the Pagan formalisms of the Uffizii, far away, separating themselves in their lustrous lightness as the waves of an Alpine torrent do by their dancing from the dead stones, though the stones be as white as they; * 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; † all these, and all else that I could * The Bacchus. There is a small statue opposite it, also unfinished; but "a spirit still." I would have insisted more on the ghostly vitality of this dreadful statue; but the passage referring to it in Rogers' Italy supersedes all further description. I suppose most lovers of art know it by heart. "Nor then forget that chamber of the dead, Yet still are breathing and shed round at noon 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.1 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 1 [A few years later, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (who, as we have seeu, Vol. III. p. xxxviii., read Ruskin at Florence) wrote a fine commentary on these same statues in Casa Guidi Windows, i. 74 ff.] 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.* anatomist and posture-master; and art was finally destroyed by the influence over admiring idiocy of the greatest mind that art ever inspired.** ** I italicised the earliest expression of my sense of the destructive power in Michael Angelo; my own mind was, however, still itself in the state described of "admiring idiocy" when I wrote the last words of the note. [1883.] 1 * Í 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 vigour and clearness of conception; nor without again 1 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 1 [See preceding volume, p. 126.] Imagi nation is the intuitive perception of Ultimate Now, in all these instances, let it be observed-for it is to that end alone that I have been arguing all § 29. Recapitulation. The along that the virtue of the Imagination is its of the Ingin 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 to call this faculty Imagination or not; I do not care about the name; but I would be understood when I speak of imagination hereafter, to mean this, the base of whose authority Truth. 2 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 deadness enlivened by extravagance. Necessarily from these modes of conception, three vices of execution must result; and these are 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 endeavour 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 1 [With this § compare Stones of Venice, vol. iii. ch. iii. § 62, and Pleasures of England, § 90.] 2 [Ed. 1 reads: "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 for 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 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 Bell in the Essay on Expression, from Blaise de Vigenere),' and as 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 Pietà 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,2 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 grey over a flat brown ground; but the touches of the tree trunks have been followed by the mind as they went 1 [Anatomy of Expression, 3rd ed., p. 207. The following is the passage: "I have seen Michael Angelo, when above sixty, and not very robust, make more fragments of the marble fly off in a quarter of an hour than three vigorous young sculptors would have done in an hour; and he worked with so much impetuosity, and put such strength into his blows, that I feared he would have broken the whole in pieces, for portions, the size of three or four fingers, were struck off so near to the contour or outline, that, if he erred by a hair's-breadth, he would have spoiled all and lost his labour, since the defect could not have been remedied as in working in clay."1 Rocco, [The pictures referred to are apparently the "Magdalen" and "St. Mary of Egypt" in the Lower Room; see Stones of Venice, vol. iii. (Venetian index, s. Scuola di San," Nos. 5 and 6). On Tintoret's rapidity of execution in this respect, see above, Introduction, p. xxxix. The "Temptation" is in the Upper Room; for a further description of it, see Stones of Venice, ibid., No. 20. It is reproduced as the frontispiece to J. B. Stoughton Holborn's Tintoretto.] 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. How different this definition of the Imagination may be § 30. Imagination, how vulgarly under stood. 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 down with the most painful intensity through their every undulation; and the few grey strokes on the stone are so considered that a better stone 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. 1 [True invention, says Fuseli, "discovers, selects, combines the possible, the probable, the known, in a mode that strikes with an air of truth and novelty, at once. Possible. means the representation of effects derived from causes, or forms compounded from materials, heterogeneous and incompatible among themselves, but rendered so plausible to our senses, that the transition of one part to another seems to be accounted for by an air of organisation . . . ; that this was the condition on which, and the limits within which alone the ancients permitted invention to represent what was, strictly speaking, impossible, we may with plausibility surmise from the picture of Zeuxis, described by Lucian in the memoir to which he has prefixed that painter's name, who was probably one of the first adventurers in this species of |