No More Learning

Let us therefore put away the designs to _The Divine Comedy_, in which
there is 'an ordinary intelligence,' and consider only the designs
in which the magical ritual has called up extraordinary shapes, the
magical light glimmered upon a world, different from the Dantesque
world of our own intelligence in its ordinary and daily moods, upon
a difficult and distinguished world. Most of the series of designs
to Dante, and there are a good number, need not busy any one for a
moment. Genelli has done a copious series, which is very able in
the 'formal' 'generalized' way which Blake hated, and which is
spiritually ridiculous. Penelli has transformed the 'Inferno' into a
vulgar Walpurgis night, and a certain Schuler, whom I do not find in
the biographical dictionaries, but who was apparently a German, has
prefaced certain flaccid designs with some excellent charts, while
Stradanus has made a series for the 'Inferno,' which has so many of
the more material and unessential powers of art, and is so extremely
undistinguished in conception, that one supposes him to have touched
in the sixteenth century the same public Dore has touched in the
nineteenth.

Though with many doubts, I am tempted to value Flaxman's designs to the
'Inferno,' the 'Purgatorio,' and the 'Paradiso,' only a little above
the best of these, because he does not seem to have ever been really
moved by Dante, and so to have sunk into a formal manner, which is a
reflection of the vital manner of his Homer and Hesiod. His designs to
_The Divine Comedy_ will be laid, one imagines, with some ceremony in
that immortal wastepaper-basket in which Time carries with many sighs
the failures of great men. I am perhaps wrong, however, because Flaxman
even at his best has not yet touched me very deeply, and I hardly ever
hope to escape this limitation of my ruling stars. That Signorelli
does not seem greatly more interesting except here and there, as in the
drawing of 'The Angel,' full of innocence and energy, coming from the
boat which has carried so many souls to the foot of the mountain of
purgation, can only be because one knows him through poor reproductions
from frescoes half mouldered away with damp. A little-known series,
drawn by Adolph Sturler, an artist of German extraction, who was
settled in Florence in the first half of this century, are very
poor in drawing, very pathetic and powerful in invention, and full
of most interesting pre-Raphaelitic detail. There are admirable and
moving figures, who, having set love above reason, listen in the
last abandonment of despair to the judgment of Minos, or walk with a
poignant melancholy to the foot of his throne through a land where owls
and strange beasts move hither and thither with the sterile content of
the evil that neither loves nor hates, and a Cerberus full of patient
cruelty. All Sturler's designs have, however, the languor of a mind
that does its work by a succession of delicate critical perceptions
rather than the decision and energy of true creation, and are more a
curious contribution to artistic methods than an imaginative force.

The only designs that compete with Blake's are those of Botticelli and
Giulio Clovio, and these contrast rather than compete; for Blake did
not live to carry his 'Paradiso' beyond the first faint pencillings,
the first thin washes of colour, while Botticelli only, as I think,
became supremely imaginative in his 'Paradiso,' and Clovio never
attempted the 'Inferno' and 'Purgatorio' at all. The imaginations of
Botticelli and Clovio were overshadowed by the cloister, and it was
only when they passed beyond the world or into some noble peace, which
is not the world's peace, that they won a perfect freedom. Blake had
not such mastery over figure and drapery as had Botticelli, but he
could sympathize with the persons and delight in the scenery of the
'Inferno' and the 'Purgatorio' as Botticelli could not, and could
fill them with a mysterious and spiritual significance born perhaps
of mystical pantheism. The flames of Botticelli give one no emotion,
and his car of Beatrice is no symbolic chariot of the Church led by
the gryphon, half eagle, half lion, of Christ's dual nature, but is
a fragment of some mediaeval pageant pictured with a merely technical
inspiration.
Clovio, the illuminator of missals, has tried to create
with that too easy hand of his a Paradise of serene air reflected in a
little mirror, a heaven of sociability and humility and prettiness,
a heaven of women and of monks; but one cannot imagine him deeply
moved, as the modern world is moved, by the symbolism of bird and
beast, of tree and mountain, of flame and darkness. It was a profound
understanding of all creatures and things, a profound sympathy with
passionate and lost souls, made possible in their extreme intensity
by his revolt against corporeal law, and corporeal reason, which made
Blake the one perfectly fit illustrator for the 'Inferno' and the
'Purgatorio'; in the serene and rapturous emptiness of Dante's Paradise
he would find no symbols but a few abstract emblems, and he had no love
for the abstract, while with the drapery and the gestures of Beatrice
and Virgil, he would have prospered less than Botticelli or even Clovio.

1897.




SYMBOLISM IN PAINTING


IN England, which has made great Symbolic Art, most people dislike
an art if they are told it is symbolic, for they confuse symbol and
allegory. Even Johnson's Dictionary sees no great difference, for it
calls a Symbol 'That which comprehends in its figure a representation
of something else'; and an Allegory, 'A figurative discourse, in which
something other is intended than is contained in the words literally
taken. ' It is only a very modern Dictionary that calls a Symbol 'the
sign or representation of any moral thing by the images or properties
of natural things,' which, though an imperfect definition, is not
unlike 'The things below are as the things above' of the Emerald Tablet
of Hermes! _The Faerie Queene_ and _The Pilgrim's Progress_ have been
so important in England that Allegory has overtopped Symbolism, and
for a time has overwhelmed it in its own downfall. William Blake was
perhaps the first modern to insist on a difference; and the other
day, when I sat for my portrait to a German Symbolist in Paris, whose
talk was all of his love for Symbolism and his hatred for Allegory,
his definitions were the same as William Blake's, of whom he knew
nothing. William Blake has written, 'Vision or imagination'--meaning
symbolism by these words--'is a representation of what actually exists,
really or unchangeably. Fable or Allegory is formed by the daughters
of Memory. ' The German insisted with many determined gestures, that
Symbolism said things which could not be said so perfectly in any other
way, and needed but a right instinct for its understanding; while
Allegory said things which could be said as well, or better, in another
way, and needed a right knowledge for its understanding. The one gave
dumb things voices, and bodiless things bodies; while the other read
a meaning--which had never lacked its voice or its body--into something
heard or seen, and loved less for the meaning than for its own sake.
The only symbols he cared for were the shapes and motions of the body;
ears hidden by the hair, to make one think of a mind busy with inner
voices; and a head so bent that back and neck made the one curve, as in
Blake's 'Vision of Bloodthirstiness,' to call up an emotion of bodily
strength; and he would not put even a lily, or a rose, or a poppy into
a picture to express purity, or love, or sleep, because he thought
such emblems were allegorical, and had their meaning by a traditional
and not by a natural right. I said that the rose, and the lily, and
the poppy were so married, by their colour and their odour, and their
use, to love and purity and sleep, or to other symbols of love and
purity and sleep, and had been so long a part of the imagination of the
world, that a symbolist might use them to help out his meaning without
becoming an allegorist. I think I quoted the lily in the hand of the
angel in Rossetti's 'Annunciation,' and the lily in the jar in his
'Childhood of Mary Virgin,' and thought they made the more important
symbols, the women's bodies, and the angels' bodies, and the clear
morning light, take that place, in the great procession of Christian
symbols, where they can alone have all their meaning and all their
beauty.

It is hard to say where Allegory and Symbolism melt into one another,
but it is not hard to say where either comes to its perfection; and
though one may doubt whether Allegory or Symbolism is the greater
in the horns of Michael Angelo's 'Moses,' one need not doubt that
its symbolism has helped to awaken the modern imagination; while
Tintoretto's 'Origin of the Milky Way,' which is Allegory without any
Symbolism, is, apart from its fine painting, but a moment's amusement
for our fancy.