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130 THE STONES OF VENICE IV. INFIDELITY
Better, a thousandfold, to have been “a Pagan suckled in some creed outworn,”1 than to have stood by the great sea of Eternity, and seen no God walking on its waves, no heavenly world on its horizon.
§ 102. This fatal result of an enthusiasm for classical literature was hastened and heightened by the misdirection of the powers of art. The imagination of the age was actively set to realise these objects of Pagan belief; and all the most exalted faculties of man, which, up to that period, had been employed in the service of Faith, were now transferred to the service of Fiction. The invention which had formerly been both sanctified and strengthened by labouring under the command of settled intention, and on the ground of assured belief, had now the reins laid upon its neck by passion, and all ground of fact cut from beneath its feet; and the imagination which formerly had helped men to apprehend the truth, now tempted them to believe a falsehood. The faculties themselves wasted away in their own treason; one by one they fell in the potter’s field; and the Raphael who seemed sent and inspired from heaven that he might paint Apostles and Prophets, sank at once into powerlessness at the feet of Apollo and the Muses.*
§ 103. But this was not all. The habit of using the greatest gifts of imagination upon fictitious subjects, of course destroyed the honour and value of the same imagination used in the cause of truth. Exactly in the proportion in which Jupiters and Mercuries were embodied and believed, in that proportion Virgins and Angles were disembodied and disbelieved. The images summoned by art began gradually to assume one average value in the spectator’s mind; and incidents from the Iliad and from the
* True, again, in general; yet the Parnassus is the greatest of the Vatican Raphael frescoes.2[1881.]
1 [Wordsworth’s sonnet, beginning “The world is too much with us.”]
2 [For Ruskin’s other references to this fresco, see note in Vol. XII. on Lectures on Architecture and Painting, § 125.]
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
