THE
ILLUSTRATIONS
OF DANTE.
Yeats
Our imaginations are but fragments of
the universal imagination, portions of the universal body of God, and
as we enlarge our imagination by imaginative sympathy, and transform
with the beauty and peace of art, the sorrows and joys of the world, we
put off the limited mortal man more and more and put on the unlimited
'immortal man. ' 'As the seed waits eagerly watching for its flower
and fruit, anxious its little soul looks out into the clear expanse
to see if hungry winds are abroad with their invisible array, so man
looks out in tree, and herb, and fish, and bird, and beast, collecting
up the fragments of his immortal body into the elemental forms of
everything that grows. . . . In pain he sighs, in pain he labours in his
universe, sorrowing in birds over the deep, or howling in the wolf
over the slain, and moaning in the cattle, and in the winds. ' Mere
sympathy for living things is not enough, because we must learn to
separate their 'infected' from their eternal, their satanic from their
divine part; and this can only be done by desiring always beauty, the
one mask through which can be seen the unveiled eyes of eternity. We
must then be artists in all things, and understand that love and old
age and death are first among the arts. In this sense he insists that
'Christ's apostles were artists,' that 'Christianity is Art,' and
that 'the whole business of man is the arts. ' Dante, who deified law,
selected its antagonist, passion, as the most important of sins, and
made the regions where it was punished the largest. Blake, who deified
imaginative freedom, held 'corporeal reason' for the most accursed of
things, because it makes the imagination revolt from the sovereignty
of beauty and pass under the sovereignty of corporeal law, and this
is 'the captivity in Egypt. ' True art is expressive and symbolic,
and makes every form, every sound, every colour, every gesture, a
signature of some unanalyzable imaginative essence. False art is not
expressive, but mimetic, not from experience but from observation, and
is the mother of all evil, persuading us to save our bodies alive at no
matter what cost of rapine and fraud. True art is the flame of the last
day, which begins for every man, when he is first moved by beauty, and
which seeks to burn all things until they become 'infinite and holy. '
III.
THE ILLUSTRATIONS OF DANTE.
The late Mr. John Addington Symonds wrote--in a preface to certain
Dante illustrations by Stradanus, a sixteenth-century artist of no
great excellence, published in phototype by Mr. Unwin in 1892--that
the illustrations of Gustave Dore, 'in spite of glaring artistic
defects, must, I think, be reckoned first among numerous attempts to
translate Dante's conceptions into terms of plastic art. ' One can only
account for this praise of a noisy and demagogic art by supposing
that a temperament, strong enough to explore with unfailing alertness
the countless schools and influences of the Renaissance in Italy, is
of necessity a little lacking in delicacy of judgment and in the
finer substances of emotion. It is more difficult to account for so
admirable a scholar not only preferring these illustrations to the work
of what he called 'the graceful and affected Botticelli,'--although
'Dore was fitted for his task, not by dramatic vigour, by feeling for
beauty, or by anything sterling in sympathy with the supreme poet's
soul, but by a very effective sense of luminosity and gloom'--but
preferring them because 'he created a fanciful world, which makes the
movement of Dante's _dramatis personae_ conceivable, introducing the
ordinary intelligence into those vast regions thronged with destinies
of souls and creeds and empires. ' When the ordinary student finds
this intelligence in an illustrator, he thinks, because it is his
own intelligence, that it is an accurate interpretation of the text,
while work of the extraordinary intelligences is merely an expression
of their own ideas and feelings. Dore and Stradanus, he will tell
you, have given us something of the world of Dante, but Blake and
Botticelli have builded worlds of their own and called them Dante's--as
if Dante's world were more than a mass of symbols of colour and form
and sound which put on humanity, when they arouse some mind to an
intense and romantic life that is not theirs; as if it was not one's
own sorrows and angers and regrets and terrors and hopes that awaken to
condemnation or repentance while Dante treads his eternal pilgrimage;
as if any poet or painter or musician could be other than an enchanter
calling with a persuasive or compelling ritual, creatures, noble or
ignoble, divine or daemonic, covered with scales or in shining raiment,
that he never imagined, out of the bottomless deeps of imaginations he
never foresaw; as if the noblest achievement of art was not when the
artist enfolds himself in darkness, while he casts over his readers a
light as of a wild and terrible dawn.
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.
the universal imagination, portions of the universal body of God, and
as we enlarge our imagination by imaginative sympathy, and transform
with the beauty and peace of art, the sorrows and joys of the world, we
put off the limited mortal man more and more and put on the unlimited
'immortal man. ' 'As the seed waits eagerly watching for its flower
and fruit, anxious its little soul looks out into the clear expanse
to see if hungry winds are abroad with their invisible array, so man
looks out in tree, and herb, and fish, and bird, and beast, collecting
up the fragments of his immortal body into the elemental forms of
everything that grows. . . . In pain he sighs, in pain he labours in his
universe, sorrowing in birds over the deep, or howling in the wolf
over the slain, and moaning in the cattle, and in the winds. ' Mere
sympathy for living things is not enough, because we must learn to
separate their 'infected' from their eternal, their satanic from their
divine part; and this can only be done by desiring always beauty, the
one mask through which can be seen the unveiled eyes of eternity. We
must then be artists in all things, and understand that love and old
age and death are first among the arts. In this sense he insists that
'Christ's apostles were artists,' that 'Christianity is Art,' and
that 'the whole business of man is the arts. ' Dante, who deified law,
selected its antagonist, passion, as the most important of sins, and
made the regions where it was punished the largest. Blake, who deified
imaginative freedom, held 'corporeal reason' for the most accursed of
things, because it makes the imagination revolt from the sovereignty
of beauty and pass under the sovereignty of corporeal law, and this
is 'the captivity in Egypt. ' True art is expressive and symbolic,
and makes every form, every sound, every colour, every gesture, a
signature of some unanalyzable imaginative essence. False art is not
expressive, but mimetic, not from experience but from observation, and
is the mother of all evil, persuading us to save our bodies alive at no
matter what cost of rapine and fraud. True art is the flame of the last
day, which begins for every man, when he is first moved by beauty, and
which seeks to burn all things until they become 'infinite and holy. '
III.
THE ILLUSTRATIONS OF DANTE.
The late Mr. John Addington Symonds wrote--in a preface to certain
Dante illustrations by Stradanus, a sixteenth-century artist of no
great excellence, published in phototype by Mr. Unwin in 1892--that
the illustrations of Gustave Dore, 'in spite of glaring artistic
defects, must, I think, be reckoned first among numerous attempts to
translate Dante's conceptions into terms of plastic art. ' One can only
account for this praise of a noisy and demagogic art by supposing
that a temperament, strong enough to explore with unfailing alertness
the countless schools and influences of the Renaissance in Italy, is
of necessity a little lacking in delicacy of judgment and in the
finer substances of emotion. It is more difficult to account for so
admirable a scholar not only preferring these illustrations to the work
of what he called 'the graceful and affected Botticelli,'--although
'Dore was fitted for his task, not by dramatic vigour, by feeling for
beauty, or by anything sterling in sympathy with the supreme poet's
soul, but by a very effective sense of luminosity and gloom'--but
preferring them because 'he created a fanciful world, which makes the
movement of Dante's _dramatis personae_ conceivable, introducing the
ordinary intelligence into those vast regions thronged with destinies
of souls and creeds and empires. ' When the ordinary student finds
this intelligence in an illustrator, he thinks, because it is his
own intelligence, that it is an accurate interpretation of the text,
while work of the extraordinary intelligences is merely an expression
of their own ideas and feelings. Dore and Stradanus, he will tell
you, have given us something of the world of Dante, but Blake and
Botticelli have builded worlds of their own and called them Dante's--as
if Dante's world were more than a mass of symbols of colour and form
and sound which put on humanity, when they arouse some mind to an
intense and romantic life that is not theirs; as if it was not one's
own sorrows and angers and regrets and terrors and hopes that awaken to
condemnation or repentance while Dante treads his eternal pilgrimage;
as if any poet or painter or musician could be other than an enchanter
calling with a persuasive or compelling ritual, creatures, noble or
ignoble, divine or daemonic, covered with scales or in shining raiment,
that he never imagined, out of the bottomless deeps of imaginations he
never foresaw; as if the noblest achievement of art was not when the
artist enfolds himself in darkness, while he casts over his readers a
light as of a wild and terrible dawn.
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.
