And this misleading potency of the map scientific engenders political as well as spiritual dangers. Tariff Reform in Britain rests on the notion of exchanging products preferentially with these great British colonies which bulk on the map like continents, but which, as yet in their infancy, only represent in all some poor ten million souls against the homeland’s forty millions. Australia, beholding her unified contours from the Gulf of Carpentaria to Bass Strait, persists in the heroic delusion that, despite the torridity and drought of her Northern Territory, she is a single country, and that country a white man’s—nay, a Briton’s exclusively. For it is from the surplus population of the little island in the Northern Sea that all these continents into which Britain has blundered are to be filled up: a notion which lives in the same brains that fever with alarm over the exodus from her shores. And all save the spherical maps foster an infinity of fallacies of dimension: drawn to fill the like-sized page in the atlas, South America seems a twin of India; Ireland and Madagascar (which contains seven Erins) look much of a muchness; and Brazil, which is almost another Europe, bulges in the imagination less than the Balkan Peninsula. What wonder if statesmen have misguided the destinies of nations and misdirected wars by false impressions derived from atlases, with their deceptive distances and their obscurations of the real character of territories, rivers, or harbours. Seoul, the capital of Corea, Lord Curzon tells us, seems on the river, yet it is three or four miles away, and approachable only by a canal at times shallow. “Get large maps,” advised the late Lord Salisbury; but I would say, beware of maps altogether. For your school map would foist upon you the delusion that Morocco is not the East at all, but actually ten degrees more westerly than London! Whereas every schoolboy knows that it is in the middle of the “Arabian Nights.” With the Orient thus thrown south-west of Europe, we are as befogged by the atlas of to-day as by the old maps which put the Orient on the top. In truth, the Orient, like heaven, is not a place, but a state of mind.
To the deuce with your parallels of longitude! Fez in the West, forsooth!
AN EXCURSION INTO HEAVEN AND HELL: WITH A DEPRECIATION OF DANTE
In that volume on the grotesque a chapter—nay, a section—would deal with the attempts of Art to give form and colour to that after-world “from whence no traveller returns.” The grotesquerie belongs more to the thought than to the picture, for in eschatological æsthetics the horrible can be reconciled to the decorative, as it is in Giotto’s Last Judgment at Padua, which I suppose is the earliest treatment of the theme that counts, and which, as Giotto and Dante were in Padua together, was probably painted under the personal influence of that great authority and explorer. There is no justification in Dante’s own work, however, for the Father’s supersession by the Son, who—while Il Padre Eterno is relegated to the choir-arch—occupies, as so often, the judicial bench, and looms dominant in a large polychromatic oval like an incomplete spectrum, with saints at either hand on golden chairs, and golden companies of hovering angels, the Cross beneath his feet making a decorative division of Heaven from Hell, and its arms providing clinging-points for floating angels. Among the beatific company on the celestial side of the Cross are monks presenting their monastery to lady saints, and fussy nude corpses of all ages and both sexes bobbing up out of their coffins, some looking round in surprise, some instinctively begging for grace, and one looking back into his coffin, as into a cab for something forgotten. The Hell is a chaos of tortures, overdusked by the Personal Hell, the fee-fi-fo-fum ogre (with whom I came to grow very familiar) who gulps down sinners like oysters. You see their legs protruding, and others ready for his maw clutched in his greedy hands. Still other sinners stand on their heads or hang by their hair or quiver under the tortures of gorilla-like devils and strange serpentine beasts, or whirl like Paolo and Francesca. And over all the agony, with beautiful serene face, floats the angel, clinging to the Cross, and the saints sit placid on their golden chairs, perhaps, as in that ecstatic prevision of Tertullian, finding their bliss enhanced by these wails of woe, as one’s enjoyment of one’s warm hearth is spiced by the howling of the winds about.
The mere ardour of life was immoral to the mediæval mind, as we may see from the celebrated anonymous frescoes of Il Trionfo della Morte in the Campo Santo of Pisa—as if a cemetery needed any enforcement of Death’s triumph! But the opportunity is seized of besmirching “The Triumph of Life,” and by way of prelude to the tomb and its terrors a gay cavalcade of hunters rides to the chase, with hound and horn, winding through a lovely landscape. Their horses are arrested by three open coffins on the roadside, precisely of the shape of horse-troughs, but containing corpses, apparently a king’s, a priest’s, and a layman’s. The last is a mere skeleton; the others are fully robed and serpents curl spitefully about them. A stag, a rabbit, and a partridge rest serenely upon a little plateau, as if conscious there will be no danger to-day from these disconcerted sportsmen. A cowled monk holds out a long scroll to the leader of the chase, like an official presenting an address. Other holy hermits read ostentatiously beneath the trees outside their humble cottage, and one milks a quaint goat. As if the hermit were more immune from death than the hunter! Overhead hover fearful fire-breathing demons bearing beautiful women head downwards to their doom. Towards the centre of the entire picture, of which this forms but a half, sweeps Death, a sombre flying figure with a great scythe, whom cripples and the sorrowful invoke in vain; underneath are his slain, upon whose bodies swoop demons with long pitchforks and angels with long crosses, fighting furiously for the spoil, in a game of pull devil, pull angel. In one case the angel has gripped the arms, the devil the feet, and they tug and lug with wings distended to their fullest, every muscle a-strain; even if the angel succeeds, the racked ghost will have known the Inferno. Let us pray the poor soul may recover breath in the Hesperian garden, where sit the meek sainted playing on lutes and lyres or nursing pet doves and spaniels.
A companion fresco devotes itself to The Last Judgment. To the sound of angel-trumpets the dead rise from their coffins, to be marched right or left by stern sworded archangels, as the great arbiter—again in a surmounting oval—may determine. Haloed saints occupy a safe platform on high and watch the suppliant, panic-stricken sinners in the dock. Hell in many compartments takes half the picture, Satan throned at centre, a grisly Colossus, horned and fanged, and each compartment a chamber of horrors unspeakable, or a caldron of stewing sinners, most noteworthy of whom are the three arch-heretics of the fourteenth century, Mohammed, Anti-Christ, and Averroes (the last grown much less respectable since Dante put him with Plato). This composition—the heretics apart—is obviously on the general lines of Giotto’s, which may be considered the archetype of all the Judgment pictures, and the crudity of the conception is apparent. It is a mere parody of earthly tribunals. In the hands of a Signorelli—as at Orvieto—the vigour of the technique dominates and sweeps away the naïveté. It is the sublimity of terror—
“Where the bright Seraphim in burning row
Their loud uplifted angel trumpets blow.”
But this conventional and crowded rendering has always impressed me far less than Maso di Bianco’s in S. Croce, where a solitary soul appears for judgment in a wild gorge under the throne of Christ, while two down-sweeping angels, blowing their trumpets perpendicularly, assist the awesomeness of the design. What a pity Michelangelo did not handle the theme with this massive simplicity, and give us one naked, shivering soul with the fierce light of judgment beating upon him, instead of the stereotyped arrangement of the Judge on high, the blessed on his right, the damned on his left, the rising dead at his feet, with Hell opening underneath! His colossal fresco, with its huddle of naked saints—to which the clothes provided by later Popes lent the last touch of gloom—is, with the possible exception of Tintoretto’s Paradise, the dismallest picture in the world, and it is even worse placed than Tintoretto’s stupendous canvas.
The angel Michael, whose scales weigh souls, must have been hard at work ere he could find enough good people to fill this Paradise. When I last peeped into it in the Palace of the Doges, it was conveniently on the floor, having been removed from its wall for repair, and, standing thus propped up in the centre of the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, it loomed even more gigantic than my recollection of it, filling half the vast hall and extending to the ceiling. Its precise dimensions, according to a buzzing attendant, were twenty-two metres broad by seven metres high. Here surely is the prize of prizes for the American millionaire. The largest picture in the world! Think of it! But, alas! a pauperised Government arrogantly clings to its treasures, forbids exportation. How smuggle it out? What railway carriage could hold it? How get it even across the Grand Canal to the station? What gondola, what barca, what vapore even could carry it? Perhaps a bridge of boats might be built, as for the passing of an army. And an army indeed it holds.