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 further 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 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.

We have seen (§ 10) that the Imagination is in no small degree dependent on acuteness of moral emotion; § 31. How its in fact, all moral truth can only thus be appre- cultivation is dependent on hended—and it is observable, generally, that all the moral true and deep emotion is imaginative, both in con- feelings. ception 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.

Again, as the Life of Imagination is in the discovering of truth, it is clear it can have no respect for sayings § 32. On indeor opinions: knowing in itself when it has invented pendence of truly, restless and tormented except when it has Mind, this knowledge, its sense of success or failure is too acute to

imagery." Fuseli goes on to recall the pains taken by Zeuxis" to give plausibility to a compound of heterogeneous forms, to inspire them with suitable soul, and to imitate the laws of existence.' But the Athenians admired not this artistic intention, but only the novelty of the subject, and the artist covered up his picture in disgust. (Lecture iii., in the Life and Writings of Fuseli, ii. 138.)]

be affected by praise or blame. Sympathy it desires-but can do without; of opinions it is regardless, not in pride but because it 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. Finally, it is evident that, like the theoretic faculty, the

§ 33. And on habitual reference to nature.

*

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.1 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.3

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

1 [Ed. 1 had a note, among the Addenda, referring to this passage; the note is given below, p. 341.]

2 [This passage, "Fancy plays" to the end of the chapter, is § 14 of Frondes Agrestes, where Ruskin added the following note:

"I leave this passage, as my friend has chosen it; but it is unintelligible without the contexts, which show how all the emotions described in the preceding passages of this section, are founded on trust in the beneficence and rule of an Omnipotent Spirit.]

3 [For the Tower of Famine, see Vol. I. p. 115. The Tuscan islands-Capraja (the island of goats," so called by the ancients also) and Gorgona, a yet more sterile island affording pasture to wild goats only-would often have been seen by Ruskin from the mainland.]

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