§ 1. Condition of the human creature en tirely different lower animals. CHAPTER XIV III. OF VITAL BEAUTY IN MAN HAVING thus passed gradually through all the orders and fields of creation, and traversed that goodly line of God's happy creatures who "leap not, but express a feast, where all the guests sit close, from that of the and nothing wants,"1 without finding any deficiency which human invention might supply, nor any harm which human interference might mend,* we come at last to set ourselves face to face with ourselves; expecting that in creatures made after the image of God, we are to find comeliness and completion more exquisite than in the fowls of the air and the things that pass through the paths of the sea. 3 But behold now a sudden change from all former experience. No longer among the individuals of the race is there equality or likeness, a distributed fairness and fixed type visible in each; but evil diversity, and terrible stamp of various degradation: features seamed by sickness, dimmed by sensuality, convulsed by passion, pinched by poverty, shadowed by sorrow, branded with remorse: bodies consumed with sloth, broken down by labour, tortured by disease, dishonoured in foul uses; intellects without power, hearts without hope, minds earthly and devilish; our bones full of the sin of our youth, the heaven revealing our iniquity, the earth rising up against us, the roots dried up beneath, Assumption again; and of the unblushingest. [1883.] 1 [George Herbert: The Temple ("Providence," lines 133-134). The lines are quoted again by Ruskin in Deucalion, ii. ch. ii. (" Revision).] 2 [Genesis i. 26.] 3 Psalms viii. 8.] 4 [Psalms xxv. 7.] and the branch cut off above;1 well for us only, if, after beholding this our natural face in a glass, we desire not straightway to forget what manner of men we be.2 §2. What room here for ideali zation. Herein there is at last something, and too much for that short-stopping intelligence and dull perception of ours to accomplish, whether in earnest fact, or in the seeking for the outward image of beauty : -to undo the devil's work; to restore to the body the grace and the power which inherited disease has destroyed; to restore to the spirit the purity, and to the intellect the grasp, that they had in Paradise. Now, first of all, this work, be it observed, is in no respect a work of imagination. Wrecked we are, and nearly all to pieces; but that little good by which we are to redeem ourselves is to be got out of the old wreck, beaten about and full of sand though it be; and not out of that desert island of pride on which the devils split first, and we after them: and so the only restoration of the body that we can reach is not to be coined out of our fancies, but to be collected out of such uninjured and bright vestiges of the old seal as we can find and set together: and the ideal of the good and perfect soul, as it is seen in the features, is not to be reached by imagination, but by the seeing and reaching forth of the better part of the soul to that of which it must first know the sweetness and goodness in itself, before it can much desire, or rightly find, the signs of it in others.† * I am glad to see that even in this Evangelical burst of flame upon the "corruption of human nature," I was at least quit of the folly of hoping for redemption except in personal effort. But I don't know what I meant by "the desert island of pride" as in opposition to effort, for a true Evangelical would say, the pride was in trying to do anything ourselves. I believe I must have meant the notion that everybody, once converted, was as good as anybody else. [1883, when the italics in § 2 were first introduced.] This sentence certainly does mean that a painter of saints must be a saint himself, which is true: and many a time since, I've said so more plainly. [1883.] 3 1 [Job xviii. 16.] 2 James i. 23, 24.] 3 [See, for instance, Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. x. § 22, "greatness in art is the expression of a mind of a God-made great man;" Two Paths, § 45, "great art is I say much desire and rightly find, because there is not any soul so sunk as not in some measure to feel the impression of mental beauty in the human features, and detest in others its own likeness, and in itself despise that which of itself it has made. § 3. How the conception of the bodily ideal is reached. Now, of the ordinary process by which the realization of ideal bodily form is reached, there is explanation enough in all treatises on art, and it is so far well comprehended that I need not stay long to consider it. So far as the sight and knowledge of the human form, of the purest race, exercised from infancy constantly, but not excessively, in all exercises of dignity, not in straining dexterities, but in natural exercises of running, casting, or riding; practised in endurance, not of extraordinary hardship, for that hardens and degrades the body, but of natural hardship, vicissitudes of winter and summer, and cold and heat, yet in a climate where none of these are severe; surrounded also by a certain degree of right luxury, so as to soften and refine the forms of strength; so far as the sight of all this could render the mental intelligence of what is noble in human form so acute as to be able to abstract and combine, from the best examples so produced, that which was most perfect in each, so far the Greek conceived and attained the ideal of humanity: and on the Greek modes of attaining it,' chiefly dwell those writers whose opinions on this subject I have collected; wholly losing sight of what seems to me the most important branch of the inquiry, namely, the influence, for good or evil, of the mind upon the bodily shape, the wreck of the mind itself, and the modes by which we may conceive of its restoration. The visible operation of the mind upon the body may be classed under three heads. nothing else than the type of a strong and noble life;" and Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. i. ch. vii. § 37, "all great painters, of whatever school, have been great only in their rendering of what they have seen and felt." And, therefore, no man can paint religious subjects in the great style unless his mind has a natural disposition to them (Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. iii. § 5); in which connexion, see what is said of Fra Angelico, passim in this volume.] 1 [Ed. 1 adds, " as well as on what he produced, as a perfect example of it, ."] owing to influ lect. First, the operation of the intellectual powers upon the features, in the fine cutting and chiselling of them, and removal from them of signs of sensuality and tons of the § 4. Modificasloth, by which they are blunted and deadened; bodily ideal and substitution of energy and intensity for vacancy ence of mind. and insipidity (by which wants alone the faces of First, of Intelmany fair women are utterly spoiled and rendered valueless); and by the keenness given to the eye and fine moulding and development to the brow, of which effects Sir Charles Bell has well described the desirableness and opposition to brutal types; only this he has not sufficiently observed, that there are certain virtues of the intellect in measure inconsistent with each other, as perhaps great subtlety with great comprehensiveness, and high analytical with high imaginative power: or that at least, if consistent and compatible, their signs upon the features are not the same, so that the outward form cannot express both, without in a measure expressing neither; and so there are certain separate virtues of the outward form correspondent with the more constant employment or more prevailing capacity of the brain, as the piercing keenness, or open and reflective comprehensiveness, of the eye and forehead: and that all these virtues of form are ideal, only those the most so which are the signs of the worthiest powers of intellect, though which these may be, we will not at present stay to enquire. Secondly, the operation of the moral feelings conjointly with the intellectual powers on both the features § 5. Secondly, and form. Now, the operation of the right moral of the Moral feelings on the intellect is always for the good of Feelings. the latter, for it is not possible that selfishness should reason 1 [Ed. 1 supplies the reference, " p. 59, third edition" of the Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting.] 2 [Ed. 1 reads :— "The second point to be considered in the influence of mind upon body, is the mode of operation and conjunction of the moral feelings on and with the intellectual powers, and then their conjoint influence on the bodily form. Now the operation . . ."] rightly in any respect, but must be blind in its estimation of the worthiness of all things: neither anger, for that overpowers the reason or outcries it; neither sensuality, for that overgrows and chokes it; neither agitation, for that has no time to compare things together; neither enmity, for that must be unjust; neither fear, for that exaggerates all things; neither cunning and deceit, for that which is voluntarily untrue will soon be unwittingly so; but the great reasoners are self-command, and trust unagitated, and deep-looking Love, and Faith, which as she is above Reason, so she best holds the reins of it from her high seat; so that they err grossly who think of the right development even of the intellectual type as possible, unless we look to higher sources of beauty first. Nevertheless, though in their operation upon them the moral feelings are thus elevatory of the mental faculties, yet in their conjunction with them they seem to occupy, in their own fulness, such space as to absorb and overshadow all else; so that, the simultaneous exercise of both being in a sort impossible, we occasionally find the moral part in full development and action, without corresponding expansion of the intellect (though never without healthy condition of it), as in the condition described by Wordsworth, "In such high hour Of visitation from the Living God, only, if we look far enough, we shall perhaps find that it is not intelligence itself, but the immediate act and effort of a laborious, struggling, and imperfect intellectual faculty, with which high moral emotion is inconsistent; and though we cannot, while we feel deeply, reason shrewdly, yet I * Good: and the following passage is carefully written, and of considerable value: only it should have been noted that, since Faith holds the reins of Reason, she ought to be early taught to drive. [1883.] 1 [The Excursion, book i. ("The Wanderer"), line 211. The passage is quoted again in the following volume, ch. xvii. § 11. For Ruskin's admiration, at this time, of The Excursion, see the letter in Appendix iii., below, p. 393.] |