ANGELS.
Angels, properly speaking, are neither winged men nor winged children. Wings, in ancient art, were the symbols of a divine nature; and the early Greeks, who humanised their gods and goddesses, and deified humanity through the perfection of the forms, at first distinguished the divine and the human by giving wings to all the celestial beings; thus lifting them above the earth. Our religious idea of angels is altogether different. Give to the child-form wings, in other words, give to the child-nature, innocent, and pure, the adjuncts of wisdom and power, and thus you realise the idea of the angel as Raphael conceived it. It is so difficult to imagine in the adult form the union of perfect purity and perfect wisdom, the absence of experience and suffering, and the capacity of thinking and feeling, a condition of being in which all conscious motive is lost in the impulse to good, that it remains a problem in art. The angels of Angelico da Fiesole, who are not only winged, but convey the idea of movement only by the wings, not by the limbs, are exquisite, as fitted to minister to us in heaven, but hardly as fitted to keep watch and ward for us on earth—
| “Against foul fiends to aid us militant.” |
The feminine element always predominates in the conception of angels, though they are supposed to be masculine: I doubt whether it ought to be so.
While these sheets are going through the press, I find the following beautiful passage relative to angels in the last number of “Fraser’s Magazine”:—
“It is safer, even, and perhaps more orthodox and scriptural, to ‘impersonate’ time and space, strength and love, and even the laws of nature, than to give us any more angel worlds, which are but dead skeletons of Dante’s creations without that awful and living reality which they had in his mind; or to fill children’s books, as the High Church party are doing now, with pictures and tales of certain winged hermaphrodites, in whom one cannot think (even by the extremest stretch of charity) that the writers or draughtsmen really believe, while one sees them servilely copying mediæval forms, and intermingling them with the ornaments of an extinct architecture; thus confessing naïvely to every one but themselves, that they accept the whole notion as an integral portion of a creed, to which, if they be members of the Church of England, they cannot well belong, seeing that it was, happily for us, expelled both by law and by conscience at the Reformation.”
This is eloquent and true; but not the less true it is, that if we have to represent in art those “spiritual beings who walk this earth unseen, both when we sleep and when we wake”—beings, who (as the author of the above passage seems to believe) may be intimately connected with the phenomena of the universe—we must have a type, a bodily type, under which to represent them; and as we cannot do this from knowledge, we must do it symbolically. Angels, as we figure them, are symbols of moral and spiritual existences elevated above ourselves—we do not believe in the forms, we only accept their significance. I should be glad to see a better impersonation than the impossible creatures represented in art; but till some artist-poet, or poet-artist, has invented such an impersonation, we must employ that which is already familiarised to the eye and hallowed to the fancy without imposing on the understanding.
