390 ST. MARK’S REST

a meaningless incident of horror, but a reminiscence of enduring punishment avenging upon Tityus* the insulted purity of Artemis.†

230. The coiled adder is the familiar symbol of eternity, here meant either to seal for the defeated their fate as final, or to hint, with something of Turner’s sadness, that this is a battle not gained “once for ever” and “for all,” but to be fought anew by every son of man, while, for each, defeat shall be deadly, and victory still most hard, though an armed Angel of the Victory of God be our marshal and leader in the contest. A further comparison with Turner is suggested by the horse’s skull between us and Saint George. A similar skeleton is prominent in the corresponding part of the foreground in the “Jason” of the Liber Studiorum. But Jason clambers to victory on foot, allows no charger to bear him in the fight. Turner, more an antique‡ Hellene than a Christian prophet, had, as all the greatest among the Greeks, neither vision nor hope of any more perfect union between lower and higher nature by which that inferior creation, groaning now with us in pain, should cease to be type of the mortal element, which seems to shame our soul as basing it in clay, and, with that element, become a temple-platform, lifting man’s life towards heaven.§

With Turner’s adder, too, springing immortal from the Python’s wound,¹ we cannot but connect this other adder of Carpaccio’s, issuing from the white skull of a great

* “Terræ omniparentis alumnum” [Æneid, vi. 595].

† Or, as the story is otherwise given, of the mother of Artemis, as in the case of the Lycian peasants above [p. 388].

‡ Hamlet, v. ii. 352.

§ Pegasus and the immortal horses of Achilles, born like Pegasus by the ocean wells, are always to be recognized as spiritual creatures, not-as St. George’s horse here-earthly creatures, though serving and manifesting divine power. Compare too the fate of Argus (Homer, Od., XVII.). In the great Greek philosophies, similarly, we find a realm of formless shadow eternally unconquered by sacred order, offering a contrast to the modern systems which aim at a unity to be reached, if not by reason, at least by what one may not inaccurately call an act of faith.

¹ [See the description of the picture in Modern Painters, vol. v. (Vol. VII. p. 420).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]