Even Johnson’s
Dictionary sees no great difference, for it calls a Symbol
“That which comprehends in its figure a representation of
something else;” and an Allegory, “A figurative discourse,
in which something other is intended than is contained in
the words literally taken.”
It is only a very modern
Dictionary that calls a Symbol “The sign or representation
of any moral thing by the images or properties of natural
things,” which, though an imperfect definition, is not
unlike “The things below are as the things above” of
the Emerald Tablet of Hermes!
}
{【關於象徵與寓言的區別：Blake與德國象徵主義者】
William Blake was perhaps the first modern to insist on a difference;
and the other day, when I sat for my portrait to a German
Symbolist in Paris, whose talk was all of his love for
Symbolism and his hatred for Allegory, his definitions
were the same as William Blake’s, of whom he knew
nothing. William Blake has written, “Vision or imagination”—meaning
symbolism by these words—“is a representation
of what actually exists, really or unchangeably.
Fable or Allegory is formed by the daughters of Memory.”
The German insisted in broken English, and with many
gestures, that Symbolism said things which could not be
said so perfectly in any other way, and needed but a right
instinct for its understanding; while Allegory said things
which could be said as well, or better, in another way,
and needed a right knowledge for its understanding.
The
one gave dumb things voices, and bodiless things bodies;
while the other read a meaning—which had never lacked
its voice or its body—into something heard or seen, and
loved less for the meaning than for its own sake.
}
{【關於傳統象徵物的辯護】
I
said that the rose, and the lily, and the poppy were so
married, by their colour, and their odour, and their use, to
love and purity and sleep, or to other symbols of love
and purity and sleep, and had been so long a part of the
imagination of the world, that a
I think I quoted the lily in the hand of the angel in
Rossetti’s Annunciation, and the lily in the jar in his
Childhood of Mary Virgin, and thought they made the
more important symbols,—the women’s bodies, and the
angels’ bodies, and the clear morning light, take that
place, in the great procession of Christian symbols, where
they can alone have all their meaning and all their beauty.
}
{【關於象徵與寓言的完美之處】
It is hard to say where Allegory and Symbolism
melt into one another, but it is not hard to say
where
either comes to its perfection; and though one may
doubt whether Allegory or Symbolism is the greater in
the horns of Michael Angelo’s Moses, one need not doubt
that its symbolism has helped to awaken the modern
imagination; while Tintoretto’s Origin of the Milky Way,
which is Allegory without any Symbolism, is, apart from
its fine painting, but a moment’s amusement for our
fancy.
A hundred generations might write out what
seemed the meaning of the one, and they would write
different meanings, for no symbol tells all its meaning
to any generation; but when you have said, “That
woman there is Juno, and the milk out of her breast is
making the Milky Way,” you have told the meaning of
the other, and the fine painting, which has added so
much unnecessary beauty, has not told it better.
}
{【關於藝術的象徵性本質】
All Art that is not mere story-telling, or mere
portraiture, is symbolic, and
has the purpose of those
symbolic talismans which mediæval magicians made with
complex colours and forms, and bade their patients
ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it
entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of
the Divine Essence.
}
{【關於解放與完美情感的象徵】
A person or a landscape that is
a part of a story or a portrait, evokes but so much
emotion as the story or the portrait can permit without
loosening the bonds that make it a story or a portrait;
but if you liberate a person or
a landscape from the
bonds of motives and their actions, causes and their
effects, and from all bonds but the bonds of your love,
it will change under your eyes, and become a symbol
of an infinite emotion, a perfected emotion, a part of the
Divine Essence; for we love nothing but the perfect,
and our dreams make all things perfect, that we may
love them.
}
{【關於有遠見者與象徵】
Religious and visionary people, monks and
nuns, and medicine-men, and opium-eaters, see symbols in
their trances; for religious
and visionary thought is thought
about perfection and the way to perfection; and symbols
are the only things free enough from all bonds to speak
of perfection.
}
{【關於現代象徵主義藝術家的廣泛性】
Wagner’s dramas, Keats’ odes, Blake’s pictures and
poems, Calvert’s pictures, Rossetti’s pictures, Villiers
de Lisle Adam’s plays, and the black-and-white art
of M.
Horton, the lithographs of Mr. Shannon, and
the pictures of Mr. Whistler, and the plays of M.
Maeterlinck, and the poetry of Verlaine, in our own
day, but differ from the religious art of Giotto and
his disciples in having accepted all symbolisms, the
symbolism of the ancient shepherds and star-gazers,
that symbolism of bodily beauty which seemed a wicked
thing to Fra Angelico, the symbolism in day and night, and
winter and summer, spring and autumn, once so great
a part of an older religion than Christianity; and in
having accepted all the Divine Intellect, its anger and
its pity, its waking
and its sleep, its love and its lust,
for the substance of their art.
}
{【關於系統化神秘主義者與想像世界】
The systematic mystic is not the
greatest of artists, because his imagination is too
great to be bounded by a picture or a song, and
because only imperfection in a mirror of perfection,
or perfection in a mirror of imperfection, delight our
frailty.
Their thought wanders from
the woman who is Love herself, to her sisters and her
forebears, and to all the great procession; and so august
a beauty moves before the mind, that they forget the
things which move before the eyes.
William Blake, who
was the chanticleer of the new dawn, has written: “If
the spectator could enter into one of these images of his
imagination, approaching them on the fiery chariot of
his contemplative thought, if ... he could make a
friend and companion of one of these images of wonder,
which always entreat him to leave mortal things (as he
must know), then would he arise from the grave, then
would he meet the Lord in the air, and then he would be
happy.”
And again, “The world of imagination is the
world of Eternity. It is the Divine bosom into which
we shall all go after the death of the vegetated body.
The world of imagination is infinite and eternal, whereas
the world of generation or vegetation is finite and
temporal.
There exist in that eternal world the eternal
realities of everything which we see reflected in the
vegetable glass of nature.”
}
{【關於清醒夢的性質】
Every visionary knows that the mind’s eye soon comes
to see a capricious and variable world, which the will
cannot shape or change, though it can call it up and banish
it again.
}
{【關於Horton的創作來源：清醒夢與「新生命兄弟會」】
Mr.
Horton, who is a disciple of “The Brotherhood
of the New Life,” which finds the way to God in waking
dreams, has his waking dreams, but more detailed and
vivid than mine; and copies them in his drawings as if
they were models posed for him by some unearthly master.
A disciple of perhaps the most mediæval movement in
modern mysticism, he has delighted in picturing the streets
of mediæval German towns, and the castles of mediæval
romances; and, at moments, as in All Thy waves are gone
over me, the images of a kind of humorous piety like that
of the mediæval miracle-plays and moralities.
}
{【關於Horton畫作中風景的「鬼魅」化】
Even
the phantastic landscapes, the entangled chimneys against
a white sky, the dark valley with its little points of light,
the cloudy and fragile towns
and churches, are part of the
history of a soul; for Mr.
and whenever spiritual purpose mixes with
artistic purpose, and not to its injury, it gives it a new
sincerity, a new simplicity.
}
{【關於Horton藝術形式的演變】
He tried at first to copy his
models in colour, and with little mastery over colour when
even great mastery would not have helped him, and very
literally: but soon found that you could only represent a
world where nothing is still for a moment, and where
colours have odours and odours musical notes, by formal
and conventional images, midway between the
scenery and
persons of common life, and the geometrical emblems on
mediæval talismans.
}
{【關於象徵主義藝術的重複性與Horton的例子】
His images are still few, though they
are becoming more plentiful, and will probably be always
but few; for he who is content to copy common life need
never repeat an image, because his eyes show him always
changing scenes, and none that cannot be copied; but there
must always be a certain monotony in the work of the Symbolist,
who can only make symbols out of the things that
he loves
Rossetti and Botticelli have put the same face
into a number of pictures; M. Maeterlinck has put a
mysterious comer, and a lighthouse, and a well in a wood
into several plays; and Mr. Horton has repeated again
and again the woman of Rosa Mystica, and the man-at-arms
of Be Strong; and has put the crooked way of The
Path to the Moon, “the straight and narrow way” into St.
George, and an old drawing in The Savoy; the abyss of
The Gap, the abyss which is always under all things, into
drawings that are not in this book; and the wave of The
Wave, which is God’s overshadowing love, into All Thy
waves are gone over me.
}
{【關於Horton後期畫作的進步與整體評價】
but his later drawings, Sancta
Dei Genitrix and Ascending into Heaven for instance, show
that he is beginning to see his waking dreams over again
in the magical mirror of his art.
He is beginning, too, to
draw more accurately, and will doubtless draw as accurately
as the greater number of the more visionary Symbolists,
who have never, from the days when visionary Symbolists
carved formal and conventional images of stone in Assyria
and Egypt, drawn as accurately as men who are interested
in things and not in the meaning of things.
His art is
immature, but it is more interesting than the mature art of
our magazines, for it is the reverie of a lonely and profound
temperament.
}
[光之書籤結束]
