GOTHIC LOVE OF IMAGINATION.

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its own sense of proportion, delights everywhere in disguising it!

This then, as I take it, is the essential distinction between the styles. Will any be bold enough to call all this "Pagan and Christian?" Is it not, on the face of it, a pure psychological affair from first to last?

I suppose "Dionysius the Areopagite" was as good a Christian as any of us. I am quite sure he would have built a church, if he built one at all, on the very strictest anti-Gothic principles: and so would " a woman named Damaris, and others with

them."

It were the easiest thing to show how psychological differences follow, now-a-days, the same identical course, how the preponderance of the poetical or the mathematical, the love of sentiment, or the love of order, determine, if but undisturbed, the love of Gothic or of Classic architecture. I had selected two very graphic passages, the one from a professional writer, who built reading-rooms and coffeehouses on inflexible Doric principles; the other from the eloquent Goth, whose works compel the present comparison: but we have no space for supererogatory proof.*

If there can remain a doubt, the following piece of evidence must dispose of it. Here is Mr. Ruskin's own account of Gothic architecture, taken from his elaborate work, the "Stones of Venice."

* The very characteristic and very beautiful passage I refer to, is in the Preface to the Second Edition of "Modern Painters," pp. xxxii. xxxiii.

:

After telling us that "its elements are certain mental tendencies of the builders legibly expressed in it," he gives us the following inventory of those elements, viz. :

1st. Savageness. 2nd. Cheerfulness. 3rd. Naturalism.

4th. "Grotesqueness" (afterwards called "disturbed imagination ”).

5th. Rigidity (afterwards called "Obstinacy"). 6th. Redundance.

1 will not speak of this inventory as its author has spoken of Dugald Stewart's account of Imagination: though I look in vain for those undeniable qualities, vastness, vagueness, vistaness, maziness; and even for the chaste solemnities of my own "Early English." This, however, is not the point. I content myself with asking, Where in this account of Gothic architecture could the subtlest casuist in the “ Lettres Provinciales " detect a solitary principle that claims the special title of "Christian ?"

CHAP. XVIII.

THE STUDY OF THE ANTIQUE.

THE whole subject of this chapter is in two short questions, What was Greek sculpture in itself? and What is it to be to us? Strange to say, the questions have not been kept distinct.

Let us see, first, what Mr. Ruskin admits of the excellence, and then what he asserts of the disqualifications of the antique.

"We see," he says, "by this light (repose) three colossal images standing side by side, looming in their great rest of spirituality, above the whole world's horizon, Phidias, Michael Angelo, and Dante; and then, separated from their great religious thrones only by less fulness and earnestness of faith, Homer and Shakspeare."(Modern Painters, pt. iii. sec. i. chap. vii. § 5.)

Again,

"One or two fragments of Greek sculpture, the works of Michael Angelo, considered with reference to their general conception and power, and the Madonna di St Sisto, are all I should myself put into such a category: not that even these are without defect; but their defects are such as mortality could never hope to rectify."—(Preface to Second Edition of Modern Painters, note to p. xvi.) Again,

"The difference in the accuracy of the lines of the

Torso of the Vatican, from one of Michael Angelo's finest works rests on points of such traceless and refined delicacy, that though we feel them in the result, we cannot follow them in the details. Yet they are such, and so great, as to place the Torso alone in Art, solitary and supreme, whilst the finest of Michael Angelo's works, considered with respect to truth alone, are said to be only on a level with antiques of the second class, under the Apollo and the Venus; that is, two classes or grades beneath the Torso."-(Modern Painters, pt. ii. sec. vi. chap. ii. § 2.)

So much for the power, "truth," and "spirituality of Greek Art. What is to be thought, after this,

of the following expressions?

"The divine form of the Greek god, except as it is the incarnation and expression of the divine mind, is degraded beside the passions and prophecy of the vaults of the Sistine.”— (Ibid., pt. i. sec. i. chap. vii.)

The question is not one of degree: there is one fact, Mr. Ruskin says, which must make "all Greek conception full of danger to the student." It is this,

"The Greek could not conceive a spirit: he could do nothing without limbs. . . . his god is a finite god, talking, pursuing, going on journeys. . . . What were the Greek's thoughts of his god of battles? No spirit's power was in the vision. It was a being of clay strength, and human passions."-(Ibid., pt. iii. sec. ii. chap. v. § 20.)

We need not follow the sequel: I will only ask, has not Mr. Ruskin's zeal outstripped his scholarship, his metaphysics, and his knowledge of Scripture? It is easy to quote Greek expressions; but what has become of others we are all familiar with, from

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the lips of Moses and Miriam, of Deborah, David, and Habakkuk ?_" The Lord is a Man of war "Thy right hand is become glorious

"There

went up a smoke out of His nostrils"... "He had horns coming out of His hand"... "Thy bow was made quite naked: thou didst march through the land in indignation"...? Or, not to multiply quotations that could be multiplied a hundred-fold, that evangelical promise, "God shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly?"

Every child knows that such words are figurative. But who shall say there was nothing figurative in the parallelisms of classic Art? Who can forget those magnificent reachings forth after a great Supreme that are on the pages of Greek philosophy?— how Thales said that "God is without beginning?" and Anaxagoras, that "He is a pure mind?" and Pythagoras, that" He is a monad, and the principle of good?" and Archilaus, that "He is mind and air?” and Heracleitus, that "He is an eternal circular fire?" and Zeno, that "He is the only eternal and infinite?" Is it just, in the presence of such conceptions, to interpret all classic imagery in the letter, and only Scripture in the spirit?

But let us come lower down, and speak, not of philosophical speculations, but of popular instincts. I said Mr. Ruskin's zeal had outstripped his metaphysics. "The Greek could not conceive a spirit: " Was Fate, then, a material being? Were the Greeks all materialists? Had they no idea of a human soul? What did they mean by the Metempsychosis? Did they take thought, fear, hatred, jealousy, duty, patriotism, for physical exercises?