The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, Volume 2 (of 3)

As if these premises be true, the distinct representation of continued action is refused to an art which cannot express even in a series of subjects, but by a supposed mental effort in the spectator's mind, the regular succession of their moments, it becomes evident, that instead of attempting to impress us by the indiscriminate usurpation of a principle out of its reach, it ought chiefly to rely for its effect on its great characteristics space and form, singly or in apposition. In forms alone the idea of existence can be rendered permanent. Sounds die, words perish or become obsolete and obscure, even colours fade, forms alone can neither be extinguished nor misconstrued; by application to their standard alone, description becomes intelligible and distinct. Thus the effectual idea of corporeal beauty can strictly exist only in the plastic arts: for as the notion of beauty arises from the pleasure we feel in the harmonious co-operation of the various parts of some favourite object to one end at once, it implies their immediate co-existence in the mass they compose; and therefore can be distinctly perceived and conveyed to the mind by the eye alone: hence the representation of form in figure is the physical element of the Art.

But as bodies exist in time as well as in space; as the pleasure arising from the mere symmetry of an object is as transient as it is immediate; as harmony of parts, if the body be the agent of an internal power, depends for its proof on their application, it follows, that the exclusive exhibition of inert and unemployed form, would be a mistake of the medium for the end, and that character or action is required to make it an interesting object of imitation. And this is the moral element of the art.

Those important moments then which exhibit the united exertion of form and character in a single object or in participation with collateral beings, at once, and which with equal rapidity and pregnancy give us a glimpse of the past and lead our eye to what follows, furnish the true materials of those technic powers, that select, direct, and fix the objects of imitation to their centre.

The most eminent of these, by the explicit acknowledgment of all ages, and the silent testimony of every breast, is invention. He whose eye athwart the outward crust of the rock penetrates into the composition of its materials, and discovers a gold mine, is surely superior to him who afterwards adapts the metal for use. Colombo, when he from astronomic and physical inductions concluded to the existence of land in the opposite hemisphere, was surely superior to Amerigo Vespucci who took possession of its continent; and when Newton improving accident by meditation, discovered and established the laws of attraction, the projectile and centrifuge qualities of the system, he gave the clue to all who after him applied it to the various branches of philosophy, and was in fact the author of all the benefits accruing from their application to society. Homer, when he means to give the principal feature of man, calls him inventor (αλφηστης).

From what we have said it is clear that the term invention never ought to be so far misconstrued as to be confounded with that of creation, incompatible with our notions of limited being, an idea of pure astonishment, and admissible only when we mention Omnipotence: to invent is to find: to find something, presupposes its existence somewhere, implicitly or explicitly, scattered or in a mass: nor should I have presumed to say so much on a word of a meaning so plain, had it not been, and were it not daily confounded, and by fashionable authorities too, with the term creation.

Form, in its widest meaning, the visible universe that envelopes our senses, and its counterpart the invisible one that agitates our mind with visions bred on sense by fancy, are the element and the realm of invention; it discovers, selects, combines the possible, the probable, the known, in a mode that strikes with an air of truth and novelty, at once. Possible strictly means an effect derived from a cause, a body composed of materials, a coalition of forms, whose union or co-agency imply in themselves no absurdity, no contradiction: applied to our art, it takes a wider latitude; it means the representation of effects derived from causes, or forms compounded from materials, heterogeneous and incompatible among themselves, but rendered so plausible to our senses, that the transition of one part to another seems to be accounted for by an air of organization, and the eye glides imperceptibly or with satisfaction from one to the other and over the whole: that this was the condition on which, and the limits within which alone the ancients permitted invention to represent what was strictly speaking impossible, we may with plausibility surmise from the picture of Zeuxis, described by Lucian in the memoir to which he has prefixed that painter's name, who was probably one of the first adventurers in this species of imagery. – Zeuxis had painted a family of centaurs; the dam a beautiful female to the middle, with the lower parts gradually sliding into the most exquisite forms of a young Thessalian mare, half reclined in playful repose and gently pawing the velvet ground, offered her human nipple to one infant centaur, whilst another greedily sucked the ferine udder below, but both with their eyes turned up to a lion-whelp held over them by the male centaur their father, rising above the hillock on which the female reclined, a grim feature, but whose ferocity was somewhat tempered by a smile.

The scenery, the colour, the chiaroscuro, the finish of the whole was no doubt equal to the style and the conception. This picture the artist exhibited, expecting that justice from the penetration of the public which the genius deserved that taught him to give plausibility to a compound of heterogeneous forms, to inspire them with suitable soul, and to imitate the laws of existence: he was mistaken. The novelty of the conceit eclipsed the art that had embodied it, the artist was absorbed in his subject, and the unbounded praise bestowed, was that of idle restless curiosity, gratified. Sick of gods and goddesses, of demigods and pure human combinations, the Athenians panted only for what was new. The artist, as haughty as irritable, ordered his picture to be withdrawn; "Cover it, Micchio," said he to his attendant, "cover it and carry it home, for this mob stick only to the clay of our art." – Such were the limits set to invention by the ancients; secure within these, it defied the ridicule thrown on that grotesque conglutination which Horace exposes; guarded by these, their mythology scattered its metamorphoses, made every element its tributary, and transmitted the privilege to us, on equal conditions: their Scylla and the Portress of Hell, their dæmons and our spectres, the shade of Patroclus and the ghost of Hamlet, their naiads, nymphs, and oreads, and our sylphs, gnomes, and fairies, their furies and our witches, differ less in essence, than in local, temporary, social modifications: their common origin was fancy, operating on the materials of nature, assisted by legendary tradition and the curiosity implanted in us of diving into the invisible;68 and they are suffered or invited to mix with or superintend real agency, in proportion of the analogy which we discover between them and ourselves. Pindar praises Homer less for that 'winged power' which whirls incident on incident with such rapidity, that absorbed by the whole, and drawn from the impossibility of single parts, we swallow a tale too gross to be believed in a dream; than for the greater power by which he contrived to connect his imaginary creation with the realities of nature and human passions;69 without this the fiction of the poet and the painter will leave us stupified rather by its insolence, than impressed by its power, it will be considered only as a superior kind of legerdemain, an exertion of ingenuity to no adequate end.

Before we proceed to the process and the methods of invention, it is not superfluous to advert to a question which has often been made, and by some has been answered in the negative; whether it be within the artist's province or not, to find or to combine a subject from himself, without having recourse to tradition or the stores of history and poetry? Why not, if the subject be within the limits of art and the combinations of nature, though it should have escaped observation? Shall the immediate avenues of the mind, open to all its observers, from the poet to the novelist, be shut only to the artist? shall he be reduced to receive as alms from them what he has a right to share as common property? Assertions like these, say in other words, that the Laocoon owes the impression he makes on us to his name alone, and that if tradition had not told a story and Pliny fixed it to that work, the artist's conception of a father with his sons, surprised and entangled by two serpents within the recesses of a cavern or lonesome dell, was inadmissible and transgressed the laws of invention. I am much mistaken, if, so far from losing its power over us with its traditional sanction, it would not rouse our sympathy more forcibly, and press the subject closer to our breast, were it considered only as the representation of an incident common to humanity. The ancients were so convinced of their right to this disputed prerogative that they assigned it its own class, and Theon the Samian is mentioned by Quintilian, whom none will accuse or suspect of confounding the limits of the arts, in his list of primary painters, as owing his celebrity to that intuition into the sudden movements of nature, which the Greeks called φαντασιας, the Romans visiones, and we might circumscribe by the phrase of 'unpremeditated conceptions' the re-production of associated ideas; he explains what he understood by it in the following passage adapted to his own profession, rhetoric.70 'We give,' says he, 'the name of visions to what the Greeks call phantasies; that power by which the images of absent things are represented by the mind with the energy of objects moving before our eyes: he who conceives these rightly will be a master of passions; his is that well-tempered fancy which can imagine things, voices, acts, as they really exist, a power perhaps in a great measure dependent on our will. For if these images so pursue us when our minds are in a state of rest, or fondly fed by hope, or in a kind of waking dream, that we seem to travel, to sail, to fight, to harangue in public, or to dispose of riches we possess not, and all this with an air of reality, why should we not turn to use this vice of the mind? – Suppose I am to plead the case of a murdered man, why should not every supposable circumstance of the act float before my eyes? Shall I not see the murderer unawares rush in upon him? in vain he tries to escape – see how pale he turns – hear you not his shrieks, his entreaties? do you not see him flying, struck, falling? will not his blood, his ashy semblance, his groans, his last expiring gasp, seize on my mind?'

Permit me to apply this organ of the orator for one moment to the poet's process: by this radiant recollection of associated ideas, the spontaneous ebullitions of nature, selected by observation, treasured by memory, classed by sensibility and judgment, Shakspeare became the supreme master of passions and the ruler of our hearts: this embodied his Falstaff and his Shylock, Hamlet and Lear, Juliet and Rosalind. By this power he saw Warwick uncover the corpse of Gloster, and swear to his assassination and his tugs for life; by this he made Banquo see the weird sisters bubble up from earth, and in their own air vanish; this is the hand that struck upon the bell when Macbeth's drink was ready, and from her chamber pushed his dreaming wife, once more to methodize the murder of her guest.

And this was the power of Theon;71 such was the unpremeditated conception that inspired him with the idea of that warrior, who in the words of Ælian, seemed to embody the terrible graces and the enthusiastic furor of the god of war. Impetuous he rushed onward to oppose the sudden incursion of enemies; with shield thrown forward, and high brandished falchion, his step as he swept on, seemed to devour the ground: his eye flashed defiance; you fancied to hear his voice, his look denounced perdition and slaughter without mercy. This figure, single and without other accompaniments of war than what the havock of the distance showed, Theon deemed sufficient to answer the impression he intended to make on those whom he had selected to inspect it. He kept it covered, till a trumpet, prepared for the purpose, after a prelude of martial symphonies, at once, by his command, blew with invigorated fierceness a signal of attack – the curtain dropped, the terrific figure appeared to start from the canvass, and irresistibly assailed the astonished eyes of the assembly.

To prove the relation of Ælian no hyperbolic legend, I need not insist on the magic effect which the union of two sister powers must produce on the senses: of what our art alone and unassisted may perform, the most unequivocal proof exists within these walls; your eyes, your feelings, and your fancy have long anticipated it: whose mind has not now recalled that wonder of a figure, the misnamed gladiator of Agasias, a figure, whose tremendous energy embodies every element of motion, whilst its pathetic dignity of character enforces sympathies, which the undisguised ferocity of Theon's warrior in vain solicits. But the same irradiation which showed the soldier to Theon, showed to Agasias the leader: Theon saw the passion, Agasias72 its rule.

But the most striking instance of the eminent place due to this intuitive faculty among the principal organs of invention, is that celebrated performance, which by the united testimony of contemporary writers, and the evident traces of its imitation, scattered over the works of contemporary artists, contributed alone more to the restoration of art and the revolution of style, than the united effort of the two centuries that preceded it: I mean the astonishing design commonly called the Cartoon of Pisa, the work of Michael Agnolo Buonarrotti, begun in competition with Lionardo da Vinci, and at intervals finished at Florence. This work, whose celebrity subjected those who had not seen it to the supercilious contempt of the luckier ones who had; which was the common centre of attraction to all the students of Tuscany and Romagna, from Raphael Sanzio to Bastian da St. Gallo, called Aristotile, from his loquacious descants on its beauties; this inestimable work itself is lost, and its destruction is with too much appearance of truth fixed on the mean villainy of Baccio Bandinelli, who, in possession of the key to the apartment where it was kept, during the revolutionary troubles of the Florentine republic, after making what use he thought proper of it, is said to have torn it in pieces. Still we may form an idea of its principal groups from some ancient prints and drawings; and of its composition from a small copy now existing at Holkham, the outlines of which have been lately etched. Crude, disguised, or feeble, as these specimens are, they will prove better guides than the half-informed rhapsodies of Vasari, the meagre account of Ascanio Condivi, better than the mere anatomic verdict of Benvenuto Cellini, who denies that the powers afterward exerted in the Capella Sistina, arrive at "half its excellence."73

It represents an imaginary moment relative to the war carried on by the Florentines against Pisa: and exhibits a numerous group of warriors, roused from their bathing in the Arno, by the sudden signal of a trumpet and rushing to arms. This composition may without exaggeration be said to personify with unexampled variety that motion, which Agasias and Theon embodied in single figures: in imagining this transient moment from a state of relaxation to a state of energy, the ideas of motion, to use the bold figure of Dante, seem to have showered into the artist's mind. From the chief, nearly placed in the centre, who precedes, and whose voice accompanies the trumpet, every age of human agility, every attitude, every feature of alarm, haste, hurry, exertion, eagerness, burst into so many rays, like sparks flying from the hammer. Many have reached, some boldly step, some have leaped on the rocky shore; here two arms emerging from the water grapple with the rock, there two hands cry for help, and their companions bend over or rush on to assist them; often imitated, but inimitable is the ardent feature of the grim veteran whose every sinew labours to force over the dripping limbs his clothes, whilst gnashing he pushes the foot through the rending garment. He is contrasted by the slender elegance of a half averted youth, who, though eagerly buckling the armour to his thigh, methodizes haste; another swings the high-raised hauberk on his shoulder, whilst one who seems a leader, mindless of dress, ready for combat, and with brandished spear, overturns a third, who crouched to grasp a weapon – one naked himself, buckles on the mail of his companion, and he, turned toward the enemy, seems to stamp impatiently the ground. – Experience and rage, old vigour, young velocity, expanded or contracted, vie in exertions of energy. Yet in this scene of tumult one motive animates the whole, eagerness to engage with subordination to command; this preserves the dignity of action, and from a straggling rabble changes the figures to men whose legitimate contest interests our wishes.

This intuition into the pure emanations of nature, Raphael Sanzio possessed in the most enviable degree, from the utmost conflict of passions, to the enchanting round of gentler emotion, and the nearly silent hints of mind and character. To this he devoted the tremendous scenery of that magnificent fresco, known to you all under the name of the Incendio del Borgo, in which he sacrificed the historic and mystic part of his subject to the effusion of the various passions roused by the sudden terrors of nocturnal conflagration. It is not for the faint appearance of the miracle which approaches with the pontiff and his train in the back-ground, that Raphael invites our eyes; the perturbation, necessity, hope, fear, danger, the pangs and efforts of affection grappling with the enraged elements of wind and fire, displayed on the foreground, furnish the pathetic motives that press on our hearts. That mother, who but half awake or rather in a waking trance, drives her children instinctively before her; that prostrate female half covered by her streaming hair, with elevated arms imploring Heaven; that other who over the flaming tenement, heedless of her own danger, absorbed in maternal agony, boldly reaches over to drop the babe into the outstretched arms of its father; that common son of nature, who careless of another's woe, intent only on his own safety, liberates a leap from the burning wall; the vigorous youth who followed by an aged mother bears the palsied father on his shoulder from the rushing wreck; the nimble grace of those helpless females that vainly strive to administer relief – these are the real objects of the painter's aim, and leave the pontiff and the miracle, with taper, bell and clergy – unheeded in the distance.

I shall not at present expatiate in tracing from this source the novel combinations of affection by which Raphael contrived to interest us in his numerous repetitions of Madonnas and Holy Families, selected from the warmest effusions of domestic endearment, or in Milton's phrase, from "all the charities of father, son, and mother." Nor shall I follow it in its more contaminated descent, to those representations of local manners and national modifications of society, whose characteristic discrimination and humorous exuberance, for instance, we admire in Hogarth, but which, like the fleeting passions of the day, every hour contributes something to obliterate, which soon become unintelligible by time, or degenerate into caricature, the chronicle of scandal, the history-book of the vulgar.

Invention in its more specific sense receives its subjects from poetry or authenticated tradition; they are epic or sublime, dramatic or impassioned, historic or circumscribed by truth. The first astonishes; the second moves; the third informs.

The aim of the epic painter is to impress one general idea, one great quality of nature or mode of society, some great maxim, without descending to those subdivisions, which the detail of character prescribes: he paints the elements with their own simplicity, height, depth, the vast, the grand, darkness, light; life, death; the past, the future; man, pity, love, joy, fear, terror, peace, war, religion, government: and the visible agents are only engines to force one irresistible idea upon the mind and fancy, as the machinery of Archimedes served only to convey destruction, and the wheels of a watch serve only to tell time.

Such is the first and general sense of what is called the sublime, epic, allegoric, lyric substance. Homer, to impress one forcible idea of war, its origin, its progress, and its end, set to work innumerable engines of various magnitude, yet none but what uniformly tends to enforce this and only this idea; gods and demigods are only actors, and nature but the scene of war; no character is discriminated but where discrimination discovers a new look of war; no passion is raised but what is blown up by the breath of war, and as soon absorbed in its universal blaze: – As in a conflagration we see turrets, spires, and temples illuminated only to propagate the horrors of destruction, so through the stormy page of Homer, we see his heroines and heroes but by the light that blasts them.

This is the principle of that divine series of frescoes, with which under the pontificates of Julius II. and Paul III. Michael Angelo adorned the lofty compartments of the Capella Sistina, and from a modesty or a pride for ever to be lamented, only not occupied the whole of its ample sides. Its subject is theocracy or the empire of religion, considered as the parent and queen of man; the origin, the progress, and final dispensation of Providence, as taught by the sacred records. Amid this imagery of primeval simplicity, whose sole object is the relation of the race to its Founder, to look for minute discrimination of character, is to invert the principle of the artist's invention: here is only God with man. The veil of eternity is rent; time, space, and matter teem in the creation of the elements and of earth; life issues from God and adoration from man, in the creation of Adam and his mate; transgression of the precept at the tree of knowledge proves the origin of evil, and of expulsion from the immediate intercourse with God; the œconomy of justice and grace commences in the revolutions of the Deluge, and the covenant made with Noah; and the germs of social character are traced in the subsequent scene between him and his sons; the awful synod of prophets and sibyls are the heralds of the Redeemer, and the host of patriarchs the pedigree of the Son of Man; the brazen serpent and the fall of Haman, the giant subdued by the stripling in Goliath and David, and the conqueror destroyed by female weakness in Judith, are types of his mysterious progress, till Jonah pronounces him immortal; and the magnificence of the Last Judgment, by showing the Saviour in the judge of man, sums up the whole, and reunites the Founder and the race.

Such is the spirit of the Sistine Chapel, and the outline of its general invention with regard to the cycle of its subjects – as in their choice they lead to each other without intermediate chasms in the transition; as each preceding one prepares and directs the conduct of the next, this the following; and as the intrinsic variety of all, conspires to the simplicity of one great end. The specific invention of the pictures separate, as each constitutes an independent whole, deserves our consideration next: each has its centre, from which it disseminates, to which it leads back all secondary points; arranged, hid, or displayed, as they are more or less organs of the inspiring plan: each rigorously is circumscribed by its generic character; no inferior, merely conventional, temporary, local, or disparate beauty, however in itself alluring, is admitted; each finally turns upon that transient moment, the moment of suspense, big with the past, and pregnant with the future; the action nowhere expires, for action and interest terminate together. Thus in the Creation of Adam, the Creator borne on a group of attendant spirits, the personified powers of Omnipotence, moves on toward his last, best work, the lord of his creation: the immortal spark, issuing from his extended arm, electrifies the new-formed being, who tremblingly alive, half raised, half reclined, hastens to meet his Maker. In the formation of Eve, the astonishment of life, just organised, is absorbed in the sublimer sentiment of adoration; perfect, though not all disengaged from the side of her dreaming mate, she moves with folded hands and humble dignity towards the majestic Form whose half raised hand attracts her – what words can express the equally bland and irresistible velocity of that mysterious Being, who forms the sun and moon, and already past, leaves the earth, completely formed, behind him? Here apposition is the symbol of immensity.74