VETUISSENT. IN RYZONICO SINU CASTRO NOVO
EXPUGNATO DIVI MARCI PROCUR
UNIVERSO REIP CONSENSU CREATUS
IN PATRIA MORITUR TOTIUS CIVITATIS
MŒRORE, ANNO ÆTATIS LXXIV. MDCXLII. XIV. KAL SEPT.”
[39] The Love of God is, however, always shown by the predominance, or greater sum, of good, in the end; but never by the annihilation of evil. The modern doubts of eternal punishment are not so much the consequence of benevolence as of feeble powers of reasoning. Every one admits that God brings finite good out of finite evil. Why not, therefore, infinite good out of infinite evil?
[40] Let the reader examine, with special reference to this subject, the general character of the language of Iago.
[41] This opposition of art to inspiration is long and gracefully dwelt upon by Plato, in his “Phædrus,” using, in the course of his argument, almost the words of St Paul: καλλιον μαρτυροῦσιν οἱ παλαιοὶ μανίαν σωφροσυνης τὴν ἐκ Θεοῦ τῆς παῤ ἀνθρώπων γιγνομένης: “It is the testimony of the ancients, that the madness which is of God is a nobler thing than the wisdom which is of men;” and again, “He who sets himself to any work with which the Muses have to do,” (i. e. to any of the fine arts,) “without madness, thinking that by art alone he can do his work sufficiently, will be found vain and incapable, and the work of temperance and rationalism will be thrust aside and obscured by that of inspiration.” The passages to the same effect, relating especially to poetry, are innumerable in nearly all ancient writers; but in this of Plato, the entire compass of the fine arts is intended to be embraced.
No one acquainted with other parts of my writings will suppose me to be an advocate of idle trust in the imagination. But it is in these days just as necessary to allege the supremacy of genius as the necessity of labor; for there never was, perhaps, a period in which the peculiar gift of the painter was so little discerned, in which so many and so vain efforts have been made to replace it by study and toil. This has been peculiarly the case with the German school, and there are few exhibitions of human error more pitiable than the manner in which the inferior members of it, men originally and for ever destitute of the painting faculty, force themselves into an unnatural, encumbered, learned fructification of tasteless fruit, and pass laborious lives in setting obscurely and weakly upon canvas the philosophy, if such it be, which ten minutes’ work of a strong man would have put into healthy practice, or plain words. I know not anything more melancholy than the sight of the huge German cartoon, with its objective side, and subjective side; and mythological division, and symbolical division, and human and Divine division; its allegorical sense, and literal sense; and ideal point of view, and intellectual point of view; its heroism of well-made armor and knitted brows; its heroinism of graceful attitude and braided hair; its inwoven web of sentiment, and piety, and philosophy, and anatomy, and history, all profound: and twenty innocent dashes of the hand of one God-made painter, poor old Bassan or Bonifazio, were worth it all, and worth it ten thousand times over.
Not that the sentiment or the philosophy is base in itself. They will make a good man, but they will not make a good painter,—no, nor the millionth part of a painter. They would have been good in the work and words of daily life; but they are good for nothing in the cartoon, if they are there alone. And the worst result of the system is the intense conceit into which it cultivates a weak mind. Nothing is so hopeless, so intolerable, as the pride of a foolish man who has passed through a process of thinking, so as actually to have found something out. He believes there is nothing else to be found out in the universe. Whereas the truly great man, on whom the Revelations rain till they bear him to the earth with their weight, lays his head in the dust, and speaks thence—often in broken syllables. Vanity is indeed a very equally divided inheritance among mankind; but I think that among the first persons, no emphasis is altogether so strong as that on the German Ich. I was once introduced to a German philosopher-painter before Tintoret’s “Massacre of the Innocents.” He looked at it superciliously, and said it “wanted to be restored.” He had been himself several years employed in painting a “Faust” in a red jerkin and blue fire; which made Tintoret appear somewhat dull to him.