§ 7.

Morbid or Nervous Fancy.

§ 8. The action of contempla

is not to be expressed by art.

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, or 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 tive imagination of illustration respecting these points; for fuller explanation of the operations of the contemplative faculty on things verbally expressible, the reader may be referred to Wordsworth'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 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.

under narrow

Abstract

ren

Yet certain powers there are, within due limits, of marking the § 9. Except thing represented with an ideal character; and it was to these limits.—1st. powers that I alluded in defining the meaning of the term ideal, dering of form 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 advantage 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 Sta. Caterina at Pisa have been coloured, the irises of the eyes painted dark, and the hair gilded, as also I think the Madonna in Sta. 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 Sta. 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, I had rather not have it done. Colour, without form, is less frequently obtainable; and it may be § 10. Of colour doubted whether it be desirable: yet I think that to the full enjoyment 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; some

without form.

§ 11. Or

both without

texture.

of

times 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 representation 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, indeed, perhaps the most unfailing characteristic of great manner in painting. Compare a dog of Edwin Landseer with a dog of Paul Veronese. 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 Veronese, 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, magnificent, 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.

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.

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 accidents § 12. Abstracin a generic or symbolical form.

tion or typical representation

of animal form.

How far this may be done with things having necessary form, as animals, I 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 realized Florentine boar, nor in Raphael's fish of the Draught. And yet the propriety and nobility of these types depend on the architectural use and character 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 Raphael'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 decoration or support in architecture, that such generalization is allowable and in such circumstances it is perhaps necessary to adopt a typical form. The evil § 13. Either consequences of the opposite treatment are ludicrously exhibited in the bolically used. St. Peter of Carlo Dolci in the Pitti palace, which, owing to the

when it is sym

§14. Or in architectural decoration.

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 symbolical 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 representation 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 façade 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 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