Stones of Venice, Volume 3 — Chapter 03, Grotesque Renaissance, part 4

§ LXII.

Now, so far as the truth is seen by the imagination[42] in its wholeness and quietness, the vision is sublime; but so far as it is narrowed and broken by the inconsistencies of the human capacity, it becomes grotesque; and it would seem to be rare that any very exalted truth should be impressed on the imagination without some grotesqueness in its aspect, proportioned to the degree of _diminution of breadth_ in the grasp which is given of it.

Nearly all the dreams recorded in the Bible,--Jacob's, Joseph's, Pharaoh's, Nebuchadnezzar's,--are grotesques;

and nearly the whole of the accessary scenery in the books of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse.

Thus, Jacob's dream revealed to him the ministry of angels; but because this ministry could not be seen or understood by him in its fulness, it was narrowed to him into a ladder between heaven and earth, which was a grotesque.

Joseph's two dreams were evidently intended to be signs of the steadfastness of the Divine purpose towards him, by possessing the clearness of special prophecy; yet were couched in such imagery, as not to inform him prematurely of his destiny, and only to be understood after their fulfilment.

The sun, and moon, and stars were at the period, and are indeed throughout the Bible, the symbols of high authority.

It was not revealed to Joseph that he should be lord over all Egypt; but the representation of his family by symbols of the most magnificent dominion, and yet as subject to him, must have been afterwards felt by him as a distinctly prophetic indication of his own supreme power.

It was not revealed to him that the occasion of his brethren's special humiliation before him should be their coming to buy corn; but when the event took place, must he not have felt that there was prophetic purpose in the form of the sheaves of wheat which first imaged forth their subjection to him?

And these two images of the sun doing obeisance, and the sheaves bowing down,--narrowed and imperfect intimations of great truth which yet could not be otherwise conveyed,--are both grotesque.

The kine of Pharaoh eating each other, the gold and clay of Nebuchadnezzar's image, the four beasts full of eyes, and other imagery of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse, are grotesques of the same kind, on which I need not further insist.

§ LXIII.

Such forms, however, ought perhaps to have been arranged under a separate head, as Symbolical Grotesque; but the element of awe enters into them so strongly, as to justify, for all our present purposes, their being classed with the other varieties of terrible grotesque.

For even if the symbolic vision itself be not terrible, the sense of what may be veiled behind it becomes all the more awful in proportion to the insignificance or strangeness of the sign itself; and, I believe, this thrill of mingled doubt, fear, and curiosity lies at the very root of the delight which mankind take in symbolism.

It was not an accidental necessity for the conveyance of truth by pictures instead of words, which led to its universal adoption wherever art was on the advance; but the Divine fear which necessarily follows on the understanding that a thing is other and greater than it seems; and which, it appears probable, has been rendered peculiarly attractive to the human heart, because God would have us understand that this is true not of invented symbols merely, but of all things amidst which we live; that there is a deeper meaning within them than eye hath seen, or ear hath heard; and that the whole visible creation is a mere perishable symbol of things eternal and true.

It cannot but have been sometimes a subject of wonder with thoughtful men, how fondly, age after age, the Church has cherished the belief that the four living creatures which surrounded the Apocalyptic throne were symbols of the four Evangelists, and rejoiced to use those forms in its picture-teaching; that a calf, a lion, an eagle, and a beast with a man's face, should in all ages have been preferred by the Christian world, as expressive of Evangelistic power and inspiration, to the majesty of human forms; and that quaint grotesques, awkward and often ludicrous caricatures even of the animals represented, should have been regarded by all men, not only with contentment, but with awe, and have superseded all endeavors to represent the characters and persons of the Evangelistic writers themselves (except in a few instances, confined principally to works undertaken without a definite religious purpose);--this, I say, might appear more than strange to us, were it not that we ourselves share the awe, and are still satisfied with the symbol, and that justly.

For, whether we are conscious of it or not, there is in our hearts, as we gaze upon the brutal forms that have so holy a signification, an acknowledgment that it was not Matthew, nor Mark, nor Luke, nor John, in whom the Gospel of Christ was unsealed: but that the invisible things of Him from the beginning of the creation are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; that the whole world, and all that is therein, be it low or high, great or small, is a continual Gospel; and that as the heathen, in their alienation from God, changed His glory into an image made like unto corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, the Christian, in his approach to God, is to undo this work, and to change the corruptible things into the image of His glory; believing that there is nothing so base in creation, but that our faith may give it wings which shall raise us into companionship with heaven; and that, on the other hand, there is nothing so great or so goodly in creation, but that it is a mean symbol of the Gospel of Christ, and of the things He has prepared for them that love Him.

§ LXIV.

And it is easy to understand, if we follow out this thought, how, when once the symbolic language was familiarized to the mind, and its solemnity felt in all its fulness, there was no likelihood of offence being taken at any repulsive or feeble characters in execution or conception.

There was no form so mean, no incident so commonplace, but, if regarded in this light, it might become sublime; the more vigorous the fancy and the more faithful the enthusiasm, the greater would be the likelihood of their delighting in the contemplation of symbols whose mystery was enhanced by apparent insignificance, or in which the sanctity and majesty of meaning were contrasted with the utmost uncouthness of external form: nor with uncouthness merely, but even with every appearance of malignity or baseness; the beholder not being revolted even by this, but comprehending that, as the seeming evil in the framework of creation did not invalidate its Divine authorship, so neither did the evil or imperfection in the symbol invalidate its Divine message.

And thus, sometimes, the designer at last became wanton in his appeal to the piety of his interpreter, and recklessly poured out the impurity and the savageness of his own heart, for the mere pleasure of seeing them overlaid with the fine gold of the sanctuary, by the religion of their beholder.

§ LXV.

It is not, however, in every symbolical subject that the fearful grotesque becomes embodied to the full.

The element of distortion which affects the intellect when dealing with subjects above its proper capacity, is as nothing compared with that which it sustains from the direct impressions of terror.

It is the trembling of the human soul in the presence of death which most of all disturbs the images on the intellectual mirror, and invests them with the fitfulness and ghastliness of dreams.

And from the contemplation of death, and of the pangs which follow his footsteps, arise in men's hearts the troop of strange and irresistible superstitions which, more or less melancholy or majestic according to the dignity of the mind they impress, are yet never without a certain grotesqueness, following on the paralysis of the reason and over-excitement of the fancy.

I do not mean to deny the actual existence of spiritual manifestations; I have never weighed the evidence upon the subject; but with these, if such exist, we are not here concerned.

The grotesque which we are examining arises out of that condition of mind which appears to follow naturally upon the contemplation of death, and in which the fancy is brought into morbid action by terror, accompanied by the belief in spiritual presence, and in the possibility of spiritual apparition.

Hence are developed its most sublime, because its least voluntary, creations, aided by the fearfulness of the phenomena of nature which are in any wise the ministers of death, and primarily directed by the peculiar ghastliness of expression in the skeleton, itself a species of terrible grotesque in its relation to the perfect human frame.

§ LXVI.

Thus, first born from the dusty and dreadful whiteness of the charnel house, but softened in their forms by the holiest of human affections, went forth the troop of wild and wonderful images, seen through tears, that had the mastery over our Northern hearts for so many ages.

The powers of sudden destruction lurking in the woods and waters, in the rocks and clouds;--kelpie and gnome, Lurlei and Hartz spirits;

the wraith and foreboding phantom; the spectra of second sight; the various conceptions of avenging or tormented ghost, haunting the perpetrator of crime, or expiating its commission; and the half fictitious and contemplative, half visionary and believed images of the presence of death itself, doing its daily work in the chambers of sickness and sin, and waiting for its hour in the fortalices of strength and the high places of pleasure;--these, partly degrading us by the instinctive and paralyzing terror with which they are attended, and partly ennobling us by leading our thoughts to dwell in the eternal world, fill the last and the most important circle in that great kingdom of dark and distorted power, of which we all must be in some sort the subjects until mortality shall be swallowed up of life; until the waters of the last fordless river cease to roll their untransparent volume between us and the light of heaven, and neither death stand between us and our brethren, nor symbols between us and our God.

§ LXVII.

We have now, I believe, obtained a view approaching to completeness of the various branches of human feeling which are concerned in the developement of this peculiar form of art.

It remains for us only to note, as briefly as possible, what facts in the actual history of the grotesque bear upon our immediate subject.

From what we have seen to be its nature, we must, I think, be led to one most important conclusion; that wherever the human mind is healthy and vigorous in all its proportions, great in imagination and emotion no less than in intellect, and not overborne by an undue or hardened preëminence of the mere reasoning faculties, there the grotesque will exist in full energy.

And, accordingly, I believe that there is no test of greatness in periods, nations, or men, more sure than the developement, among them or in them, of a noble grotesque, and no test of comparative smallness or limitation, of one kind or another, more sure than the absence of grotesque invention, or incapability of understanding it.

I think that the central man of all the world, as representing in perfect balance the imaginative, moral, and intellectual faculties, all at their highest, is Dante; and in him the grotesque reaches at once the most distinct and the most noble developement to which it was ever brought in the human mind.

The two other greatest men whom Italy has produced, Michael Angelo and Tintoret, show the same element in no less original strength, but oppressed in the one by his science, and in both by the spirit of the age in which they lived;

never, however, absent even in Michael Angelo, but stealing forth continually in a strange and spectral way, lurking in folds of raiment and knots of wild hair, and mountainous confusions of craggy limb and cloudy drapery; and, in Tintoret, ruling the entire conceptions of his greatest works to such a degree that they are an enigma or an offence, even to this day, to all the petty disciples of a formal criticism.

Of the grotesque in our own Shakspeare I need hardly speak, nor of its intolerableness to his French critics; nor of that of Æschylus and Homer, as opposed to the lower Greek writers; and so I believe it will be found, at all periods, in all minds of the first order.

§ LXVIII.

As an index of the greatness of nations, it is a less certain test, or, rather, we are not so well agreed on the meaning of the term "greatness" respecting them.

A nation may produce a great effect, and take up a high place in the world's history, by the temporary enthusiasm or fury of its multitudes, without being truly great; or, on the other hand, the discipline of morality and common sense may extend its physical power or exalt its well-being, while yet its creative and imaginative powers are continually diminishing.

And again: a people may take so definite a lead over all the rest of the world in one direction, as to obtain a respect which is not justly due to them if judged on universal grounds.

Thus the Greeks perfected the sculpture of the human body; threw their literature into a disciplined form, which has given it a peculiar power over certain conditions of modern mind; and were the most carefully educated race that the world has seen; but a few years hence, I believe, we shall no longer think them a greater people than either the Egyptians or Assyrians.

§ LXIX.

If, then, ridding ourselves as far as possible of prejudices owing merely to the school-teaching which remains from the system of the Renaissance, we set ourselves to discover in what races the human soul, taken all in all, reached its highest magnificence, we shall find, I believe, two great families of men, one of the East and South, the other of the West and North: the one including the Egyptians, Jews, Arabians, Assyrians, and Persians; the other, I know not whence derived, but seeming to flow forth from Scandinavia, and filling the whole of Europe with its Norman and Gothic energy.

And in both these families, wherever they are seen in their utmost nobleness, there the grotesque is developed in its utmost energy; and I hardly know whether most to admire the winged bulls of Nineveh, or the winged dragons of Verona.

§ LXX.

The reader who has not before turned his attention to this subject may, however, at first have some difficulty in distinguishing between the noble grotesque of these great nations, and the barbarous grotesque of mere savages, as seen in the work of the Hindoo and other Indian nations; or, more grossly still, in that of the complete savage of the Pacific islands; or if, as is to be hoped, he instinctively feels the difference, he may yet find difficulty in determining wherein that difference consists.

But he will discover, on consideration, that the noble grotesque _involves the true appreciation of beauty_, though the mind may wilfully turn to other images or the hand resolutely stop short of the perfection which it must fail, if it endeavored, to reach;

while the grotesque of the Sandwich islander involves no perception or imagination of anything above itself.

He will find that in the exact proportion in which the grotesque results from an incapability of perceiving beauty, it becomes savage or barbarous; and that there are many stages of progress to be found in it even in its best times, much truly savage grotesque occurring in the fine Gothic periods, mingled with the other forms of the ignoble grotesque resulting from vicious inclinations or base sportiveness.

Nothing is more mysterious in the history of the human mind, than the manner in which gross and ludicrous images are mingled with the most solemn subjects in the work of the middle ages, whether of sculpture or illumination; and although, in great part, such incongruities are to be accounted for on the various principles which I have above endeavored to define, in many instances they are clearly the result of vice and sensuality.

The general greatness of seriousness of an age does not effect the restoration of human nature; and it would be strange, if, in the midst of the art even of the best periods, when that art was entrusted to myriads of workmen, we found no manifestations of impiety, folly, or impurity.

§ LXXI.

It needs only to be added that in the noble grotesque, as it is partly the result of a morbid state of the imaginative power, that power itself will be always seen in a high degree; and that therefore our power of judging of the rank of a grotesque work will depend on the degree in which we are in general sensible of the presence of invention.

The reader may partly test this power in himself by referring to the Plate given in the opening of this chapter, in which, on the left, is a piece of noble and inventive grotesque, a head of the lion-symbol of St. Mark, from the Veronese Gothic; the other is a head introduced as a boss on the foundation of the Palazzo Corner della Regina at Venice, utterly devoid of invention, made merely monstrous by exaggerations of the eyeballs and cheeks, and generally characteristic of that late Renaissance grotesque of Venice, with which we are at present more immediately concerned.

[43] § LXXII.

The developement of that grotesque took place under different laws from those which regulate it in any other European city.

For, great as we have seen the Byzantine mind show itself to be in other directions, it was marked as that of a declining nation by the absence of the grotesque element; and, owing to its influence, the early Venetian Gothic remained inferior to all other schools in this particular character.

Nothing can well be more wonderful than its instant failure in any attempt at the representation of ludicrous or fearful images, more especially when it is compared with the magnificent grotesque of the neighboring city of Verona, in which the Lombard influence had full sway.

Nor was it until the last links of connexion with Constantinople had been dissolved, that the strength of the Venetian mind could manifest itself in this direction.

But it had then a new enemy to encounter.

The Renaissance laws altogether checked its imagination in architecture; and it could only obtain permission to express itself by starting forth in the work of the Venetian painters, filling them with monkeys and dwarfs, even amidst the most serious subjects, and leading Veronese and Tintoret to the most unexpected and wild fantasies of form and color.

§ LXXIII.

We may be deeply thankful for this peculiar reserve of the Gothic grotesque character to the last days of Venice.

All over the rest of Europe it had been strongest in the days of imperfect art;

magnificently powerful throughout the whole of the thirteenth century, tamed gradually in the fourteenth and fifteenth, and expiring in the sixteenth amidst anatomy and laws of art.

But at Venice, it had not been received when it was elsewhere in triumph, and it fled to the lagoons for shelter when elsewhere it was oppressed.

And it was arrayed by the Venetian painters in robes of state, and advanced by them to such honor as it had never received in its days of widest dominion; while, in return, it bestowed upon their pictures that fulness, piquancy, decision of parts, and mosaic-like intermingling of fancies, alternately brilliant and sublime, which were exactly what was most needed for the developement of their unapproachable color-power.

§ LXXIV.

Yet, observe, it by no means follows that because the grotesque does not appear in the art of a nation, the sense of it does not exist in the national mind.

Except in the form of caricature, it is hardly traceable in the English work of the present day; but the minds of our workmen are full of it, if we would only allow them to give it shape.

They express it daily in gesture and gibe, but are not allowed to do so where it would be useful.

In like manner, though the Byzantine influence repressed it in the early Venetian architecture, it was always present in the Venetian mind, and showed itself in various forms of national custom and festival; _acted_ grotesques, full of wit, feeling, and good-humor.

The ceremony of the hat and the orange, described in the beginning of this chapter, is one instance out of multitudes.

Another, more rude, and exceedingly characteristic, was that instituted in the twelfth century in memorial of the submission of Woldaric, the patriarch of Aquileia, who, having taken up arms against the patriarch of Grado, and being defeated and taken prisoner by the Venetians, was sentenced, not to death, but to send every year on "Fat Thursday" sixty-two large loaves, twelve fat pigs, and a bull, to the Doge; the bull being understood to represent the patriarch, and the twelve pigs his clergy: and the ceremonies of the day consisting in the decapitation of these representatives, and a distribution of their joints among the senators;

together with a symbolic record of the attack upon Aquileia, by the erection of a wooden castle in the rooms of the Ducal Palace, which the _Doge and the Senate_ attacked and demolished with clubs.

As long as the Doge and the Senate were truly kingly and noble, they were content to let this ceremony be continued; but when they became proud and selfish, and were destroying both themselves and the state by their luxury, they found it inconsistent with their dignity, and it was abolished, as far as the Senate was concerned, in 1549. [44] § LXXV.

By these and other similar manifestations, the grotesque spirit is traceable through all the strength of the Venetian people.

But again: it is necessary that we should carefully distinguish between it and the spirit of mere levity.

I said, in the fifth chapter, that the Venetians were distinctively a serious people, serious, that is to say, in the sense in which the English are a more serious people than the French;

though the habitual intercourse of our lower classes in London has a tone of humor in it which I believe is untraceable in that of the Parisian populace.

It is one thing to indulge in playful rest, and another to be devoted to the pursuit of pleasure: and gaiety of heart during the reaction after hard labor, and quickened by satisfaction in the accomplished duty or perfected result, is altogether compatible with, nay, even in some sort arises naturally out of, a deep internal seriousness of disposition; this latter being exactly the condition of mind which, as we have seen, leads to the richest developements of the playful grotesque; while, on the contrary, the continual pursuit of pleasure deprives the soul of all alacrity and elasticity, and leaves it incapable of happy jesting, capable only of that which is bitter, base, and foolish.

Thus, throughout the whole of the early career of the Venetians, though there is much jesting, there is no levity; on the contrary there is an intense earnestness both in their pursuit of commercial and political successes, and in their devotion to religion,[45] which led gradually to the formation of that highly wrought mingling of immovable resolution with secret thoughtfulness, which so strangely, sometimes so darkly, distinguishes the Venetian character at the time of their highest power, when the seriousness was left, but the conscientiousness destroyed.

And if there be any one sign by which the Venetian countenance, as it is recorded for us, to the very life, by a school of portraiture which has never been equalled (chiefly because no portraiture ever had subjects so noble),--I say, if there be one thing more notable than another in the Venetian features, it is this deep pensiveness and solemnity.

In other districts of Italy, the dignity of the heads which occur in the most celebrated compositions is clearly owing to the feeling of the painter.

He has visibly raised or idealized his models, and appears always to be veiling the faults or failings of the human nature around him, so that the best of his work is that which has most perfectly taken the color of his own mind; and the least impressive, if not the least valuable, that which appears to have been unaffected and unmodified portraiture.

But at Venice, all is exactly the reverse of this.

The tone of mind in the painter appears often in some degree frivolous or sensual; delighting in costume, in domestic and grotesque incident, and in studies of the naked form.

But the moment he gives himself definitely to portraiture, all is noble and grave; the more literally true his work, the more majestic; and the same artist who will produce little beyond what is commonplace in painting a Madonna or an apostle, will rise into unapproachable sublimity when his subject is a member of the Forty, or a Master of the Mint.

Such, then, were the general tone and progress of the Venetian mind, up to the close of the seventeenth century.

First, serious, religious, and sincere; then, though serious still, comparatively deprived of conscientiousness, and apt to decline into stern and subtle policy: in the first case, the spirit of the noble grotesque not showing itself in art at all, but only in speech and action; in the second case, developing itself in painting, through accessories and vivacities of composition, while perfect dignity was always preserved in portraiture.

A third phase rapidly developed itself.

§ LXXVI.

Once more, and for the last time, let me refer the reader to the important epoch of the death of the Doge Tomaso Mocenigo in 1423, long ago indicated as the commencement of the decline of the Venetian power.

That commencement is marked, not merely by the words of the dying Prince, but by a great and clearly legible sign.

It is recorded, that on the accession of his successor, Foscari, to the throne, "SI FESTEGGIO DALLA CITTA UNO ANNO INTERO:" "The city kept festival for a whole year."

Venice had in her childhood sown, in tears, the harvest she was to reap in rejoicing.

She now sowed in laughter the seeds of death.

Thenceforward, year after year, the nation drank with deeper thirst from the fountains of forbidden pleasure, and dug for springs, hitherto unknown, in the dark places of the earth.

In the ingenuity of indulgence, in the varieties of vanity, Venice surpassed the cities of Christendom, as of old she surpassed them in fortitude and devotion; and as once the powers of Europe stood before her judgment-seat, to receive the decisions of her justice, so now the youth of Europe assembled in the halls of her luxury, to learn from her the arts of delight.

It is as needless, as it is painful, to trace the steps of her final ruin.

That ancient curse was upon her, the curse of the cities of the plain, "Pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness."

By the inner burning of her own passions, as fatal as the fiery reign of Gomorrah, she was consumed from her place among the nations; and her ashes are choking the channels of the dead salt sea.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] Mutinelli, Annali Urbani, lib.

i.

p. 24; and the Chronicle of 1738, quoted by Galliciolli: "attrovandosi allora la giesia de Sta.

Maria Formosa sola giesia del nome della gloriosa Vergine Maria."

[28] Or from the brightness of the cloud, according to the Padre who arranged the "Memorie delle Chiese di Venezia," vol. iii.

p. 7. Compare Corner, p. 42. This first church was built in 639. [29] Perhaps both Corner and the Padre founded their diluted information on the short sentence of Sansovino: "Finalmente, l'anno 1075, fu ridotta a perfezione da Paolo Barbetta, sul modello del corpo di mezzo della chiesa di S. Marco."

Sansovino, however, gives 842, instead of 864, as the date of the first rebuilding.

[30] Or at least for its principal families.

Vide Appendix 8, "Early Venetian Marriages."

[31] "Nazionale quasi la ceremonia, perciocche per essa nuovi difensori ad acquistar andava la patria, sostegni nuovi le leggi, la Liberta."

--_Mutinelli.

_ [32] "Vestita, _per antico uso_, di bianco, e con chiome sparse giù per le spalle, conteste con fila d'oro."

"Dressed according to ancient usage in white, and with her hair thrown down upon her shoulders, interwoven with threads of gold."

This was when she was first brought out of her chamber to be seen by the guests invited to the espousals.

"And when the form of the espousal has been gone through, she is led, to the sound of pipes and trumpets, and other musical instruments, round the room, _dancing serenely all the time, and bowing herself before the guests_ (ballando placidamente, e facendo inchini ai convitati); and so she returns to her chamber: and when other guests have arrived, she again comes forth, and makes the circuit of the chamber.

And this is repeated for an hour or somewhat more; and then, accompanied by many ladies who wait for her, she enters a gondola without its felze (canopy), and, seated on a somewhat raised seat covered with carpets, with a great number of gondolas following her, she goes to visit the monasteries and convents, wheresoever she has any relations."

[33] Sansovino.

[34] English, "Malmsey."

The reader will find a most amusing account of the negotiations between the English and Venetians, touching the supply of London with this wine, in Mr. Brown's translation of the Giustiniani papers.

See Appendix IX.

[35] "XV.

diebus et octo diebus ante festum Mariarum omni anno."

--_Galliciolli.

_ The same precautions were taken before the feast of the Ascension.

[36] Casa Vittura.

[37] The keystone of the arch on its western side, facing the canal.

[38] The inscriptions are as follows: To the left of the reader.

"VINCENTIUS CAPELLUS MARITIMARUM RERUM PERITISSIMUS ET ANTIQUORUM

LAUDIBUS PAR, TRIREMIUM ONERARIA

RUM PRÆFECTUS, AB HENRICO VII.

BRI

TANNIÆ REGE INSIGNE DONATUS CLAS

SIS LEGATUS V.

IMP.

DESIG.

TER CLAS

SEM DEDUXIT, COLLAPSAM NAVALEM DIS

CIPLINAM RESTITUIT, AD ZACXINTHUM

AURIÆ CÆSARIS LEGATO PRISCAM

VENETAM VIRTUTEM OSTENDIT."

To the right of the reader.

"IN AMBRACIO SINU BARBARUSSUM OTTHO MANICÆ CLASSIS DUCEM INCLUSIT

POSTRIDIE AD INTERNITIONEM DELETU

RUS NISI FATA CHRISTIANIS ADVERSA

VETUISSENT.

IN RYZONICO SINU CASTRO NOVO

EXPUGNATO DIVI MARCI PROCUR

UNIVERSO REIP CONSENSU CREATUS

IN PATRIA MORITUR TOTIUS CIVITATIS

MOERORE, ANNO ÆTATIS LXXIV.

MDCXLII. XIV. KAL SEPT."

[39] The Love of God is, however, always shown by the predominance, or greater sum, of good, in the end; but never by the annihilation of evil.

The modern doubts of eternal punishment are not so much the consequence of benevolence as of feeble powers of reasoning.

Every one admits that God brings finite good out of finite evil.

Why not, therefore, infinite good out of infinite evil?

[40] Let the reader examine, with special reference to this subject, the general character of the language of Iago.

[41] This opposition of art to inspiration is long and gracefully dwelt upon by Plato, in his "Phædrus," using, in the course of his argument, almost the words of St Paul: [Greek: kallion marturousin oi palaioi manian sôphrosynês tên ek Theou tês par anthrôpôn gignomenês]: "It is the testimony of the ancients, that _the madness which is of God is a nobler thing than the wisdom which is of men_;"

and again, "He who sets himself to any work with which the Muses have to do," (i. e. to any of the fine arts,) "without madness, thinking that by art alone he can do his work sufficiently, will be found vain and incapable, and the work of temperance and rationalism will be thrust aside and obscured by that of inspiration."

The passages to the same effect, relating especially to poetry, are innumerable in nearly all ancient writers; but in this of Plato, the entire compass of the fine arts is intended to be embraced.

No one acquainted with other parts of my writings will suppose me to be an advocate of idle trust in the imagination.

But it is in these days just as necessary to allege the supremacy of genius as the necessity of labor; for there never was, perhaps, a period in which the peculiar gift of the painter was so little discerned, in which so many and so vain efforts have been made to replace it by study and toil.

This has been peculiarly the case with the German school, and there are few exhibitions of human error more pitiable than the manner in which the inferior members of it, men originally and for ever destitute of the painting faculty, force themselves into an unnatural, encumbered, learned fructification of tasteless fruit, and pass laborious lives in setting obscurely and weakly upon canvas the philosophy, if such it be, which ten minutes' work of a strong man would have put into healthy practice, or plain words.

I know not anything more melancholy than the sight of the huge German cartoon, with its objective side, and subjective side; and mythological division, and symbolical division, and human and Divine division;

its allegorical sense, and literal sense; and ideal point of view, and intellectual point of view; its heroism of well-made armor and knitted brows; its heroinism of graceful attitude and braided hair;

its inwoven web of sentiment, and piety, and philosophy, and anatomy, and history, all profound: and twenty innocent dashes of the hand of one God-made painter, poor old Bassan or Bonifazio, were worth it all, and worth it ten thousand times over.

Not that the sentiment or the philosophy is base in itself.

They will make a good man, but they will not make a good painter,--no, nor the millionth part of a painter.

They would have been good in the work and words of daily life; but they are good for nothing in the cartoon, if they are there alone.

And the worst result of the system is the intense conceit into which it cultivates a weak mind.

Nothing is so hopeless, so intolerable, as the pride of a foolish man who has passed through a process of thinking, so as actually to have found something out.

He believes there is nothing else to be found out in the universe.

Whereas the truly great man, on whom the Revelations rain till they bear him to the earth with their weight, lays his head in the dust, and speaks thence--often in broken syllables.

Vanity is indeed a very equally divided inheritance among mankind; but I think that among the first persons, no emphasis is altogether so strong as that on the German _Ich_.

I was once introduced to a German philosopher-painter before Tintoret's "Massacre of the Innocents."

He looked at it superciliously, and said it "wanted to be restored."

He had been himself several years employed in painting a "Faust" in a red jerkin and blue fire; which made Tintoret appear somewhat dull to him.

[42] I have before stated ("Modern Painters" vol. ii.

) that the first function of the imagination is the apprehension of ultimate truth.

[43] Note especially, in connexion with what was advanced in Vol. II.

respecting our English neatness of execution, how the base workman has cut the lines of the architecture neatly and precisely round the abominable head: but the noble workman has used his chisel like a painter's pencil, and sketched the glory with a few irregular lines, anything rather than circular; and struck out the whole head in the same frank and fearless way, leaving the sharp edges of the stone as they first broke, and flinging back the crest of hair from the forehead with half a dozen hammer-strokes, while the poor wretch who did the other was half a day in smoothing its vapid and vermicular curls.

[44] The decree is quoted by Mutinelli, lib.

i.

p. 46. [45] See Appendix 9. CHAPTER IV.