III. GROTESQUE RENAISSANCE 179

his mind calm, consistent, and powerful, the vision which comes to him is seen as in a perfect mirror, serenely, and in consistence with the rational powers; but if the mind be imperfect and ill trained, the vision is seen as in a broken mirror, with strange distortions and discrepancies, all the passions of the heart breathing upon it in cross ripples, till hardly a trace of it remains unbroken. So that, strictly

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.”¹ 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 labour; 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 then 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 its subjective side;² 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 armour 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,³ 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

¹ [The passages here quoted are in pp. 244 and 245 (Steph.) of the Phædrus; compare 1 Corinthians i. 25, ii. 14.]

² [Compare Vol. IV. p. 57 n., on Ruskin’s attitude to German philosophy.]

³ [Ruskin, it will be seen, purposely chooses two painters, whom he did not consider first-rate. For Bassano, see Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. vi. § 23, and compare ibid., ch. xi. § 8 n., and vol. ii. sec. ii. ch. iv. § 10. For Bonifazio, whom Ruskin rated higher, see Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xviii. § 22 and App. iii.; vol. iv. ch. xviii. § 9; and Guide to the Venetian Academy.]

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