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bodily perfections. Such inconsistencies we should find in the perfections of no other animal. The strength or swiftness of the Dog is not inconsistent with his sagacity, nor is bodily labour in the Ant and Bee destructive of their acuteness of instinct. And this peculiarity of relation among the perfections of man is no result of his fall or sinfulness, but an evidence of his greater nobility, and of the goodness of God towards him. For the individuals of each race of lower animals, being not intended to hold among each other those relations of charity which are the privilege of humanity, are not adapted to each other's assistance, admiration, or support, by differences of power and function. But the Love of the human race is increased by their individual differences, and the Unity of the creature, as before we saw of all unity, made perfect by each having something to bestow and to receive, bound to the rest by a thousand various necessities and various gratitudes; humility in each rejoicing to admire in his fellow that which he finds not in himself, and each being in some respect the complement of his race.1 Therefore, in investigating the signs of the ideal or perfect type of humanity, we must not presume on the singleness of that type; and yet, on the other hand, we must cautiously distinguish between differences conceivably existing in a perfect state, and differences resulting from immediate and present operation of the Adamite curse. Of which the former are differences that bind, and the latter that separate. For although we can suppose the ideal or

"In another sense still the human race may be considered as one man only. While each animal begins anew the work of its species, each human being does not begin anew the work of mankind. He continues it, and cannot but continue it. He receives, on his entrance into life, the heritage of all ages - he is the son of the whole human race. Thousands of causes, thousands of persons have co-operated since the beginning of time to make him what he is. Man, isolated either in time or space, is not truly man. Absolute solitude transforms him into an animal, and much less than an animal, since he wants its infallible instincts, or has only in their stead a powerless reason, indolent, and as it were, shrouded. A man, then, does not come up to his type, does not perfectly exist, without his race; it is the race that makes him a man. And when we picture to ourselves a man existing by himself as man, and with all the attributes of his race, we dream; since a man purely individual and isolated is an impossibility. It is not thus in any other department of the animal kingdom. A whole does not exist anywhere else as in our race; but is it not wonderful that true individuality exists only in the same race also, and that the sole being whose nature is developed fully only as one of a race is also the only one who manifests the sentiment of liberty, morality, and the consciousness implied in the word Me?"— Vinet's (Alex.) Vital Christianity.

§ 9. Is a sign of God's kind pur

pose towards

the race.

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§ 10. Consequent separa

tion and differ

perfect human heart, and the perfect human intelligence, equally adapted to receive every right sensation, and pursue every order of truth, yet as it is appointed for some to be in authority and others in obedience, some in solitary functions and others in relative ones, some to receive and others to give, some to teach and some to discover; and as all these varieties of office are not only conceivable as existing in a perfect state of man, but seem almost to be implied by it, and at any rate cannot be done away with but by a total change of his constitution and dependencies, of which the imagination can take no hold; so there are habits and capacities of expression induced by these various offices, which admit of many separate ideals of equal perfection. There is an ideal of Authority, of Judgment, of Affection, of Reason, and of Faith, neither can any ence of Ideals. combination of these ideals be attained; not that the just judge is to be supposed incapable of affection, nor the king incapable of obedience, but as it is impossible that any essence short of the Divine should at the same instant be equally receptive of all emotions, those emotions which, by right and order have the most usual victory, both leave the stamp of their habitual presence on the body, and render the individual more and more susceptible of them in proportion to the frequency of their prevalent recurrence. Still less can the differences of age and sex, though seemingly of more finite influence, be banished from any human conception. David, ruddy and of a fair countenance, with the brook stone of deliverance in his hand, is not more ideal than David leaning on the old age of Barzillai, returning chastened to his kingly home. And they who are as the angels of God in heaven, yet cannot be conceived as so assimilated that their different experiences and affections upon earth shall then be forgotten and effectless; the child taken early to his place cannot be imagined to wear there such a body, nor to have such thoughts, as the glorified apostle who has finished his course and kept the faith on earth. And so whatever perfections and likeness of love we may attribute to either the tried or the crowned creatures, there is the difference of the stars in glory among them yet; differences of original gifts, though not of occupying till their Lord come, different dispensations of trial and of trust, of sorrow and support, both in their own inward, variable

hearts, and in their positions of exposure or of peace, of the gourd shadow and the smiting sun, of calling at heat of day or eleventh hour, of the house unroofed by faith, or the clouds opened by revelation; differences in warning, in mercies, in sicknesses, in signs, in time of calling to account; alike only they all are, by that which is not of them, but the gift of God's unchangeable mercy. "I will give unto this last even as unto thee."

of the Adamite curse are to be

distinguished

from signs of

its immediate

activity.

Hence, then, it will follow, that we must not determinedly banish §11. The effects from the human form and countenance, in our restoration of its ideal, everything which can be ultimately traced to the Adamite Fall for its cause, but only the immediate operation and presence of the degrading power of sin. For there is not any part of our nature, nor can there be through eternity, uninfluenced or unaffected by the fall, and that not in any way of degradation, for the renewing in the divinity of Christ is a nobler condition than that of Paradise; and yet throughout eternity it must imply and refer to the disobedience, and the corrupt state of sin and death, and the suffering of Christ himself, which can we conceive of any redeemed soul as for an instant forgetting, or as remembering without sorrow? Neither are the alternations of joy and such sorrow as by us is inconceivable, being only as it were a softness and silence in the pulse of an infinite felicity, inconsistent with the state even of the unfallen; for the angels, who rejoice over repentance, cannot but feel an uncomprehended pain as they try and try again in vain, whether they may not warm hard hearts with the brooding of their kind wings. So that we have not to banish from the ideal countenance the evidences of sorrow, nor of past suffering, nor even of past and conquered sin, but only the immediate operation of any evil, or the immediate coldness and hollowness of any good emotion. And hence in that contest before noted, between the body and the soul, we may often have to indicate the body as far conquered and outworn, and with signs of hard struggle and bitter pain upon it; and yet without ever diminishing the purity of its ideal: and since it is not in the power of any human imagination to reason out or conceive the countless modifications of experience, suffering, and separated feeling, which have modelled and written their indelible images, in various order, upon every human countenance, so no right ideal can

§ 12. Which latter only are

to be banished from ideal form,

§ 13. Ideal form is only to be obtained by portraiture.

be reached by any combination of feature nor by any moulding and melting of individual beauties together, and still less without model or example at all; but there is a perfect ideal to be wrought out of every face around us that has on its forehead the writing and the seal of the angel ascending from the East', by the earnest study and penetration of the written history thereupon, and the banishing of the blots and stains, wherein we still see, in all that is human, the visible and instant operation of unconquered Sin.

Now I see not how any of the steps of the argument by which we have arrived at this conclusion can be evaded, and yet it would be difficult to state anything more directly opposite to the general teaching and practice of artists. It is usual to hear portraiture opposed to the pursuit of ideality, and yet we find that no face can be ideal which is not a portrait. Of this general principle, however, there are certain modifications which we must presently state; but let us first pursue it a little farther and deduce its practical consequences.

These are, first, that the pursuit of idealism in humanity, as of idealism in lower nature, can be successful only when followed through the most constant, patient, and humble rendering of actual models, accompanied with that earnest mental study of each, which can interpret all that is written upon it, disentangle the hieroglyphics of its sacred history, rend the veil of the bodily temple, and rightly measure the relations of good and evil contending within it for mastery 2; that everything done without such study must be shallow and contemptible; that generalization or combination of individual character will end less in the mending than the losing of it, and, except in certain instances of which we shall presently take note, is valueless and vapid, even if it escape being painful from § 14. Instances its want of truth. And that habit of the old and great painters of introducing portrait into all their highest works, I look to, not as error in them, but as the very source and root of their superiority in all things; for they were too great and too humble not to see in every face about them that which was above them, and which no fancies of theirs could match nor take place of; wherefore we find

among the

greater of the Ideal Masters.

1 Rev. vii. 2.

2 Compare Part II. Sec. I. Chap. III. § 6.

the custom of portraiture constant with them, both portraiture of study and for purposes of analysis, as with Leonardo; and actual, professed, serviceable, hardworking portraiture of the men of their time, as with Raffaelle, and Titian, and Tintoret; and portraiture of love, as with Fra Bartolomeo of Savonarola, and Simon Memmi of Petrarch, and Giotto of Dante, and Gentile Bellini of a beloved imagination of Dandolo, and with Raffaelle constantly; and portraiture for the sake of the nobility of personal character even in their most imaginative works, as was the practice of Ghirlandajo perpetually, and Masaccio and Raffaelle, and manifestly of the men of highest and purest ideal purpose, as again, Giotto, and in his characteristic monkish heads, Angelico, and John Bellini (note especially the St. Christopher at the side of that mighty picture of St. Jerome, at Venice): and so of all: which practice had indeed. a perilous tendency among men of debased mind, who used models such as and where they ought not; or among men who looked not at their models with intellectual or loving penetration, but took the outside of them, or perhaps took the evil and left the good, as even Titian has done in that academy study at Venice which is called a St. John, and all workers whatsoever that I know of, after Raffaelle's time, as Guido and the Caracci, and such others; but it is nevertheless the necessary and sterling basis of all ideal art, neither has any great man ever been able to do without it, nor dreamed of doing without it even to the close of his days.

And therefore there is not any greater sign of want of vitality and hopefulness in the schools of the present day, than that unhappy prettiness and sameness under which they mask, or rather for which they barter, in their lentil thirst, all the birthright and power of nature; which prettiness, wrought out and spun fine in the study, till it hardly betters the blocks on which dresses and hair are tried in barbers' windows and milliners' books, cannot but be revolting to any man who has his eyes, even in a measure, open to the divinity of the immortal seal on the common features that he meets in the highways and hedges hourly and momentarily, outreaching all efforts of conception as all power of realization, were it Raffaelle's three times over, even when the glory of the wedding garment is not there.

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