Was still yet lighted; his long locks curled down
On his vast bust whence a huge quiver rose
With shaft-heads feathered from the eagle’s wing
That peeped up bristling through his serpent hair.”
To match in bulk such an imaginative picture, we should have to go back to the great king-headed bulls that flank the portals of the Assyrian palaces, or the colossal pharaonic figures in granite that symbolize the Egyptian kings.
Sculpture affords many good illustrations of parts detached from the whole and magnified by the imagination into separate creations. The Colleoni statue at Venice comes to mind instantly. The great commander and his horse have been taken out of battle and placed upon a pedestal, yet, isolated as it is, how the statue tells the irresistible strength, the pushing power of both man and horse! The “Water Nymphs” of Jean Goujon are separated again in panels, they tell no connected story; but the serpentine grace of the figures, the rippling flow of the draperies, how inevitably they bring to mind the native element, the home of the water people! The Greek youths that ride along the Parthenon frieze, the wounded lionesses that roar defiance from the Assyrian bas-reliefs, the Japanese fish that swim in bronze, though cut off from their background or environment, yet again how perfectly each suggests its habitat through the magnifying imagination of the artist!
The combining imagination (the building up by additions which enhance and enliven) is just the reverse of the process we have been considering. It has to do with associations, with memories; and the combination is brought about by images from hither and yon, that gather and join in the mind. There is some confusion just here between what is imagination in painting and what is mere composition, which Mr. Ruskin has tried to clear up by asserting that the former is intuitive and the latter is labored, that one works by genius and the other by laws and principles. But the distinction itself is somewhat labored, and in its practical working it seems to have small basis in reality. A gathering together of antique pavements, marble benches stained with iron rust, ideal figures clad in Greek garments, with various museum bric-a-brac illustrative of Greek life, such as we see in the pictures of Alma-Tadema, is certainly composition. It may be good or bad composition, it may be academic or naturalistic, it may have been put together laboriously, piece by piece, or flashed together by a momentary lightning of the mind; but, whatever the method or however brought about, one thing seems very certain, and that is, the work, in the hands of Alma-Tadema, contains not one spark of imagination. The same method of combining in the mind or working on the canvas with Delacroix or Turner or even J. S. Cotman would have almost certainly resulted in the imaginative.
XIII.—VELASQUEZ, Innocent X. Doria Gallery, Rome.
It is a fond fancy of Mr. Ruskin, and also of ourselves, that genius despises laborious composition and does things with a sudden burst of inspiration. We think, because the completed work looks easy or reads easy, that it must have been done easily. But the geniuses of the world have all put upon record their conviction that there is more virtue in perspiration than in inspiration. The great poets, whether in print or in paint, have spent their weeks and months—yes, years—composing, adjusting, putting in, and taking out. They have known what it was to “lick things into shape,” to labor and be baffled, to despair and to hope anew. Goethe may have conceived “Faust” intuitively, but it took him something like fifty years to record his intuitions. He composed laboriously, and yet was no less a man of superlative imagination. Listen a moment to his Prologue to “Faust”: