some portions of it. It is nearly destroyed, and placed between two lights, and far from
the eye, so as to render its details in many of the shadowed portions almost unti'aceable.
I leave the passage unaltered, however, until I can obtain an opportunity of close access
to the picturc. Tiie other works described are in fuller light and in better preservation,
and the reader may accept with confidence the account given of them, which I have
confirmed by re-examination.

arm there is a spectre in the black shade; the Fiend, harpy-shaped,
hardly seen, glares down iipon 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. Behind 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 ecstasy,
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 sym-
bolical 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 in-
dicated 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.

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 ana-
tomical signs, or else it is permitted to rest on that countenance
inconceivable by man at any time, but chiefly so in this its con-
summated humiliation. In the first case, the representation is
revolting; in the second, inefficient, false, and sometimes bias-

phemous. 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 Byzan-
tines ; Perugino fails in his Christ in almost every instance: of
other men than these, after them, we need not speak. But Tin-
toret 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 expres-
sion 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 earth-
quake darkness closes upon the day, the broad and sunlike glory
about the head of the Redeemer has become wan, and of the colour
of ashes. ^

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,
or 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 disappoint-
ment 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

' This circumstance, like most that lie not at the surface, has escaped Fuseli, though
his remarks on the general tone of the picture arc very good, as well as his opposition
of it to the treatment of Rubens. (Lecture ix.)

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 hack 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 illustra-
tion 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 Ave cannot excite, it is of no
use to know how to govern.
§21. The Mas- I have before alluded. Sec. I. Chap. XIV., to the painfulness of
I Innocents.^ 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 convulse features methodically, and philosophize over
insanity. Not so Tintoret. Knowing, or feeling, that the ex-
pression 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 ill tlie chiaroscuro. The scene is the outer vestibule of a
palace, the slippery marble floor is fearfully barred across by san-
guine shadows, so that our eyes seem to become bloodshot and
strained with strange horror and deadly vision; a lalce 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 hy her iceight;—she
will be dashed dead in a second : —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 to-
gether and hurled down in one hopeless, frenzied, furious abandon-
ment of body and soul in the effort to save. 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.

This, to my mind, is the only Imaginative, that is, the only true, § 22. Various
real, heartfelt representation of the being and actuality of the sub- gcuola m'san
ject, in existence.^ I should exhaust the patience of the reader, if Kocco.
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 Avhile 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 cloud, 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

' Note the shallow and uncomprehending notice of tliis picture by Tuseli. His
description of the treatment of it by other painters is however true, terse, and valuable.

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 judg-
ment 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
§ 23. The Last the wliiteness of the shroud. Of these, and all the other thoughts
Hotfh-rated by of indescribable power that are now fading from the walls of those
various painters, neglected chambers, I may perhaps endeavour at a future time to
preserve some image and shadow more faithfully than by words;
but I shall at present terminate our series of illustrations by refer-
ence 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 circiimstances 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. ^ His group of the dead,
including not more than ten or twelve figures, occupies the fore-
ground 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
' Fresco in an outhouse of tlie Ospedalc St". Maria Nuova at Florence,

is thus expressed as taking place in about a rood square, and on a
single group; 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.

B J Tintoret only has this unimaginable event been grappled with § 24. By Tin-
in its Verity; not typically nor symbolically, but as they may see it
who shall not sleep, but be changed. Only one traditional circum-
stance he has received with Dante and Michael Angelo, the Boat of
the Condemned; but the impetuosity of his mind bursts out even in
the adoption of this image; he has not stopped at the scowling ferry-
man of the one, nor at the sweeping blow and demon dragging of
the other, but seized Hylas-like by the limbs, and tearing up the
earth in his agony, the victim is dashed into his destruction; nor is
it the sluggish Lethe, nor the fiery lake that bears the cursed vessel,
but the oceans of the earth and the waters of the firmament gathered
into one white, ghastly cataract; the river of the wrath of God,
roaring down into the gulf where the world has melted with its
fervent heat, choked with the ruin of nations, and the limbs of its
corpses tossed out of its whirling, like water-wheels. Bat-like, out
of the holes and caverns and shadows of the earth, the bones gather,
and the clay heaps heave, rattling and adhering into half-kneaded
anatomies, that crawl, and startle, and struggle up among the putrid
weeds, with the clay clinging to their clotted hair, and their heavy
eyes sealed by the earth darkness yet, like his of old who went his
way unseeing to the Siloam Pool; shaking off one by one the dreams
of the prison-house, hardly hearing the clangour of the trumpets
of the armies of God, blinded yet more, as they awake, by the white
light of the new Heaven, until the great vortex of the four winds
bears up their bodies to the judgment seat: the Firmament is all
full of them, a very dust of human souls, that drifts, and floats, and
falls in the interminable, inevitable light; the bright clouds are
darkened with them as with thick snow, currents of atom life in
the arteries of heaven, now soaring up slowly, and higher and higher
still, till the eye and the thought can follow no farther, borne up,
wingless, by their inward faith and by the angel powers invisible,
now hurled in countless drifts of horror before the breath of their
condemnation.

Now, I wish the reader particularly to observe throughout all
these works of Tintoret, the distinction of the Imaginative Yerity
from falsehood on the one hand, and from realism on the other.
The power of every picture depends on the penetration of the ima-
gination into the true nature of the thing represented, and on the
utter scorn of the imagination for all shackles and fetters of mere
external fact that stand in the way of its suggestiveness. In the
Baptism it cuts away the trunks of trees as if they were so much
cloud or vapour, that it may exhibit to the thought the completed
sequency of the scene *; in the Massacre, it covers the marble floor
with visionary light, that it may strike terror into the spectator
without condescending to butchery; it defies the bare fact, but
creates in him the fearful feeling; in the Crucifixion it annihilates
locality, and brings the palm leaves to Calvary, so only that it may
bear the mind to the Mount of Olives; as in the Entombment it
brings the manger to Jerusalem, that it may take the heart to
Bethlehem; and all this it does in the daring consciousness of its
higher and spiritual verity, and in the entire knowledge of the fact
and substance of all that it touches. The imaginary boat of the
demon angel expands the rush of the visible river into the descent
of irresistible condemnation; but to make that rush and roar felt
by the eye, and heard by the ear, the rending of the pine branches
above the cataract is taken directly from nature; it is an abstract
of Alpine storm. Hence while we are always placed face to face
with whatever is to be told, there is in and beyond its reality a
voice supernatural; and that which is doubtful in the vision has
strength, sinew, and assuredness, built up in it by fact.

Let us, however, still advance one step farther, and observe the
imaginative power deprived of all aid from chiaroscuro, colour, or
any other means of concealing the framework of its thoughts.

§ 25. The Ima-
ginative Yerity,
how distin-
guished from
realism.

§ 26. The Ima-
gination how
manifested in
sculpture.

It was said by Michael Angelo that " non ha 1' ottimo scultore
alcun concetto, ch' un marmo solo in se non circoscriva," a sentence
which, though in the immediate sense intended by the writer it may
remind us a little of the indignation of Boileau's Pluto, " II s'ensuit

' The same thing is done yet more boldly in the large composition of the ceiling;
the Plague of Fiery Sei-pents; a part of the host, and another sky horizon, are seen
through an opening in the ground.

de-1^ que tout ce qui se peut dire de beau est dans les diction-
naires; il n'y a que les paroles qui sont transpos^es," yet is valuable,
because it shows us that Michael Angelo held the imagination to be
entirely expressible in rock, and therefore altogether independent,
in its own nature, of those aids of colour and shade by which it is
recommended in Tintoret, though the sphere of its operation is of
course by these incalculably extended. But the presence of the
imagination may be rendered in marble as deep, thrilling, and awful
as in painting, so that the sculptor seek for the soul and govern the
body thereby.

Of unimaginative work, Bandinelli and Canova supply us with § 27. Bandi-
characteristic instances of every kind, the Hercules and Cacus of the MinodaFieToie.
former, and its criticism by Cellini, will occur at once to every one;
the disgusting statue now placed So as to conceal Giotto's important
tempera picture in Santa Croce is a better instance; but a still more
impressive lesson might be received by comparing the inanity of
Canova's garland grace, and ball-room sentiment, with the intense
truth, tenderness, and power of men like Mino da Fiesole, whose
chisel leaves many a hard edge, and despises down and dimple, but
it seems to cut light and carve breath, the marble burns beneath it,
and becomes transparent with very spirit. Yet Mino stopped at the
human nature; he saw the soul, but not the ghostly presences about
it; it was reserved for Michael Angelo to pierce deeper yet, and to § 28. Michael
see the indwelling angels. No man's soul is alone: Laocoon or
Tobit, the serpent has it by the heart or the angel by the hand; the
light or the fear of the Spiritual things that move beside it may be
seen on the body; and that bodily form with Buonaroti, white, solid,
distinct, material, though it be, is invariably felt as the instrument
or the habitation of some infinite, invisible power. The earth of
the Sistine Adam that begins to burn ; the woman-embodied burst
of Adoration from his sleep; the twelve great torrents of the Spirit
of God that pause above us there, urned in their vessels of clay;
the waiting in the shadow of Futurity of those through whom the
Promise and Presence of God went down from the Eve to the Mary,
each still and fixed, fixed in his expectation, silent, foreseeing,
faithful, seated each on his stony throne, the building stones of the
word of God, building on and on, tier by tier, to the Refused one,

the head of the corner; not only these, not only the troops of terror
torn up from the earth by the four-quartered winds of the Judgment,
but every fragment and atom of stone that he ever touched became
instantly inhabited by what makes the hair stand up and the words
be few: the St. Matthew, not yet disengaged from his sepulchre,
bound hand and foot by his grave clothes, it is left for us to loose
him; the strange spectral wreath of the Florence Pieta, casting its
pyramidal, distorted shadow, full of pain and death, among the faint
purple lights that cross and perish under the obscure dome of St^
Maria del Fiore; the white lassitude of joyous limbs, panther-like,
yet passive, fainting with their own delight, that gleam among the
Pagan formalisms of the Uffizzii, far away, separating themselves in
their lustrous lightness as the waves of an Alpine torrent do by their
dancing from the dead stones, though the stones be as white as
they ^; and finally, and perhaps more than all, those four ineffable
types, not of darkness nor of day—not of morning nor evenhig, but
of the departure and the resurrection, the twilight and the dawn of
the souls of men—together with the spectre sitting in the shadow of
the niche above them all these, and all else that I could name of

' The Bacchus. There is a small statue opposite it, also unfinished; but " a spirit
still."

® I would have insisted more on the ghostly vitality of this dreadful statue ; but the
passage refemng to it in Rogers's Italy supersedes all further description. I suppose
most lovers of art know it by heart.

" Nor then forget that chamber of the dead,
Where the gigantic shapes of Night and Day,
Turned into stone, rest everlastingly ;
Yet still are breathing, and shed round at noon
A twofold influence,—only to be felt—
A light, a darkness, mingling each with each ;
Both, and yet neither. There, from age to age.
Two ghosts are sitting on their sepulchres.
That is the Duke Lorenzo. Mark him well.
He meditates, his head upon his hand.
What from beneath his helm-like bonnet scowls ?
Is it a face, or but an eyeless skull ?
'Tis lost in shade ; yet, like the basilisk,
It fascinates, and is intolerable.
His mien is noble, most majestical!
Then most so, when the distant choir is heard
At morn or eve—nor fail thou to attend

his forming, have borne, and in themselves retain and exercise the
same inexplicable power—inexplicable because proceeding from an
imaginative perception almost superhuman, which goes whither we
cannot follow, and is where we cannot come; throwing naked the
final, deepest root of the being of man, whereby he grows out of
the invisible, and holds on his God home.^

On that thrice-hallowed day, when all ai-e there;
When all, propitiating with solemn songs,
Visit the Dead. Then wilt thou feel his power!"

It is strange that this should be the only written instance (us far as I recollect) of
just and entire appreciation of Michael Angelo's spiritual power. It is perhaps owing
to the very intensity of his imagination that he has been so little understood : for, as I
before said, imagination can never be met by vanity, nor without earnestness. His
Florentine followers saw in him an anatomist and posture-master and art was finally
destroyed by the influence over admiring idiotcy of the greatest mind that ai't ever
inspired.

' I have not chosen to interrupt the argument respecting the essence of the imaginative
faculty by any remarks on the execution of the imaginative hand; but we can hardly
leave Tintoret and Michael Angelo without s(ime notice of the pre-eminent power of
execution exhibited by both of them, in consequence of their vigour and clearness of
conception; nor without again warning the lower artist from confounding this velocity
of decision and impatience with the velocity of affectation or indolence. Every result
of real imagination we have seen to be a truth of some sort; and it is the characteristic
of truth to be in some way tangible, seizable, distinguishable, and clear, as it is of
falsehood to be obscure, confused, and confusing. Not but that many, if not moat truths
have a dark side, a side by which they are connected with mysteries too high for us, —
nay, I think it is commonly but a poor and miserable truth which the human mind can
walk all round, but at all events they have one side by which we can lay hold of them,
and feel that they are downright adamant, and that their form, though lost in cloud
here and there, is unalterable and real, and not less real and rocky because infinite, and
joined on, St. Michael's Mount-like, to a far mainland. So then, whatever the real
imagination lays hold of, as it is a trath, does not alter into anything else, as the imagi-
native part works at it, and feels over it, and finds out more of it, but comes out more
and more continually; all that is found out pointing to and indicating still more behind,
and giving additional stability and reality to that which is discovered already. But if it
be fancy or any other form of pseudo-imagination which is at work, then that which it
gets hold of may not be a truth, but only an idea, which will keep giving way as soon
as we try to take hold of it, and turning into something else ; so that, as we go on copying
it, every part will be inconsistent with all that has gone before, and at intervals it will
vanish altogether and leave blanks which must be filled up by any means at hand. And in
these circumstances, the painter, unable to seize his thought, because it has not substance
nor bone enough to bear grasping, is liable to catch at every line that he lays down, for
help and suggestion, and to be led away by it to something else, which the first eff'ort to
realize dissipates in like manner, placing another phantom in its stead ; until, out of the
fragments of these successive phantoms, he has glued together a vague, mindless in-

Now, in all these instances, let it be observed—for it is to that
end alone that I have been arguing all along—that the virtue of the
k Imagination is its reaching, by intuition and intensity of gaze (not

voluntary whole, a mixture of all that was trite or common in each of the successive
conceptions, for that is necessarily what is first caught, a heap of things with the bloom
oiF and the chill on, laborious, unnatural, inane, with its emptiness disguised by affect-
ation, and its deadness enlivened by extravagance.

Necessarily, from these modes of conception, three vices of execution must result; and
these are found in all those parts of the work where any trust has been put in conception,
and only to be avoided in portions of actual portraiture, for a thoroughly unimaginative
painter can make no use of a study — all his studies are guesses and experiments, all are
equally wrong, and so far felt to be wrong by himself, that he will not work by any of
them, but will always endeavour to improve upon them in the picture, and so lose the
use of them. These three vices of execution are then—first, feebleness of handling,
owing to uncertainty of intention ; secondly, intentional carelessness of handling, in the
hope of getting by accident something more than was meant; and, lastly, violence and
haste of handling, in the effort to secure as much as possible of the obscure image of
which the mind feels itself losing hold. I am throughout, it will be observed, attributing
right feeling to the unimaginative painter; if he lack this, his execution may be cool
and determined, as he will set down falsehood without blushing, and ugliness without
suffering. Added to these various evidences of weakness, will be the various vices
assumed for the sake of concealment; morbid refinements disguising feebleness,—or
insolence and coarseness to cover desperation. When the imagination is powerful, the
resulting execution is of course the contrary of all this ; its first steps will commonly be
impetuous, in clearing its ground and getting at its first conception—as we know of
Michael Angelo in his smiting his blocks into shape (see the passage quoted by Sir
Charles Bell in the Essay on Expression, from Blaise de Vigenere), and as is visible in
the handling of Tintoret always : as the work approaches completion, the stroke, while
it remains certain and firm, because its end is always known, may frequently become
slow and careful, both on account of the difficulty of following the pure lines of the con-
ception, and because there is no fear felt of the conception's vanishing before it can be
realized ; but generally there is a certain degree of impetuosity visible in the works of all
the men of high imagination, when they are not working from a study, showing itself in
Michael Angelo by the number of blocks he left unfinished, and by some slight evidences
in those he completed of his having worked painfully towards the close ; so that, except
the Duke Lorenzo, the Bacchus of the Florentine Gallery, and the Pieta of Genoa, I
know not any of his finished works in which his mind is as mightily expressed as in his
marble sketches ; only, it is always to be observed that impetuosity or rudeness of hand
is not necessarily — and, if imaginative, is never—carelessness. In the two landscapes
at the end of the Scuola di San Eocco, Tintoret has drawn several large tree-trunks
with two strokes of his brush—one for the dark, and another for the light side ; and
the large rock at the foot of the picture of the Temptation is painted with a few detached
touches of grey over a flat brown ground ; but the touches of the tree-trunks have been
followed by the mind as they went down with the most painful intensity through their
every undulation; and the few grey strokes on the stone are so considered that a better
stone could not be painted if we took a month to it: and I suppose, generally, it would
be utterly impossible to give an example of execution in which less was left to accident,

§ 29. Eecapitu-
lation. The per-
fect function of

is the intuitive
perception of
Ultimate Truth.

a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things. I repeat
that it matters not whether the reader is willing to call this faculty
Imagination or not; I do not care about the name ; but I would be
imderstood when I speak of imagination hereafter, to mean this, the
base of whose authority and being is its perpetual thirst for truth
and purpose to be true. It has no food, no delight, no care, no
perception, except of truth ; it is for ever looking under masks, and
burning up mists; no fairness of form, no majesty of seeming will
satisfy it; the first condition of its existence is incapability of being
deceived; and though it sometimes dwells upon and substantiates
the fictions of fancy, yet its own operation is to trace to their farthest
limit the true laws and likelihoods even of the fictitious creation.
This has been well explained by Fuseli, in his allusion to the
Centaur of Zeuxis; and there is not perhaps a greater exertion of
imaginative power than may be manifested in following out to their
farthest limits the necessary consequences of such arbitrary com-
bination ; but let not the jests of the fancy be confounded with that
after serious work of the imagination which gives them all the
nervous verity and substance of which they are capable. Let not
the monsters of Chinese earthenware be confounded with the Faun,
Satyr, or Centaur.

How different this definition of the Imagination may be from the § 30. imagina-
idea of it commonly entertained among us, I can hardly say, because gg^y
I have a very indistinct idea of what is usually meant by the term, stood.
I hear modern works constantly praised as being imaginative, in

or in which more care was concentrated in every stroke, than the seemingly regardless
and impetuous handling of this painter.

On the habit of both Tintoret and Michael Angelo to work straight forward from the
block and on the canvass, without study or model, it is needless to insist; for though
this is one of the most amazing proofs of their imaginative power, it is a dangerous pre-
cedent. No mode of execution ought ever to be taught to a young artist as better than
another; he ought to understand the truth of what he has to do ; felicitous execution
will follow as a matter of course; and if he feels himself capable of getting at the right
at once, he Avill naturally do so without reference to precedent. He ought to hold always I

be a narrow one, with a slip on each side. He may pause, but he must not hesitate —
and tremble, but must not vacillate.

which I can trace no virtue of any kind; but simple, slavish, un-
palliated falsehood and exaggeration. I see not what merit there
can he in pure, ugly, resolute fiction; it is surely easy enough to he
wrong ; there are many ways of being unlike nature. I understand
not what virtue that is which entitles one of these ways to be called
imaginative, rather than another; and I am still farther embarrassed
by hearing the portions of those works called especially imaginative
in which there is the most effort at minute and mechanical statement
of contemptible details, and in which the artist would have been as
actual and absolute in imitation as an echo, if he had known how.
Against convictions which I do not understand I cannot argue;
but I may warn the artist that imagination of this strange kind is
not capable of bearing the time test; nothing of its doing has con-
tinued its influence over men; and if he desires to take place among
the great men of older time, there is but one way for it; and one
kind of imagination that will stand the immortal light: I know not
how far it is by effort cultivable; but we have evidence enough
before lis to show in what direction that effort must be made.

We have seen (§ 10.) that the Imagination is in no small degree
dependent on acuteness of moral emotion; in fact, all moral truth
can only thus be apprehended—and it is observable, generally, that
all true and deep emotion is imaginative, both in conception and
expression; and that the mental sight becomes sharper with every
full beat of the heart; and, therefore, all egotism, and selfish care,
or regard, are, in proportion to their constancy, destructive of ima-
gination ; whose play and power depend altogether on our being
able to forget ourselves and enter, like possessing spirits, into the
bodies of things about us.

Again, as the Life of Imagination is in the discovering of truth,
it is clear it can have no respect for sayings or opinions j knowing
in itself when it has invented truly, restless and tormented except
when it has this knowledge, its sense of success or failure is too
acute to be affected by praise or blame. Sympathy it desires—but
can do without; of opinions it is regardless, not in pride but because
it is conscious of a rule of action and object of aim in which it
cannot be mistaken; partly, also, in pure energy of desire, and
longing to do and to invent more and more, which suffer it not to

§ 31. How its
cultivation is
dependent on
the moral feel-
inRs.

suck the sweetness of praise—unless a little with the end of the
rod in its hand, and without pausing in its march. It goes straight
forward up the hill; no voices nor mutterings can turn it back, nor
petrify it from its purpose.^

Finally, it is evident, that, like the theoretic faculty, the imagin- § 33. And on
, p , , \ , , Ml habitual refer-

atlon must be fed constantly by external nature—atter the illustra- ence to nature.

" That which we know of the lives of M. Angelo and Tintoret is eminently illustrativo
of this temper.

We have, in the two preceding chapters, arrived at definite con-
clusions respecting the power and essence of the imaginative faculty.
In these tM^o acts of penetration and combination, its separating
and characteristic attributes are entirely developed; it remains for
us only to observe a certain habit or mode of operation in which it
frequently delights, and by which it addresses itself to our percep-
tions more forcibly, and asserts its presence more distinctly than in
those mighty but more secret workings wherein its life consists.

In our examination of the combining imagination, we chose to
assume the first or simple conception to be as clear in the absence
as in the presence of the object of it. This, I suppose, is, in point
of fact, never the case, nor is an approximation to such distinctness
of conception always a characteristic of the imaginative mind.
Many persons have thorough and felicitous power of drawing from
memory, yet never originate a thought, nor excite an emotion.

The form in which conception actually occurs to ordinary minds
appears to derive value and preciousness from that indefiniteness
which we alluded to in the second chapter (§ 2.); for there is an
unfailing charm in the memory and anticipation of things beautiful,
more sunny and spiritual than attaches to their presence; for with
their presence it is possible to be sated, and even wearied, but with
the imagination of them never; in so far that it needs some self-
discipline to prevent the mind from falling into a morbid condition
of dissatisfaction with all that it immediately possesses, and con-
tinual longing for things absent: and yet I think this charm is not
justly to be attributed to the mere vagueness and uncertainty of
the conception, except thus far, that of objects whose substantial

§ 1. Imagina-
tion contempla-
tive is not part
of the essence,
but only a habit
or mode of the
faculty.

§ 2. The am-
biguity of Con-
ception.

presence was painful, tlie sublimity and impressiveness, if there
were any, are retained in the conception, while the sensual offen-
siveness is withdrawn; thus circumstances of horror may be safely
touched in verbal description, and for a time dwelt upon by the
mind, as often by Homer and Spenser (by the latter frequently
with too much grossness), which could not for a moment be re-
garded or tolerated in their reality, or on canvass; and besides
this mellowing and softening operation on those it retains, the
conceptive faculty has the power of letting go many of them
altogether out of its groups of ideas, and retaining only those where
the meminisse juvabit will apply; and in this way the entire group
of memories becomes altogether delightful. But of those parts of § 3. Is not in
anything which are in themselves beautiful, I think the indistinct- adding to the
ness no benefit, but that the brighter they are the better ; and that f
the peculiar charm we feel in conception results from its grasp and
blending of ideas rather than from their obscurity; for we do not
usually recall, as we have seen, one part at a time only of a
pleasant scene, one moment only of a happy day; but together
with each single object we summon up a kind of crowded and
involved shadowing forth of all the other glories with which it
was associated, and into every moment we concentrate an epitome
of the day; and it will happen frequently that even when the
visible objects or actual circumstances are not in detail remem-
bered, the feeling and joy of them are obtained we know not how
or whence: and so, with a kind of conceptive burning-glass, we
bend the sunshine of all the day, and the fulness of all the scene
upon every point that we successively seize; and this together
with more vivid action of Fancy, for I think that the wilful and
playful seizures of the points that suit her purpose, and help her
springing, whereby she is distinguished from simple conception,
take place more easily and actively with the memory of things
than in presence of them. But, however this be, and I confess
that there is much that I cannot satisfactorily to myself unravel
with respect to the nature of simple conception, it is evident that
this agreeableness, whatever it be, is not by art attainable, for all
art is, in some sort, realization; it may be the realization of ob-
scurity or indefiniteness, but still it must differ from the mere

conception of obscurity and indefiniteness; so that whatever emo-
tions depend absolutely on imperfectness of conception^ as the
horror of Milton's Death, cannot be rendered by art; for art can
only lay hold of things which have shape, and destroys by its
touch the fearfulness or pleasurableness of those which shape
have none.

But on this indistinctness of conception, itself comparatively
valueless and unaffecting, is based the operation of the Imaginative
faculty with which we are at present concerned, and in which its
glory is consummated; whereby, depriving the subject of material
and bodily shape, and regarding such of its qualities only as it
chooses for particular piirpose, it forges these qualities together in
such groups and forms as it desires, and gives to their abstract
being consistency and reality, by striking them as it were with the
die of an image belonging to other matter, which stroke having
once received, they pass current at once in the peculiar conjunction
and for the peculiar value desired.

Thus, in the description of Satan quoted in the first chapter,
"And like a comet burned," the bodily shape of the angel is
destroyed, the inflaming of the formless spirit is alone regarded;
and this, and his power of evil, associated in one fearful and abs-
tract conception, are stamped to give them distinctness and per-
manence with the image of the comet, " That fires the length of
Ophiuchus huge." Yet this could not be done, but that the image
of the comet itself is in a measure indistinct, capable of awful
expansion, and full of threatening and fear. Again, in his fall,
the imagination gathers up the tlnmder, the resistance, the massy
prostration, separates them from the external form, and binds them
together by the help of that image of the mountain half sunk;
which again would be unfit but for its own indistinctness, and for
that glorious addition " with all his pines," whereby a vitality and
spear-like hostility are communicated to its falling form; and the
fall is marked as not utter subversion, but sinking only, the pines
remaining in their uprightness and unity and threatening of dark-
ness upon the descended precipice; and again, in that yet more
noble passage at the close of the fourth book, where almost every
operation of the contemplative imagination is concentrated; the

§ 4. But gives
to the Imagina-
tion its regard-
ant power over
them.

angelic squadron first gathered into one burning mass by the single
expression " sharpening in mooned horns," then told out in their
unity and multitude and stooped hostility, by the image of the
wind upon the corn; Satan endowed with godlike strength and
endurance in that mighty line, " Like TenerifF or Atlas, unre-
moved," with infinitude of size the next instant, and with all the
vagueness and terribleness of spiritual power, by the " H'orrour
plumed," and the what seemed both spear and shield."

The third function of Fancy, already spoken of as subordinate to § 5. The third
this of the Imagination, is the highest of which she is capable; like d^tinguilhed^
the Imagination, she beholds in the things submitted to her treatment im^ina-

things different from the actual; but the suggestions she follows are tive.
not in their nature essential in the object contemplated; and the
images resulting, instead of illustrating, may lead the mind away
from it, and change the current of contemplative feeling: for, as in
her operation parallel to Imagination penetrative we saw her dwell-
ing upon external features, while the nobler sister faculty entered
within; so now, when both, from what they see and know in their
immediate object, are conjuring up images illustrative or elevatory
of it, the Fancy necessarily summons those of mere external relation-
ship, and therefore of unaffecting influence; while tlie Imagination,
by every ghost she raises, tells tales about the prison house, and
therefore never loses her power over the heart, nor her unity of
emotion. On the other hand, the regardant or contemplative action
of Fancy is in this different from, and in this nobler than, that mere
seizing and likeness-catching operation we saw in her before; that,
when contemplative, she verily believes in the truth of the vision
she has summoned, loses sight of actuality, and beholds the new
and spiritual image faithfully and even seriously; whereas, before,
she summoned no spiritual image, but merely caught the vivid
actuality, or the curious resemblance of the real object; not that
these two operations are separate, for the Fancy passes gradually
from mere vivid sight of reality, and witty suggestion of likeness,
to a ghostly sight of what is unreal; and through this, in proportion
as she begins to feel, she rises towards and partakes of Imagination
itself; for Imagination and Fancy are continually united, and it is
necessary, when they are so, carefully to distinguish the feelingless

part which is Fancy's, from the sentient part, which is Imagination's.
Let us take a few instances. Here is Fancy, first, very beautiful,
in her simple capacity of likeness-catching:

" To-day we purpose — ay, this hour we mount.
To spur three leagues towards the Apennine.
Come down, we pray thee, ere the hot sun count
His dewy rosary on the eglantine."

Seizing on the outside resemblances of bead form, and on the
slipping from their threading bough one by one, the fancy is con-
tent to lose the heart of the thing, the solemnity of prayer: or
perhaps I do the glorious poet wrong in saying this, for the sense
of a sun worship and orison in beginning its race, may have been
in his mind; and so far as it was so, the passage is imaginative and
not fanciful. But that which most readers would accept from it,
is the mere flash of the external image, in whose truth the Fancy
herself does not yet believe, and therefore is not yet contemplative.
Here, however, is Fancy believing in the images she creates:

" It feeds the quick growth of the serpent-vine,
And the dark linked ivy tangling wild,
And budding, blown, or odour-faded blooms,
Which star the winds with points of coloured light
As they rain through them ; and bright golden globes
Of fruit suspended in their own green heaven. "

It is not, observe, a mere likeness that is caught here; but the
flowers and fruit are entirely deprived by the fancy of their material
existence, and contemplated by her seriously and faithfully as stars
and worlds; yet it is only external likeness that she catches; she
forces the resemblance, and lowers the dignity of the adopted image.

Next take two delicious stanzas of Fancy regardant (believing
in her creations), followed by one of heavenly imagination, from
Wordsworth's address to the daisy:

" A Nun demure—of lowly port;
Or sprightly maiden — of Love's court,—
In thy simplicity the sport
Of all temptations.
A Queen in crown of rubies drest,
A starveling in a scanty vest,
Are all as seems to suit thee best, —
Thy appellations.

" I see thae glittering from afar,
And then thou art a pretty star, —
Not quite so fair as many are
In heaven above thee.
Yet like a star, M^ith glittering crest,
Self-poised in air thou seem'st to rest; —
May peace come never to his nest
Who shall reprove thee!

" Sweet flower—for by that name at last,
When all my reveries are past,
I call thee, and to that cleave fast—
Sweet silent creature.
That breath'st with me, in sun and an-,
Do thou, as thou art wont, repair
My heart with gladness, and a share
Of thy meek nature."

Observe liow spiritual, yet how wandering and playful, the fancy § 6. Various
is in the first two stanzas, and how far she flies from the matter in
hand; never stopping to brood on the character of any one of the
images she summons, and yet for a moment truly seeing and be-
lieving in them all; while in the last stanza the imagination returns
with its deep feeling to the heart of the flower, and " cleaves fast"
to that. Compare the operation of the Imagination in Coleridge,
on one of the most trifling objects that could possibly have been
submitted to its action:

" The thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not:
Only that film which fluttered on the grate
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me, who live.
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling spu-it
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or min-or seeking of itself.
And makes a toy of thought."

Lastly, observe the sweet operation of Fancy regardant, in the
following well-known passage from Scott, where both her beholding
and transforming powers are seen in their simplicity:

" The rocky summits, split and rent.
Formed turret, dome, or battlement.
Or seemed fantastically set
With cupola or minaret.

Nor were these earth-born castles bare,
Nor lacked they many a banner fair,
For, from their shivered brows displayed,
Far o'er th' unfathomable glade,
All twinkling with the dew-drop sheen,
The briar-rose fell, in streamers green,—
And creeping shrubs of thousand dyes
WaA^ed in the west wind's summer sighs."

Let the reader refer to tliis passage, with its pretty tremulous
conclusion above the pine tree, " where glistening streamers waved
and danced," and then compare with it the following, where the
Imagination operates on a scene nearly similar:

" Grey rocks did peep from the spare moss, and stemmed
The struggling brook ; tall spires of windle strae
Threw their thin shadows down the rugged slope.
And nought but gnarled roots of ancient pines.
Branchless and blasted, clenched, with grasping roots,

Yet ghastly. For, as fast years flow away,
The smooth brow gathers, and the hair grows thin
And white; and, where irradiate dewy eyes
Had shone, gleam stony orbs: so from his steps
Bright flowers departed, and the beautiful shade
Of die green groves, with all their odorous winds
And musical motions.....

Its stony jaws, the abrupt mountain breaks,
And seems with its accumulated crags
To overhang the world ; for wide expand
Beneath the wan stars, and descending moon,
Islanded seas, blue mountains, mighty streams.
Dim tracts and vast, robed in the lustrous gloom
Of leaden-coloured even, and fiery hills
Mingling their flames with twilight, on the verge
Of the remote horizon. The near scene,
In naked and severe simplicity, j

Made contrast with the universe. A pine j
Rock-rooted, stretch'd athwai-t the vacancy
Its swinging boughs, to each inconstant blast
Yielding one oidy response at each pause.
In most familiar cadence, with the howl.
The thunder, and the hiss of homeless streams,
Mingling its solemn song."

session of the solitary scene, the Imagination only giving weight,
meaning, and strange human sympathies to all its sights and sounds.

In that from Scott ^ the Fancy, led away by the outside resem-
blance of floating form and hue to the banners, loses the feeling
and possession of the scene, and places herself in circumstances of
character completely opposite to the quietness and grandeur of the
natural objects; this would have been unjustifiable, but that the
resemblance occurs to the mind of the monarch, rather than to that
of the poet; and it is that, which, of all others, would have been
the most likely to occur at the time; in this point of view it has
high imaginative propriety. Of the same fanciful character is that
transformation of the tree trunks into dragons noticed before in
Turner's Jason; and in the same way this becomes imaginative, as
it exhibits the effect of Fear in disposing to morbid perception.
Compare with it the real and high action of the Imagination on the
same matter in Wordsworth's Yew trees (perhaps the most vigorous
and solemn bit of forest landscape ever painted): —

" Each particular trunk a growth
Of intertwisted fibres serpentine,
Up-coiling and inveterately convolved,
Nor uninformed with Phantasy, and looks
That threaten the profane"

It is too long to quote, but the reader should refer to it: let him
note especially, if painter, that pure touch of colour, " By sheddings
from the pining umbrage tinged."

In the same way the blasted trunk on the left, in Turner's draw-
ing of the spot where Harold fell at the battle of Hastings, takes,
where its boughs first separate, the shape of the head of an arrow;
this, which is mere fancy in itself, is imagination as it supposes in

' Let it not be supposed that I mean to compare the sickly dreaming of Shelley over
clouds and waves, with the masculine and magnificent grasp of men and things which
we find in Scott; it only happens that these two passages are more illustrative, by the
likeness of the scenery they treat, than any others I could have opposed, and that Shelley
is peculiarly distinguished by the faculty of Contemplative imagination. Scott's healthy
and truthful feeling would not allow him to represent the benighted hunter, provoked
by loss of game, horse, and way at once, as indulging in any more exalted flights of
imagination than those naturally consequent on the contrast between the night's lodging
he expected, and that which befitted him.

the spectator an excited condition of feeling dependent on the history
of the spot.

I have been led perhaps into too great detail in illustrating these
points; but I think it is of no small importance to prove how in
all cases the Imagination is based upon, and appeals to, a deep
heart feeling; and how faithful and earnest it is in contemplation
of the subject-matter, never losing sight of it, nor disguising it, but
depriving it of extraneous and material accidents, and regarding it
in its disembodied essence. I have not, however, sufficiently noted,
in opposition to it, that diseased action of the fancy which depends
more on nervous temperament than intellectual power; and which,
as in dreaming, fever, insanity, and other morbid conditions of mind,
is frequently a source of daring and inventive conception; and so
the visionary appearances resulting from disturbances of the frame
by passion, and from the rapid tendency of the mind to invest with
shape and intelligence the active influences about it, as in the
various demons, spirits, and fairies, of all imaginative nations;
which, however, I consider are no more to be ranked as right
creations of fancy or imagination than things actually seen and
heard; for the action of the nerves is, I suppose, the same, whether
externally caused, or from within, although very grand imagination
may be shown by the intellectual anticipation and realization of such
impressions, as in that glorious vignette of Turner's to the voyage
of Columbus. " Slowly along the evening sky they went." Note
especially how admirably true to the natural form, and yet how
suggestive of the battlement, he has rendered the level flake of
evening cloud.

I believe that it is unnecessary for me to enter into farther detail
of illustration respecting these points; for fuller explanation of the
is not to be ex- operations of the contemplative faculty on^ things verbally ex-
pressible, the reader may be referred to Woirdsworth's preface to
his poems; it only remains for us, here, to examine how far this
imaginative or abstract conception is to be conveyed by the material
art of the sculptor or the painter.

Now, it is evident that the bold action of either the fancy or the
imagination, dependent on a bodiless and spiritual image of the
object, is not to be by lines or colours represented. We cannot, in

§ 8. Tiie action
of Contempla-
tive imagination

the painting of Satan fallen, suggest any image of pines or crags;
neither can we assimilate the briar and the banner, nor give human
sympathy to the motion of the film, nor voice to the swinging of
the pines.

powers that I alluded in defining the meaning of the term Ideal, ^e^hig'of fom
in the thirteenth chapter of the preceding section. For it is by without colour;
this operation that the productions of high art are separated from
those of the Realist.

And, first, there is evidently capability of separating colour and
form, and considering either separately. Form we find abstractedly
considered by the sculptor; how far it would be possible to ad-
vantage a statue by the addition of colour, I venture not to affirm;
the question is too extensive to be here discussed. High authorities,
and ancient practice, are in favour of colour; so the sculpture of
the middle ages. The two statues of Mino da Fiesole in the church
of St^ Caterina at Pisa have been coloured, the irises of the eyes
painted dark, and the hair gilded, as also I think the Madonna in
St®. Maria della Spina; the eyes have been painted in the sculptures
of Orcagna in Or San Michele. But it looks like a remnant of
barbarism (compare the pulpit of Guido da Como, in the church
of San Bartolomeo at Pistoja); and I have never seen colour on
any solid forms, that did not, to my mind, neutralize all other
power: the porcelains of Luca della Robbia are painful examples;
and, in lower art, Florentine mosaic in relief. Gilding is more
admissible, and tells sometimes sweetly upon figures of quaint
design, as on the pulpit of St^ Maria Novella, while it spoils the
classical ornaments of the mouldings. But the truest grandeur of
sculpture I believe to be in the white form; something of this
feeling may be owing to the difficulty, or rather the impossibility,
of obtaining truly noble colour upon it; but if we could colour
the Elgin marbles with the flesh tint of Giorgione, 1 had rather
not have it done.

be doubted whether it be desirable: yet I think that to the full en- without form;
joyment of it a certain sacrifice of form is necessary; sometimes by

reducing it to the shapeless glitter of the gem, as often Tintoret
and Bassano; sometimes by loss of outline and blending of parts,
as Turner; sometimes by flatness of mass, as often Giorgione and
Titian. How far it is possible for the painter to represent those
mountains of Shelly as the poet sees them, " mingling their flames
with twilight," I cannot say; but my impression is, that there is no
true abstract mode of considering colour; and that all the loss of
form in the works of Titian or Turner is not ideal, but the repre-
sentation of the natural conditions under which bright colour is
seen; for form is always in a measure lost by Nature herself when
colour is very vivid.

Again, there is capability of representing the essential character,
form, and colour of an object, without external texture. On this
point much has been said by Reynolds and others, and it is, in-
deed, perhaps the most unfailing characteristic of great manner in
painting Compare a dog of Edwin Landseer with a dog of Paul
Yeronese. In the first, the outward texture is wrought out with
exquisite dexterity of handling, and minute attention to all the
accidents of curl and gloss which can give appearance of reality;
while the hue and power of the sunshine, and the truth of the
shadow, on all these forms are neglected, and the large relations of
the animal, as a mass of colour, to the sky or ground, or other
parts of the picture, utterly lost. This is realism at the expense
of ideality; it is treatment essentially unimaginative.' With Vero-
nese, there is no curling nor crisping, no glossiness nor sparkle,
hardly even hair; a mere type of hide, laid on with a few scene-
painter's touches: but the essence of dog is there; the entire, mag-

' I do not mean to withdraw the praise I have given, and'shall always be willing to
give to pictures, such as the Shepherd's Chief Mourner, and many others, in which the
soul, if we may so call it, of animals, has been explained to us in modes hitherto unfelt
and unexampled.

But Mr. Landseer is much more a natural historian than a painter ; and the power
of his works depends more on his knowledge and love of animals—on his understanding
of their minds and ways—on his unerring notice and memory of their gestures and
expressions, than on artistical or technical excellence. He never aims at colour—his
composition is always weak, and sometimes unskilful; and his execution, though partially
dexterous, and admirably adapted to the imitation of certain textures and surfaces, is
far from being that of a great Painter attained by the mastery of every various difficulty,
and changefully adapted to the treatment of every object. Compare the notes at the
end of this volume.

nificent, generic animal type, muscular and living, and with broad,
pure, sunny daylight upon him, and bearing his true and harmonious
relation of colour to all colour about him. This is ideal treatment.

The same treatment is found in the works of all the greatest men;
they all paint the lion more than his mane, and the horse rather than
his hide: and I think also they are often more careful to obtain the
right expression of large and universal light and colour, than accuracy
of features ; for the warmth of sunshine, and the force of sunlighted
hue, are always sublime on whatever subject they may be exhibited;
and so also are light and shade, if grandly arranged, as may be well
seen in an etching of Rembrandt's of a spotted shell, which he has
made altogether sublime by broad truth and large ideality of light
and shade : and so we find frequent instances of very grand ideality
in treatment of the most commonplace still life, by our own Hunt,
where the petty glosses, and delicacies, and minor forms, are all
merged in a broad glow of suffused colour; so also in pieces of the
same kind by Etty, where, however, though the richness and play
of colour are greater and the arrangement grander, there is less
expression of light; neither is there anything in modern art that
can be set beside some choice passages of Hunt in this respect.

Again, it is possible to represent objects capable of various acci- § j2. Abstrac-

How far this may be done with things having necessary form as of animal form;
animals, T am not prepared to say. The Lions of the Egyptian
room in the British Museum, and the Fish beside Michael Angelo's
Jonah, are instances; and there is imaginative power about both
which we find not in the more perfectly realised Florentine boar,
nor in Raffaelle's fish of the Draught. And yet the propriety and
nobility of these types depend on the architectural use and cha-
racter of the one, and on the typical meaning of the other; we
should be grieved to see the forms of the Egyptian lion substituted
for those of Raffaelle's in its struggle with Samson, nor would the
whale of Michael Angelo be tolerated in the nets of Gennesaret. So
that I think it is only when the figure of the creature stands, not
for any representation of vitality, but merely for a letter or type of
certain symbolical meaning, or else is adopted as a form of decora-
tion or support in architecture, that such generalization is allowable;

and in such circumstances it is perhaps necessary to adopt a typical
form. The evil consequences of the opposite treatment are ludi-
crously exhibited in the St. Peter of Carlo Dolci in the Pitti Palace,
which owing to the prominent, glossy-plumed, and crimson-combed
cock, is liable to be taken for the portrait of a poulterer; only let
it be observed that the treatment of the animal form here is offensive,
not only from its realization, but from the pettiness and meanness
of its realization; for it might, in other hands than Carlo Dolci's,
have been a sublime cock, though a real one; but, in his, it is fit
for nothing but the spit. Compare, as an example partly of sym-
bolical treatment, partly of magnificent realization, that supernatural
lion of Tintoret (in the picture of the Doge Loredano before the
Madonna) with the plumes of his mighty wings clashed together in
cloudlike repose, and the strength of the sea winds shut within their
folding. And note, farther, the difference between the typical use
of the animal, as in this case, and that of the fish of Jonah (and
again the fish before mentioned whose form is indicated in the clouds
of the Baptism), and the actual occurrence of the creature itself^
with concealed meaning, as the ass colt of the Crucifixion, which it
was necessary to paint as such, and not as an ideal form.

I cannot enter here into the question of the exact degree of
severity and abstraction necessary in the forms of living things
architecturally employed: my own feeling on the subject is, though
I dare not lay it down as a principle (with the Parthenon pediment
standing against me like the shield of Ajax), that no perfect repre-
sentation of animal form is right in architectural decoration. For
my own part, I had much rather see the metopes in the Elgin room
of the British Museum, and the Parthenon without them, than have
them together ; and I would not surrender, in an architectural point
of view, one mighty line of the colossal, quiet,' life-in-death statue
mountains of Egypt with their narrow fixed eyes and hands on their
rocky limbs, nor one Romanesque fa9ade with its porphyry mosaic
of indefinable monsters, nor one Gothic moulding of rigid saints and
grinning goblins, for ten Parthenons. And, I believe, I could show
some rational ground for this seeming barbarity, if this were the
place to do so; but at present I can only ask the reader to compare
the effect of the so-called barbarous ancient mosaics on the front of

§ 13. Either
when it is sym-
bolicivlly used,

§ 14. Or in
architectural
decoration.

St. Mark's (as they have been recorded, happily, by the faithfulness
of the good Gentile Bellini, in one of his pictures now in the Venice
Gallery) with the veritably barbarous pictorial substitutions of the
seventeenth century (one only of the old mosaics remains, or did
remain till lately, over the northern door, but it is probably by this
time torn down by some of the Venetian committees of taste); and
also I would have the old portions of the interior ceiling, or of the
mosaics of Murano and Torcello, and the glorious Cimabue mosaic
of Pisa, and the roof of the Baptistery at Parma (that of the Florence
Baptistery is a bad example, owing to its crude whites and compli-
cated mosaic of small forms), all of which are as barbarous as they
can well be, in a certain sense, but mighty in their barbarism, com-
pared with any architectural decorations whatsoever, consisting of
professedly perfect animal forms, from the vile frescoes of Federigo
Zuccaro at Florence to the ceiling of the Sistine; and, again, compare
the professedly perfect sculpture of Milan Cathedral with the statues
of the porches of Chartres; only be it always observed that it is § 15. Exception
not rudeness and ignorance of art, but intellectually awful abstrac- superimposed
tion that I would uphold : and also be it noted that in all ornament ornament,
which takes place in the general effect merely as so much fretted
stone, in capitals and other pieces of minute detail, the forms may
be, and perhaps ought to be, elaborately imitative; and in this
respect again the capitals of St. Mark's church, and at the Doge's
palace at Venice, may be an example to the architects of all the
world, in their boundless inventiveness, unfailing elegance, and
elaborate finish. There is more mind poured out in turning a
single angle of that church than would serve to build a modern
cathedral.^

' I have not brought forward any instances of the Imaginative power in architecture,
as my object is not at present to exhibit its operation in all matter, but only to define
its essence; but it may be well to note, in our new Plouses of Parliament, how far
a building approved by a committee of Taste may proceed without manifesting either
imagination or composition. It remains to be seen how far the towers may redeem it";
and I allude to it at present unwillingly, and only in the desire of influencing, so far as
I may, those who have the power to prevent the adoption of a design for a bridge to
take place of that of Westminster, which was exhibited in 1844 at the Royal Academy,
professing to be in haimony with the new building, but which was fit only to cany
a railroad over a canal.

So far, then, of the abstraction proper to architecture, and to
symbolical uses, of which I shall have occasion to speak hereafter at
length, referring to it only at present as one of the operations of ima-
gination contemplative; other abstractions there are which are neces-
sarily consequent on the imperfection of materials, as of the hair in
sculpture, which is necessarily treated in masses that are in no sort
imitative, but only stand for hair, and have the grace, flow, and
feeling of it without the texture or division : and other abstractions
there are in which the form of one thing is fancifully indicated in
the matter of another; as in phantoms and cloud shapes, the use of
which, in mighty hands, is often most impressive, as in the cloudy-
charioted Apollo of Nicolo Poussin in our own gallery, which the
reader may oppose to the substantial Apollo, in Wilson's Niobe; and
again in the phantom vignette of Turner already noticed ; only such
operations of the imagination are to be held of lower kind, and
dangerous consequence if frequently trusted in ; for those painters
only have the right imaginative power who can set the supernatural
form before us, fleshed and boned like ourselves.^ Other abstractions
occur, frequently, of things which have much accidental variety of
form; as of waves, on Greek sculptures in successive volutes, and
of clouds often in supporting volumes in the sacred pictures; but
these I do not look upon as results of imagination at all, but mere
signs and letters; and whenever a very highly imaginative mind
touches them, it always realizes as far as may be. Even Titian is
content to use, at the top of his S. Pietro Martire, the conventional,
round, opaque cloud, which cuts his trees open like an axe; but
Tintoret, in his picture of the Golden Calf, though compelled to
represent the Sinai under conventional form, in order that the re-
ceiving of the tables might be seen at the top of it, yet so soon as it
is possible to give more truth, he takes a grand fold of horizontal
cloud straight from the flanks of the Alps, and shows the forests of
the mountains through its misty volume, like sea-weed through
deep sea.^ Nevertheless, when the realization is impossible, bold
symbolism is of the highest value, and in religious art, as we shall

All the clouds of Tintoret are sublime ; the worst that I know in art are Correggio's,
especially in the Madonna della Scudella, and Duomo of Parma.

§ 16. Abstrac-
tion necessary
from imperfec-
tion of mate-
rials.

§ 17. Abstrac-
tions of things
capable of
varied accident
are not imagi-
native ;

presently see, even necessary, as of the rays of light in the Titian
woodcut of St. Francis; and sometimes the attention is directed by
some such strange form to the meaning of the image, which may
be missed if it remains in its natural purity, (as, I suppose, few, in
looking at the Cephalus and Procris of Turner, note the sympathy
of those faint rays that are just drawing back and dying between
the trunks of the far-off forest, with the ebbing life of the nymph,
unless, indeed, they happen to recollect the same sympathy marked
by Shelley in the Alastor); but the imagination is not shown in any
such modifications; however, in some cases they may be valuable,
and I note them merely in consequence of their peculiar use in re-
ligious art, presently to be examined.

The last mode we have here to note in which the Imagination § 19. Exagge-
regardant may be expressed in art is Exaggeration, of which, as it and^Hmits!
is the vice of all bad artists, and may be constantly resorted to

without any warrant of imagination, it is necessary to note strictly tion.
the admissible limits.

In the first place, a colossal statue is not necessarily any more
an exaggeration of what it represents, than a miniature is a dimi-
nution ; it need not be a representation of a giant, but a representa-
tion, on a large scale, of a man: only it is to be observed, that, as
any plane intersecting the cone of rays between us and the object
must receive an image smaller than the object, a small image is
rationally and completely expressive of a larger one; but not a
large of a small one. Hence I think that all statues above the
Elgin standard, or that of Michael Angelo's Night and Morning,
are, in a measure, taken by the eye for representations of giants,
and I think them always disagreeable. The amount of exaggera-
tion admitted by Michael Angelo is valuable, because it separates
the emblematic from the human form, and gives greater freedom to
the grand lines of the frame; for notice of his scientific system of
increase of size I may refer the reader to Sir Charles Bell's remarks
on the statues of the Medici chapel. But there is one circumstance
which Sir Charles has not noticed, and in the interpretation of
which, therefore, it is likely I may be myself wrong, that the ex-
tremities are singularly small in proportion to the limbs; by which
means there is an expression given of strength and activity greater

than in the ordinar j human type: which appears to me to be an
allowance for that alteration in proportion necessitated by increase
of size, which has been spoken of in Chap. VI. of the first Section,
§ 10., note; not but that Michael Angelo always makes the ex-
tremities comparatively small, but smallest, comparatively, in his
largest works: so I think, from the size of the head, it may be
conjectured respecting the Theseus of the Elgins. Such adaptations
are not necessary when the exaggerated image is spectral; for, as
the laws of matter in that case can have no operation, we may
expand the form as far as we choose, only let careful distinction
be made between the size of the thing represented, and the scale of
the representation. The canvass on which Sir T. Lawrence has
stretched his Satan in the schools of the Royal Academy is a mere
concession to inability. He might have made him look more
gigantic in one of a foot square.
§ 20. Secondly, Another kind of Exaggeration is of things whose size is variable
pabie rf^varkty ^ degree greater than that usual wdth them, as in waves

ation, so long as the laws which Nature observes in her increase be
observed. Thus, for instance, the form and polished surface of a
breaking ripple three inches high are not representative of either
the form or the surface of the surf of a storm, nodding ten feet
above the beach; neither would the cutting ripple of a breeze upon
a lake, if simply exaggerated, represent the forms of Atlantic
surges : but as Nature increases her bulk, she diminishes the angles
of ascent, and increases her divisions; and if we would represent
surges of size greater than ever existed, which it is lawful to do,
we must carry out these operations to still greater extent. Thus
Turner, in his picture of the Slave Ship, divides the whole sea into
two masses of enormous swell, and conceals the horizon by a
gradual slope of only two or three degrees. This is intellectual
exaggeration. In the Academy exhibition of 1843, there was, in
one of the smaller rooms, a black picture of a storm, in which
there appeared on the near sea, just about to be overwhelmed by a
breaker curling right over it, an object at first sight liable to be
taken for a walnut shell, but which, on close examination, proved
to be a ship with mast and sail. This is childish exaggeration.

because it is impossible, by the laws of matter and motion, that
such a breaker should ever exist. Again, in mountains, we have
repeatedly observed the necessary building up and multitudinous
division of the higher peaks, and the smallness of the slopes by
which they usually rise. We may, therefore, build up the moun-
tain as high as we please, but Ave must do it in nature's way, and
not in impossible peaks and precipices: not but that a daring
feature is admissible here and there, as the ]\Iatterhorn is admitted
by nature; but we must not compose a picture out of such excep-
tions ; we may use them, but they must be as exceptions exhibited.
I shall have much to say, when we come to treat of the sublime, of
the various modes of treating mountain form; so that at present I
shall only point to an unfortunate instance of inexcusable and
effectless exaggeration in the distance of Turner's vignette to Mil-
ton (the Temptation on the Mountain), and desire the reader to
compare it with legitimate exaggeration, in his vignette to the
second part of Jacqueline, in Rogers's poems.

Another kind of Exaggeration is necessary to retain the charac- § 21, Thirdly,
teristic impressions of nature on reduced scale. It is not possible, expressio^ of
for instance, to give the leafage of trees in its proper proportion,
on a small scale, without entirely losing their grace of form and miniahed scale
curvature; of this the best proof is found in the calotype or
daguerreotype, which fail in foliage, not only because the green
rays are ineffective, but because, on the small scale of the image,
the reduced leaves lose their organization, and look like moss
attached to sticks. In order to retain, therefore, their character
of flexibility, the painter is often compelled to increase the propor-
tionate size of the leaves, and to arrange them in generic masses.
Of this treatment compare the grand examples throughout the
Liber Studiorum. That it is by such means only that the ideal
character of objects is to be preserved, has been observed in the
13th chapter of the first section. In all these cases exaggeration
is only lawful as the sole means of arriving at truth of impression
when strict fidelity is out of the question.

Other modes of Exaggeration there are, on which I shall not at
present farther insist, the proper place for their discussion being in
treating of the sublime; and these which I have at present in-

stanced are enough to establish the point at issue, respecting
imaginative verity, inasmuch as we find that exaggeration itself, if
imaginative, is referred to principles of truth, and of actual being.

We have now, I think, reviewed the various modes in which
Imagination contemplative may be exhibited in art, and arrived at
all necessary certainties respecting the essence of the faculty: which
we have found in its three functions. Associative of Truth, Pene-
trative of Truth, and Contemplative of Truth; and having no
dealings nor relations with any kind of falsity. One task, how-
ever, remains to us, namely, to observe the operation of the Theo-
retic and Imaginative faculties together, in the attempt at realization
to the bodily sense of Beauty supernatural and divine.

In our investigation, in the first Section, of the laws of beauty, § i. Thesub-
we confined ourselves to the observation of lower nature, or of
humanity. We were prevented from proceeding to deduce con- detail,
elusions respecting divine ideality by our not having then es-
tablished any principles respecting the Imaginative faculty, by
which, under the discipline of the Theoretic, such ideality is con-
ceived. I had purposed to conclude the present Section by a
careful examination of this subject; but as this is evidently foreign
to the matter immediately under discussion, and involves questions
of great intricacy respecting the development of mind among those
pagan nations who are supposed to have produced high examples
of spiritual ideality, I believe it will be better to delay such in-
quiries until we have concluded our detailed observation of the
beauty of visible nature; and I shall therefore at present take
notice only of one or two principles, which were referred to, or
implied, in the chapter respecting the Human ideal, and without
the enunciation of which that chapter might lead to false con-
clusions.

There are four ways in which Beings supernatural may be § 2. The con-
conceived as manifesting themselves to human sense. The first, of manif™tatira
by external types, signs, or influences; as God to Moses in the Beta^gfarffour
flames of the bush, and to Elijah in the voice of Horeb.

The second, by the assuming of a form not properly belonging
to them; as the Holy Spirit of that of a Dove; the second person
of the Trinity of that of a Lamb; and so such manifestations,
under Angelic or other form, of the first person of the Trinity, as
seem to have been made to Abraham, Moses, and Ezekiel.

§ 3. And these It is evident that in all these cases, Avherever there is form at

Our inquiry is simply therefore, by what modifications those
creature forms to us known, as of a lamb, a bird, or a human
creature, may be explained as signs or habitations of Divinity, or
of angelic essence, and not creatures such they seem.
§ 4. Superna- This may be done in two ways. First, by effecting some change
may be^nTpreTs- i^i the appearance of the creature inconsistent with its actual nature;
ed on these g^g jj^y giving it colossal size, or unnatural colour or material, as of

mena inconsist- gold, or silver, or flame, instead of flesh; or taking away its pro-
common nature perty of matter altogether, and forming it of light or shade, or
(^ompar^e Chap, intermediate step, of cloud or vapour; or explaining it by

terrible concomitant circumstances, as of wounds in the body, or
strange lights and seemings round about it; or joining of two bodies
together, as in angels' wings. Of all which means of attaining
supernatural character (which, though in their nature ordinary and
vulgar, are yet effective and very glorious in mighty hands) we
have already seen the limits in speaking of the Imagination.
§ 5. Or by in- But the second means of obtaining supernatural character is that
herent dignity.J which we are now concerned, namely, retaining the actual

form in its full and material presence, and, without aid from any
external interpretation whatsoever, to raise that form by mere in^
herent dignity to such pitch of power and impressiveness as cannot
but assert and stamp it for superhuman.

On the north side of the Campo Santo at Pisa, are a series of
paintings from the Old Testament liistory by Benozzo Gozzoli. In
the earlier of these, angelic presences, mingled with human, occur
frequently, illustrated by no awfulness of light, nor incorporeal
tracing. Clear revealed they move, in human forms, in the broad
daylight and on the open earth, side by side, and hand in hand
with men. But they never miss of the angel.

He who can do this, has reached the last pinnacle and utmost
power of ideal, or any other art. He stands in no need, thence-
forward, of cloud, or lightning, or tempest, or terror of mystery.
His sublime is independent of the elements. It is of that which
shall stand when they shall melt with fervent heat, and light the
firmament when the sun is as sackcloth of hair.

Let us consider by what means this has been effected, so far as § 6. First, Of
they are by analysis traceable; and that is not far, for here, as orins^rrtion"
always, we find that the greater part of what has been rightly
accomplished has been done by faitli and intense feeling, and
cannot, by aid of any rules or teaching, be either tried, estimated,
or imitated.

And first, of the expression of supernatural influence on forms
actually human, as of Sibyl or Prophet. It is evident that not
only here is it unnecessary, but we are not altogether at liberty
to trust for expression to the utmost ennobling of the human form :
for we cannot do more than this, when that form is to be the
actual representation, and not the recipient of divine presence.
Hence in order to retain the actual humanity definitely, we must
leave upon it such signs of the operation of Sin and the liability to
Death as are consistent with human ideality; and often more than
these, definite signs of immediate and active evil, when the prophetic
spirit is to be expressed in men such as were Saul and Balaam;
neither may we ever, with just discrimination, touch the utmost
limits of beauty in human form when inspiration only is to be
expressed, and not angelic or divine being; of which reserve and
subjection the most instructive instances are found in the works
of Angelico, who invariably uses inferior types for the features of
humanity, even glorified (excepting always the Madonna), nor ever
exerts his full power of beauty, either in feature or expression,
except in angels, or in the Madonna, or in Christ. Now the ex-
pression of Spiritual influence without supreme elevation of the
bodily type we have seen to be a work of Penetrative imagination,
and we found it accomplished by Michael Angelo; but I think by
him only. I am aware of no one else who, to my mind, has ex-
pressed the inspiration of Prophet or Sibyl; this, however, I affirm
not, but shall leave to the determination of the reader, as the

principles at present to be noted refer entirely to that elevation of
the Creature form necessary when it is actually representative of a
Spiritual being.

more than crea- think this almost self-evident, for it is clear that the illimitableness
ture IS possible.

of Divine attributes cannot be by matter represented (though it
may be typified); and I believe that all who are acquainted with
the range of sacred art will admit, not only that no representation
of Christ has ever been even partially successful, but that the
greatest painters fall therein below their accustomed level; Peru-
gino and Fra Angelico especially: Leonardo has, I think, done
best; but perhaps the beauty of the fragment left at Milan (for in
spite of all that is said of repainting and destruction, that Cenacola
is still the finest in existence) is as much dependent on the very
untraceableness resulting from injury as on its original perfection.
Of more daring attempts at representation of Divinity we need not
speak; only this is to be noted respecting them, that though by the
ignorant Romanists many such efibrts were made under the idea of
actual representation (note the way in which Cellini speaks of the
seal made for the Pope), by the nobler among them I suppose they
were intended, and by us at any rate they may always be received,
as mere symbols, the noblest that could be employed, but as much
symbols still as a triangle, or the Alpha and Omega; nor do I
think that the most scrupulous amongst Christians ought to desire
to exchange the power obtained by the use of this symbol in
Michael Angelo's creation of Adam and of Eve, for the effect which
would be produced by the substitution of any other sign in place
of it. Of these efforts then we need reason no | farther, but may
limit ourselves to considering the purest modes of giving a con-
ception of superhuman but still creature form, as of angels; in
equal rank with whom, perhaps, we may without offence place the
mother of Christ: at least we must so regard the type of the
Madonna in receiving it from Romanist painters.^

' I take no note of the representation of Evil Spirits, since throughout we have been
occupied in the pursuit of Beauty ; but it may be observed generally, that there is great
difficulty to be overcome in attempts of this kind, because the elevation of the form

§ 7. No repre-
sentation of
that which is

them by the Spiritual creature. There is a beautiful instance of ^^ modification
^ _ _ ^ ^ accessaries.

this in John Bellini's picture of St. Jerome at Venice. The Saint
sits upon a rock, his grand form defined against clear green open
sky; he is reading; a noble tree springs out of a cleft in the rock,
bends itself suddenly back to form a rest for the volume, then
shoots up into the sky. There is something very beautiful in this
obedient ministry of the lower creature; but be it observed that
the sweet feeling of the whole depends upon the service being such
as is consistent with its nature. It is not animated, it does not
listen to the saint, nor bend itself towards him as if in affection;
this would have been mere fancy, illegitimate and effectless. But
the simple bend of the trunk to receive the book is miraculous
subjection of the true nature of the tree; it is therefore imaginative,
and very touching.

It is not often, however, that the religious painters even go this § 9, Landscape
length; they content themselves usually with impressing on the pa^titL^^^^itr
landscape perfect symmetry and order, such as may seem consistent
with, or induced by, the spiritual nature they would represent. All metrical,
signs of decay, disturbance, and imperfection, are also banished;
and in doing this it is evident that some unnaturalness and sin-
gularity must result, inasmuch as there are no veritable forms of
landscape but express or imply a state of progression or of im-
perfection. All mountain forms are seen to be produced by con-

necessary to give it spirituality destroys the appearance of evil; hence even the greatest
painters have been reduced to receive aid from the fancy, and to eke out all they could
conceive of malignity by help of horns, hoofs, and claws, Giotto's Satan in the Campo
Santo, with the serpent gnawing the heart, is fine; so many of the fiends of Orcagna,
and always those of Michael Angelo. Tintoret, in the Temptation, with his usual
truth of invention, has represented the Evil Spirit under the form of a fair angel, the
wings burning with crimson and silver, the face sensual and treacherous. It is in-
structive to compare the results of imagination associated with powerful fancy in the
demons of these great painters, or even in such nightmares as that of Salvator already
spoken of (Sec. I. Chap. V. § 12. note), with the simple ugliness of idiotic distortion
in the meaningless, terrorless monsters of Bronzino in the large picture of the Uffizii;
where the painter, utterly uninventive, having assembled all that is abominable of
hanging flesh, bony limbs, crane necks, staring eyes, and straggling hair, cannot yet, by
the sum and substance of all, obtain as much real fearfulness as an imaginative painter
could throw into the tiu'n of a lip or the knitting of a brow.

vulsion and modelled by decay; the finer forms of cloud have
threatenings in them of storm; all forest groupmg is wrought out
with varieties of strength and growth among its several members,
and bears evidences of struggle with unkind influences. All such
appearances are banished in the supernatural landscape; the trees
grow straight^ equally branched on each side, and of such slight
and feathery frame as shows them never to have encountered
blight, or frost, or tempest. The mountains stand up in fantastic
pinnacles; there is on them no trace of torrent, no scathe of light-
ning; no fallen fragments encumber their foundations, no worn
ravines divide their flanks; the seas are always waveless, the skies
always calm, crossed only by fair, horizontal, lightly wreathed,
white clouds.

In some cases these conditions result partly from feeling, partly
from ignorance of the facts of nature, or incapability of repre-
senting them, as in the first type of the treatment found in Giotto
and his school; in others they are observed on principle, as by
Benozzo Gozzoli, Perugino, and Raffkelle. There is a beautiful
instance by the former in the frescoes of the Hicardi Palace, where,
behind the adoring angel groups, the landscape is governed by the
most absolute symmetry; roses, and pomegranates, their leaves
drawn to the last rib and vein, twine themselves in fair and perfect
order about delicate trellises; broad stone pines and tall cypresses
overshadow them, bright birds hover here and there in the serene
sky, and groups of angels, hand joined with hand, and wing with
wing, glide and float through the glades of the unentangled forest.
But behind the human figures, behind the pomp and turbulence of
the kingly procession descending from the distant hills, the spirit
of the landscape is changed. Severer mountains rise in the distance,
ruder prominences and less flowery vary the nearer ground, and
gloomy shadows remain unbroken beneath the forest branches.

The landscape of Perugino, for grace, purity, and as much of
nature as is consistent with the above-named conditions, is un-
rivalled ; and the more interesting because in him, certainly, what-
ever limits are set to the rendering of nature proceed not from
incapability. The sea is in the distance almost always, then some
blue promontories and undulating dewy park ground, studded with

§ 10. Land-
scape of Be-
nozzo Gozzoli.

§ 11. Land-
scape of Peru-
gino and Raf.
faelle.

glittering trees. In the landscape of tlie fresco in St^ Maria
Maddalena at Florence there is more variety than is usual with
him: a gentle river winds round the bases of rocky hills, a river
like our own Wye or Tees in their loveliest reaches; level meadows
stretch away on its opposite side; mounds set with slender-stemmed
foliage occupy the nearer ground, and a small village with its
simple spire peeps from the forest at the bend of the valley; it is
remarkable that, in architecture thus employed, neither Perugino,
nor any other of the ideal painters, ever use Italian forms, but
always Transalpine, both of church and castle. The little landscape
which forms the background of his own portrait in the Uffizii is
another highly finished and characteristic example. The landscape
of Raffaelle was learned from his father, and continued for some
time little modified, though expressed with greater refinement. It
became afterwards conventional and poor, and in some cases alto-
gether meaningless. The haystacks and vulgar trees behind the
St. Cecilia at Bologna form a painful contrast to the pure space of
mountain country in the Perugino opposite ^

In all these cases, while I would uphold the landscape thus em- § 12. Such
ployed and treated, as worthy of all admiration, I should be sorry imU

to advance it for imitation. What is right in its mannerism arose
from keen feeling in the painter: imitated without the same feeling
it would be painful; the only safe mode of following in such steps
is to attain perfect knowledge of Nature herself, and then to suffer
our own feelings to guide us in the selection of what is fitting for
any particular purpose. Every painter ought to paint what he
himself loves, not what others have loved; if his mind be pure and
sweetly toned, what he loves will be lovely; if otherwise, no
example can guide his selection, no precept govern his hand; and
farther, let it be distinctly observed, that all this mannered land-
scape is only right under the supposition of its being a background

' I have not thought it necessary to give farther instances at present, sincc I purpose
hereafter to give numerous examples of this kind of ideal landscape. Of true and noble
landscape, as such, I am awai-e of no instances except where least they might have been
expected, among the sea-bred Venetians, Ghirlandajo shows keen, though prosaic,
sense of nature in that view of Venice behind an Adoration of the Magi in the Uffizii, but
he at last walled himself up among gilded entablatures. Masaccio indeed has given one
grand example in the fresco of the Tribute Money, but its colour is now nearly lost,

to some supernatural presence; behind mortal beings it would be
wrong, and by itself, as landscape, ridiculous; and farther, the
chief virtue of it results from the exquisite refinement of those
natural details consistent with its character; from the botanical
drawing of the flowers, and the clearness and brightness of the sky.

Another mode of attaining supernatural character is by purity
of colour almost shadowless, no more darkness being allowed than
is absolutely necessary for the explanation of the forms and the
vividness of the effect, enhanced, as far as may be, by use of
gilding, enamel, and other jewellery. I think the smaller works of
Angelico are perfect models in this respect; the glories about the
heads being of beaten rays of gold, on which the light plays and
changes as the spectator moves (and which therefore throw the
purest flesh colour out in dark relief); and such colour and light
being obtained by the enamelling of the angel wings as, of course,
is utterly unattainable by any other expedient of art; the colours
of the draperies always pure and pale, blue, rose, or tender green,
or brown, but never dark or gloomy; the faces of the most celestial
fairness, brightly flushed; the height and glow of this flush are
noticed by Constantin as reserved by the older painters for spiritual
beings, as if expressive of light seen through the body.

I cannot think it necessary, while I insist on the value of all
these seemingly childish means when in the hands of a noble painter,
to assert also their futility, and even absurdity, if employed by no
exalted power. I think the error has commonly been on the side
of scorn, and that we reject much in our foolish vanity, which, if
wiser and more earnest, we should delight in. But two points it is
very necessary to note in the use of such accessaries.

§ 13. Colour
and Decora-
tion, their use
in representa-
tions of the
Supernatural.

The first, that the ornaments used by Angelico, Giotto, and
Perugino, but especially by Angelico, are always of a generic and
abstract character. They are not diamonds, nor brocades, nor
velvets, nor gold embroideries; they are mere spots of gold or of
colour, simple patterns upon textureless draperies; the angel wings
burn with transparent crimson and purple and amber, but they
are not set forth with peacocks' plumes; the golden circlets gleam
with changeful light, but they are not beaded with pearls, nor set
with sapphires.

§ 14. Decora-
tion so used
must be Gene-
ric,

In the works of Filippino Lippi, Mantegna, and manj other
painters following, interesting examples may be found of the opposite
treatment; and as in Lippi the heads are usually very sweet, and
the composition severe, the degrading effect of the realized decora-
tions and imitated dress may be seen in him simply, and without
any addition of painfulness from other deficiencies of feeling. The
larger of the two pictures in the Tuscan room of the TJffizii, but
for this defect, would have been a very noble ideal work.

The second point to be observed is that brightness of colour is § 15. And Co-
altogether inadmissible without purity and harmony; and that the
sacred painters must not be followed in their frankness of unshadowed
colour, unless we can also follow them in its clearness. As far
as I am acquainted with the modern schools of Germany, they seem
to be entirely ignorant of the value of colour as an assistant of
feeling, and to think that hardness, dryness, and opacity are its
virtues as employed in religious art; whereas I hesitate not to affirm
that in such art, more than in any other, clearness, luminousness,
and intensity of hue are essential to right impression ; and from the
walls of the Arena chapel in their rainbow play of brilliant har-
monies, to the solemn purple tones of Perugino's fresco in the Albizzi
Palace, I know not any great work of sacred art which is not as
precious in colour as in all other qualities (unless indeed it be a
Crucifixion of Fra Angelico in the Florence Academy, which has
just been glazed, and pumiced, and painted, and varnished by the
picture cleaners until it glares from one end of the gallery to the
other); only the pure white light and delicate hue of the idealists,
whose colours are by preference such as we have seen to be the
most beautiful in the chapter on Purity, are carefully to be distin-
guished from the golden light and deep-pitched hue of the school of
Titian, whose virtue is the grandeur of earthly solemnity, not the
glory of heavenly rejoicing.

But leaving these accessary circumstances, and touching the § 16. ideal
treatment of the bodily form, it is evident, in the first place, that bo™ UseiT; of
whatever typical beauty the human body is capable of possessing ^^^^ variety
must be bestowed upon it when it is to be understood as spiritual.
And therefore those general proportions and types which are dedu-
cible from comparison of the nobler individuals of the race, must be

adopted and adhered to; admitting among them not, as in the
human ideal, such varieties as result from past suffering, or contest
with sin, but such only as are consistent with sinless nature, or are
the signs of instantly or continually operatiye affections; for though
it is conceivable that spirit should suffer, it is inconceivable that
spiritual frame should retain, like the stamped inelastic human
clay, the brand of sorrow past, unless fallen:

Yet so far forth the Angelic idea is diminished, nor could this be
suffered in pictorial representation.

Again, such muscular development as is necessary to the perfect
beauty of the body is to be rendered. But that which is necessary
to strength, or which appears to have been the result of laborious
exercise, is inadmissible. No herculean form is spiritual, for it is
degrading the spiritual creature to suppose it operative through
impulse of bone and sinew; its power is immaterial and constant,
neither dependent on, nor developed by, exertion. Generally it is
well to conceal anatomical development as far as. may be; even
Michael Angelo's anatomy interferes with his divinity; in the
hands of lower men the angel becomes a preparation. How far it
is possible to subdue or generalize the naked form I venture not to
affirm; but I believe that it is best to conceal it, as far as may be,
not with light and imdulating draperies, that fall in with and
exhibit its principal lines, but with severe and linear draperies,
such as were constantly employed before the time of Raffaelle. I
recollect no single instance of a naked angel that does not look
boylike or childlike, and unspiritualized; even Fra Bartolomeo's
might with advantage be spared from the pictures at Lucca: and,
afterwards, the sky is merely encumbered with sprawling infants ;
those of Domenichino in the Madonna del Rosario, and Martyrdom
of St. Agnes, are peculiarly offensive, studies of bare-legged children
howling and kicking in volumes of smoke. Confusion seems to
exist in the minds of subsequent painters between angels and
Cupids.

§ 17. Ana-
tomical deve-
lopment, how
far admissible.

Farther, the qualities of symmetry and repose are of peculiar § 18. Sym-
value in spiritual form. We find the former most earnestly sought vaiuabi^^"^
by all the great painters in the arrangement of the hair, wherein no
loosely flowing nor varied form is admitted, hut all restrained in
undisturbed and equal ringlets; often, as in the infant Christ of
Fra Angelico, supported on the forehead in forms of sculpturesque
severity. The angel of Masaccio, in the Deliverance of Peter,
grand both in countenance and motion, loses much of his spirituality
because the painter has put a little too much of his own character
into the hair, and left it disordered.

Of repose, and its exalting power, I have already said enough § 19. The in-
for our present purpose, though I have not insisted on the peculiar da^.^^

manifestation of it in the Christian ideal as opposed to the Pagan, serous.
But this, as well as all other questions relating to the particular
development of the Greek mind, is foreign to the immediate inquiry,
which therefore I shall here conclude, in the hope of resuming it in
detail after examining the laws of beauty in the inanimate creation;
always, however, holding this for certain, that of whatever kind or
degree the short coming may be, it is not possible but that short
coming should be visible in every Pagan conception, when set beside
Christian; and.believing, for my own part, that there is not only
deficiency, but such difference in kind as must make all Greek con-
ception full of danger to the student in proportion to liis admiration
of it; as I think has been fatally seen in its effects on the Italian
schools, when its pernicious element first mingled with their solemn
purity, and recently in its influence on the French historical painters;
neither can I, from my present knowledge, fix upon an ancient statue
which expresses by the countenance any one elevated character of
soul, or any single enthusiastic self-abandoning affection, much less
any such majesty of feeling as might mark the features for super-
natural, The Greek could not conceive a spirit; he could do § 20. its scope,
nothing without limbs; his God is a finite God, talking, pursuing, "mited.
and going journeys if at any time he was touched with a true

1 I know not anything in the range of art more unspiritual than the Apollo Belvedere;
the raising of the fingers of the right hand in surprise at the truth of the arrow is alto-
gether human, and would be vulgar in a prince, much more in a deity. The sandals
destroy the divinity of the foot, and the lip is curled with mortal passion.

feeling of the unseen powers around him, it was in the field of
poised battle; for there is something in the near coming of the
shadow of death, something in the devoted fulfilment of mortal
duty, that reveals the real God, though darkly. That pause on the
field of Platsea was not one of vain superstition; the two white
figures that blazed along the Delphic plain, when the earthquake
and the fire led the charge from Olympus, were more than sunbeams
on the battle dust; the sacred cloud, with its lance light and triumph
singing, that went down to brood over the masts of Salamis, was
more than morning mist among the olives : and yet what were the
Greek's thoughts of his God of Battle ? No spirit power was in
the vision: it was a being of clay strength, and human passion,
foul, fierce, and changeful; of penetrable arms, and vulnerable
flesh. Gather what we may of great from Pagan chisel or Pagan
dream, and set it beside the orderer of Christian warfare, Michael
the Archangel: not Milton's " with hostile brow and visage all
inflamed;" not even Milton's in kingly treading of the hills of
Paradise; not Raffaelle's with the expanded wings and brandished
spear; but Perugino's with his triple crest of traceless plume
tmshaken in heaven, his hand fallen on his crossleted sword, the
truth girdle binding his imdinted armour: God has put his power
upon him, resistless radiance is on his limbs ; no lines are there of
earthly strength, no trace on the divine features of earthly anger;
trustful, and thoughtful, fearless but full of love, incapable except
of the repose of eternal conquest, vessel and instrument of Omni-
potence, filled like a cloud with the victor light, the dust of princi-
palities and powers beneath his feet, the murmur of hell against him
heard by his spiritual ear like the winding of a shell on the far off
sea shore.

It is vain to attempt to pursue the comparisoil; the two orders
of art have in them nothing common, and the field of sacred
history, the intent and scope of Christian feeling, are too wide and
exalted to admit of the juxtaposition of any other sphere or order of
conception; they embrace all other fields like the dome of heaven.
With what comparison shall we compare the types of the martyr
saints; the St. Stephen of Fra Bartolomeo, with his calm forehead
crowned by the stony diadem, or the St. Catherine of Raffaelle

looking up to heaven in the dawn of the eternal day, with her lips
parted in the resting from her pain ? or with what the Madonnas of
Francia and Pinturicchio, in whom the hues of the morning and the
solemnity of eve, the gladness in accomplished promise, and sorrow
of the sword-pierced heart, are gathered into one human Lamp of
ineffable love ? or with what the angel choirs of Angelico, with the
flames on their white foreheads waving brighter as they move, and
the sparkles streaming from their purple wings like the glitter of
many suns upon a sounding sea, listening in the pauses of alternate
song, for the prolonging of the trumpet blast, and the answering of
psaltery and cymbal, throughout the endless deep, and from all the
star shores of heaven ?

Although the plan of the present portion of this work does not
admit of particular criticism, it will neither be useless nor irre-
levant to refer to one or two works, lately before the public, in the
Exhibitions of the Royal Academy, which either illustrate, or pre-
sent exceptions to, any of the preceding statements. I would first
mention, with reference to what has been advanced respecting the
functions of Associative Imagination, the very important work of
Mr. Linnell, the " Eve of the Deluge;" a picture upheld by its
admirers (and these were some of the most intelligent judges of
the day) for a work of consummate imaginative power; while it
was pronounced by the public journals to be " a chaos of uncon-
cocted colour." If the writers for the press had been aware of the
kind of study pursued by Mr. Linnell through many laborious
years, characterised by an observance of nature scrupulously and
minutely patient, directed by the deepest sensibility, and aided by
a power of drawing almost too refined for landscape subjects, and
only to be understood by reference to his engravings after Michael
Angelo, they would have felt it to be unlikely that the work of
such a man should be entirely undeserving of respect. On the
other hand, the grounds of its praise were unfortunately chosen;
for, though possessing many merits, it had no claim whatever to
be ranked among productions of Creative art. It would perhaps
be difficult to point to a work so exalted in feeling, and so deficient
in invention. The sky had been strictly taken from nature, this
was evident at a glance; and as a study of sky it was every way
noble. To the purpose of the picture it hardly contributed: its
sublimity was that of splendour, not of terror; and its darkness
that of retreating, not of gathering, storm. The features of the

landscape were devoid alike of variety and probability; the division
of the scene by the central valley and winding river at once thea-
trical and commonplace; and the foreground, on which the light
was intense, alike devoid of dignity in arrangement, and of interest
in detail.

The falseness or deficiency of colour in the works of Mr. Land-
seer has been remarked above, p. 196. The writer has much
pleasure in noticing a very beautiful exception in the picture of
the " Random Shot," certainly the most successful rendering he
has ever seen of the line of snow under warm but subdued light.
The subtlety of gradation from the portions of the w^reath fully
illumined, to those which, feebly tinged by the horizontal rays,
swelled into a dome of dim purple, dark against the green evening
sky; the truth of the blue shadows, with which this dome was
barred, and the depth of delicate colour out of which the lights
upon the footprints were raised, deserved the most earnest and
serious admiration; proving, at the same time, that the errors in
colour, so frequ.ently to be regretted in the works of the painter,
are the result rather of inattention than of feeble perception. A
curious proof of this inattention occurs in the disposition of the
shadows in the background of the " Old Cover Hack," No. 229.
One of its points of light is on the rusty iron handle of a pump, in
the shape of an S. The sun strikes the greater part of its length,
illuminating the perpendicular portion of the curve; yet shadow is
only cast on the wall behind by the returning portion of the lower
extremity. A smile may be excited by the notice of so trivial a
circumstance; but the simplicity of the error renders it the more
remarkable, and the great masters of chiaroscuro are accurate in
all such minor points; a vague sense of greater truth results from
this correctness, even when it is not in particulars analyzed or
noted by the observer. In the small but very valuable Paul
Potter in Lord Westminster's collection, the body of one of the
sheep under the hedge is for the most part in shadow, but the
sunlight touches the extremity of the back. The sun is low, and
the shadows feeble and distorted; yet that of the sunlighted fleece
is cast exactly in its true place and proportion beyond that of the
hedge. The spectator may not observe this; yet, unobserved, it is

one of the circumstances which make him feel the picture to be full
of sunshine.

As an example of perfect colour^ and of the most refined hand-
ling ever perhaps exhibited in animal painting, the Butcher's Dog
in the corner of Mr. Mulready's "Butt," No. 160., deserved a
whole room of the Academy to himself. This, with the spaniel in
the " Choosing the Wedding Gown," and the two dogs in the hay-
field subject (Bui'chell and Sophia), displays perhaps the most
wonderful, because the most dignified, finish in the expression of
anatomy and covering — of muscle and hide at once, and assuredly
the most perfect unity of drawing and colour, which the entire
range of ancient and modern art can exhibit. Albert Durer is
indeed the only rival who might be suggested; and, though greater
far in imagination, and equal in draughtsmanship, Albert Durer
was less true and less delicate in hue. In sculpturesque arrange-
ment both masters show the same degree of feeling: any of these
dogs of Mulready might be taken out of the canvass and cut in
alabaster, or, perhaps better, struck upon a coin. Every lock and
line of the hair has been grouped as it is on a Greek die; and if
this not always without some loss of ease and of action, yet this
very loss is ennobling, in a period when all is generally sacrificed
to the great coxcombry of art, the afifectation of ease.

Yet Mr. Mulready himself is not always free from affectation of
some kind; mannerism, at least, there is in his treatment of tree
trunks. There is a ghastliness about his laboured anatomies of
them, as well as a want of specific character. Why need they be
always flayed ? The hide of a beech tree, or of a birch or fir, is
nearly as fair a thing as an animal's; glossy as a dove's neck,
barred with black like a zebra, or glowing in purple grey and
velvet brown like furry cattle in sunset. Why not paint these as
Mr. Mulready paints other things, as they are ? that simplest, that
deepest of all secrets, which gives such majesty to the ragged leaves
about the edges of the pond in the " Gravel-pit" (No. 125.), and
imparts a strange interest to the grey ragged urchins disappearing
behind the bank, that bank so low, so familiar, so sublime ! What
a contrast between the deep sentiment of that commonest of all
common, homeliest of all homely, subjects, and the lost sentiment

of Mr. Stanfield's ^^ Amalfi," the chief landscape of the year, full
of exalted material, and mighty crags, and massy seas, grottoes,
precipices, and convents, fortress-towers and cloud-capped moun-
tains, and all in vain, merely because that same simple secret has
been despised; because nothing there is painted as it is ! The
picture was a most singular example of the scenic assemblage of
contradictory theme which is characteristic of Picturesque, as
opposed to Poetical, composition. The lines chosen from Rogers
for a titular legend were full of summer, glowing with golden
light, and toned with quiet melancholy:

" To him who sails
Under the shore, a few white villages,
Scattered above, below, some in the clouds,
Some on the margin of the dark blue sea,
And glittering thro' their lemon groves, announce
The region of Amalfi. Then, half-fallen,
A lonely watch-tower on the precipice.
Their ancient landmark, comes—long may it last!
And to the seaman, in a distant age,
Though now he little thinks how large his debt.
Serve for their monument."

Prepared by these lines for a dream upon deep calm waters,
under the shadow and scent of the close lemon-leaves, the spectator
found himself placed by the painter, wet through, in a noisy fishing
boat, on a splashing sea, with just as much on his hands as he
could manage to keep her gunwale from being stove in against a
black rock; and with a heavy grey squall to windward. (This
squall, by the by, was the very same which appeared in the picture
of the Magra of 1847, and so were the snowy mountains above;
only the squall at Amalfi entered on the left, and at the Magra on
the right.) Now the scenery of Amalfi is impressive alike in storm
or calm, and the writer has seen the Mediterranean as majestic and
as southern-looking in its rage as in its rest. ^ But it is treating
both the green w^ater and woods unfairly, to destroy their peace
without expressing their power; and withdraw from them their
sadness and their sun, without the substitution of any effect more
terrific than that of a squall at the Nore. The snow on the distant
mountains chilled what it could not elevate, and was untrue to the
scene besides; there is no snow on the Monte St. Angelo in summer

i:
i.

I'
!

.1;

i 1

I'J

except what is kept for the Neapolitan confectioners. The great
merit of the picture was its rock-painting; too good to have re-
quired the aid of the exaggeration of forms which satiated the eye
throughout the composition.

Mr. F. R. Pickersgill's "Contest of Beauty" (No. 515.), and
Mr. Uwins's " Vineyard Scene in the South of France," were,
after Mr. Mulready's works, among the most interesting pieces of
colour in the Exhibition. The former, very rich and sweet in its
harmonies, and especially happy in its contrasts of light and dark
armour; nor less in the fancy of the little Love who, losing his
hold of the orange houghs, was falling ignominiously without
having time to open his wings. The latter was a curious example
of what I have described as abstraction of colour. Strictly true or
possible it was not; a vintage is usually a dusty and dim-looking
procedure; but there were poetry and feehng in Mr. Uwins's
idealization of the sombre black of the veritable grape into a
luscious ultra-marine purple, glowing among the green leaves like
so much painted glass. The figures were bright and graceful in
the extreme, and most happily grouped. Little else that could be
called colour was to be seen upon the walls of the Exhibition, with
the exception of the smaller works of Mr. Etty. Of these, the
single head, « Morning Prayer " (No. 25.), and the " Still Life "
(No. 73.), deserved, allowing for their peculiar aim, the highest
praise. The larger subjects, more especially the St. John, were
wanting in the merits peculiar to the painter; and in other respects
it is alike painful and useless to allude to them. A very import-
ant and valuable work of Mr. Harding was placed, as usual,
where its merits could be but ill seen, and where its chief fault, a
feebleness of colour in the principal light on the distant hills, was
apparent. It was one of the very few views of the year which
were transcripts, nearly without exaggeration, of the features of
the localities.

Among the less conspicuous landscapes, Mr. W. E. Dighton's
" Hay-Meadow Corner " deserved especial notice; it was at once
vigorous, fresh, faithful, and unpretending; the management of the
distance most ingenious, and the painting of the foreground, with
the single exception of Mr. Mulready's above noticed, unques-

tionably the best in the room. I have before had occasion to
notice a picture by this artist, " A Hayfield in a Shower," ex-
hibited in the British Institution in 1847, and this year (1848) in
the Scottish Academy, whose sky, in qualities of rainy, shattered,
transparent grey, I have seldom seen equalled; nor the mist of its
distance, expressive alike of previous heat and present beat of rain.
I look with much interest for other works by this painter.

A hurried visit to Scotland in the spring of this year, while it
enables the writer to acknowledge the ardour and genius mani-
fested in very many of the works exhibited in the Scottish
Academy, cannot be considered as furnishing him with sufficient
grounds for specific criticism. He cannot, however, err in testi-
fying his concurrence in the opinion expressed to him by several of
the most distinguished members of that Academy, respecting the
singular merit of the works of Mr. H. Drummond. A cabinet
picture of " Banditti on the Watch," appeared to him one of the
most masterly, unaffected, and sterling pieces of quiet painting he
has ever seen from the hand of a living artist; and the other works
of Mr. Drummond were alike remarkable for their manly and
earnest finish, and their sweetness of feeling.

J-jf

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§	8.	How difficult of attainment, yet essential to all good...............