Chapter III: Of Imagination Penetrative (2)

Of unimaginative work, Bandinelli and Canova supply us with characteristic instances of every kind, the Hercules and Cacus of the 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 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^a. 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 Uffizii, far away, showing themselves in their lustrous lightness as the waves of an Alpine torrent do by their dancing among the dead stones, though the stones be as white as they:[66] and finally, and perhaps more than all, those four ineffable types, not of darkness nor of day--not of morning nor evening, 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;[67] all these, and all else that I could name of 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.[68]

Sec. 29. Recapitulation. The perfect function of the imagination is the
intuitive perception of ultimate truth.

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 imagination is its reaching, by intuition and intensity of gaze, (not by reasoning, but by its authoritative opening and revealing power,) a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things. I repeat that it matters not whether the reader is willing call this faculty imagination or no, I do not care about the name; but I would be understood when I speak of imagination hereafter, to mean this, the true foundation of all art which exercises eternal authority over men's minds; (all other imagination than this is either secondary and contemplative, or utterly spurious;) the base of whose authority and being is its perpetual thirst of truth and purpose to be true. It has no food, no delight, no care, no perception, except of truth; it is forever 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 combination; 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.

Sec. 30. Imagination now vulgarly understood.

How different this definition of the imagination may be from the idea of it commonly entertained among us, I can hardly say, because I have a very indistinct idea of what is usually meant by the term. I hear modern works constantly praised as being imaginative, in which I can trace no virtue of any kind; but simple, slavish, unpalliated falsehood and exaggeration; I see not what merit there can be in pure, ugly, resolute fiction; it is surely easy enough to be 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 ever has continued 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 us to show in what direction that effort must be made.

Sec. 31. How its cultivation is dependent on the moral feelings.

We have seen (Sec. 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 imagination; 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.

Sec. 32. On independence of mind.

Again, as the life of imagination is in the discovering of truth, it is clear it can have no respect for sayings or opinions: 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 has no vanity, and 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 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.[69]

Sec. 33. And on habitual reference to nature.

Finally, it is evident, that like the theoretic faculty, the imagination must be fed constantly by external nature--after the illustrations we have given, this may seem mere truism, for it is clear that to the exercise of the penetrative faculty a subject of penetration is necessary; but I note it because many painters of powerful mind have been lost to the world by their suffering the restless writhing of their imagination in its cage to take place of its healthy and exulting activity in the fields of nature. The most imaginative men always study the hardest, and are the most thirsty for new knowledge. Fancy plays like a squirrel in its circular prison, and is happy; but imagination is a pilgrim on the earth--and her home is in heaven. Shut her from the fields of the celestial mountains--bar her from breathing their lofty, sun-warmed air; and we may as well turn upon her the last bolt of the tower of famine, and give the keys to the keeping of the wildest surge that washes Capraja and Gorgona.

FOOTNOTES

[56] Compare Arist. Rhet. III. 11.

[57] For the distinction between fancy and simple conception; see
Chap. IV. Sec. 3.

[58] 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
imagination, 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, mindlessness, and eclecticism of Guido
and the Carracci, which in its poetical demand of tenderness might
have foiled Pinturicchio; of dignity, Leonardo; and of color,
Giorgione.

[59] Fancy, in her third function may, however, become serious, and
gradually rise into imagination in doing so. Compare Chap. IV. Sec. 5.

[60] I am describing from a proof: in bad impressions this trunk is
darkened.

[61] The picture is in the Guadagni palace. It is one of the most
important landscapes Salvator ever painted. The figures are studied
from street beggars. On the one 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
ruffians 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 the stream of light to which the
eye is principally directed.

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

[63] Note the shallow and uncomprehending notice of this picture by
Fuseli. His description of the treatment of it by other painters is
however true, terse, and valuable.

[64] Fresco in an out-house of the Ospedale St^a. Maria Nuova at
Florence.

[65] The same thing is done yet more boldly in the large composition
of the ceiling; the plague of fiery serpents; a part of the host,
and another sky horizon are seen through an opening in the ground.

[66] The Bacchus. There is a small statue opposite it
also--unfinished, but "a spirit still."

[67] I would have insisted more on the ghostly vitality of this
dreadful statue; but the passage referring 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
On that thrice-hallowed day, when all are 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 (as 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 idiocy of the greatest mind that art ever inspired.

[68] 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 some notice of the pre-eminent power of
execution exhibited by both of them, in consequence of their vigor
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 most 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 truth, does not alter into anything else as the
imaginative 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 effort 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, involuntary 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 off
and the chill on, laborious, unnatural, inane, with its emptiness
disguised by affectation, and its tastelessness salted by
extravagance.

Necessarily, from these modes of conception, three vices of
execution must result; and these are necessarily 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 endeavor 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 Clarke in the
Essay on Expression, from Blaise de Vigenere,) and as it 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
conception, 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 Rocco, 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 gray 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 gray strokes on the stone are so considered that a better stone
cone 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, 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 canvas, 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 precedent. 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 will
naturally do so without reference to precedent. He ought to hold
always that his duty is to attain the highest result he can,--but
that no one has any business with the means or time he has taken. If
it can be done quickly, let it be so done; if not, let it be done at
any rate. For knowing his way he is answerable, and therefore must
not walk _doubtingly_; but no one can blame him for walking
_cautiously_, if the way be a narrow one, with a slip on each side.
He may pause, but he must not hesitate,--and tremble, but must not
vacillate.

[69] That which we know of the lives of M. Angelo and Tintoret is
eminently illustrative of this temper.