session of the solitary scene, the Imagination only giving weight, meaning, and strange human sympathies to all its sights and sounds. In that from Scott the Fancy, led away by the outside resemblance of floating form and hue to the banners, loses the feeling and possession of the scene, and places herself in circumstances of character completely opposite to the quietness and grandeur of the natural objects; this would have been unjustifiable, but that the resemblance occurs to the mind of the monarch, rather than to that of the poet; and it is that, which, of all others, would have been the most likely to occur at the time; in this point of view it has high imaginative propriety. Of the same fanciful character is that transformation of the tree trunks into dragons noticed before in Turner's Jason; and in the same way this becomes imaginative, as it exhibits the effect of Fear in disposing to morbid perception. Compare with it the real and high action of the Imagination on the same matter in Wordsworth's Yew trees (perhaps the most vigorous and solemn bit of forest landscape ever painted): "Each particular trunk a growth Of intertwisted fibres serpentine, It is too long to quote, but the reader should refer to it: let him note especially, if painter, that pure touch of colour, "By sheddings ⚫ from the pining umbrage tinged." In the same way the blasted trunk on the left, in Turner's drawing of the spot where Harold fell at the battle of Hastings, takes, where its boughs first separate, the shape of the head of an arrow; this, which is mere fancy in itself, is imagination as it supposes 1 Let it not be supposed that I mean to compare the sickly dreaming of Shelley over clouds and waves, with the masculine and magnificent grasp of men and things which we find in Scott; it only happens that these two passages are more illustrative, by the likeness of the scenery they treat, than any others I could have opposed, and that Shelley is peculiarly distinguished by the faculty of Contemplative imagination. Scott's healthy and truthful feeling would not allow him to represent the benighted hunter, provoked by loss of game, horse, and way at once, as indulging in any more exalted flights of imagination than those naturally consequent on the contrast between the night's lodging he expected, and that which befitted him. VOL. II. § 7. Morbid or Nervous Fancy. § 8. The action of Contempla is not to be ex pressed by art. the 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, nor 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 be shown by the intellectual anticipation and realization of such impressions, as in that glorious vignette of Turner's to the voyage of Columbus. 66 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. may 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 of 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 dering of form 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. First, powers that I alluded in defining the meaning of the term Ideal, in the thirteenth chapter of the preceding section. For it is by 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 St. 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. without colour; without form; Colour, without form, is less frequently obtainable; and it may § 10. Of colour be doubted whether it be desirable; yet I think that to the full enjoyment of it a certain sacrifice of form is necessary; sometimes by § 11. Or of both without texture. 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; sometimes by flatness of mass, as often Giorgione and Titian. How far it is possible for the painter to represent those mountains of Shelley 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.1 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 scenepainter's touches: but the essence of dog is there; the entire, mag 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 diffi culty, and changefully adapted to the treatment of every object. Compare the notes at the end of this volume. nificent, 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. 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 acci- § 12. Abstracdents in a generic or symbolical 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 realised Florentine boar, nor in Raffaelle'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 Raffaelle's in its struggle with Sampson, 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; tion or typical representation of animal form; |