180 THE STONES OF VENICE

speaking, the imagination is never governed; it is always the ruling and Divine power: and the rest of the man is to it only as an instrument which it sounds, or a tablet on which it writes; clearly and sublimely if the wax be smooth and the strings true, grotesquely and wildly if they are strained and broken. And thus the Iliad, the Inferno, the Pilgrim’s Progress, the Faërie Queen, are all of them true dreams;¹ only the sleep of the men to whom they came was the deep, living sleep which God sends, with a sacredness in it as of death, the revealer of secrets.

§ 61. Now, observe in this matter, carefully, the difference between a dim mirror and a distorted one; and do not blame me for pressing the analogy too far, for it will enable me to explain my meaning every way more clearly. Most men’s minds are dim mirrors, in which all truth is seen, as St. Paul tells us, darkly;² this is the fault most common and most fatal; dulness of the heart and mistiness of sight, increasing to utter hardness and blindness; Satan breathing upon the glass, so that if we do not sweep the mist laboriously away, it will take no image. But, even so far as we are able to do this, we have still the distortion to

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.”³ 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.

¹ [So in Modern Painters, vol. iv. ch. xx. § 24, Ruskin says that great art is the “art of dreaming.”]

² [1 Corinthians xiii. 12.]

³ [For this picture, see below, Venetian Index, p. 407.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]