Title: A book of images
Illustrator: W. T. Horton
Author of introduction, etc.: W. B. Yeats
Release date: July 31, 2022 [eBook #68657]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024
Language: English
Original publication: United Kingdom: Unicorn Press, 1898
Credits: Tim Lindell, Charlie Howard, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
Transcriber’s Note
Larger versions of most illustrations may be seen by right-clicking themand selecting an option to view them separately, or by double-tapping and/orstretching them.
THE UNICORN QUARTOS, NUMBER TWO. ABOOK OF IMAGES. DRAWN BY WILLIAM T.HORTON, INTRODUCED BY W. B. YEATS,AND PUBLISHED AT THE UNICORNPRESS, VII. CECIL COURT, ST. MARTIN’SLANE, LONDON. MDCCCXCVIII.
“A Book of Images.”—Page 14, Line 4.
The Publishers are asked to state that “The Brotherhoodof the New Life” claims to be practical rather thanvisionary, and that the “waking dreams” referred to inthe above passage are a purely personal matter.
DRAWN BY W. T.
HORTON & INTRODUCED
BY W. B. YEATS
LONDON AT THE UNICORN
PRESS VII CECIL COURT ST.
MARTIN’S LANE MDCCCXCVIII
| PAGE | |
| Introduction by W. B. Yeats, | 7 |
| “BY THE CANAL,” | 17 |
| “CHATEAU ULTIME,” | 19 |
| “THE OLD PIER,” | 21 |
| “NOTRE DAME DE PARIS,” | 23 |
| “TREES WALKING,” | 25 |
| “LA RUE DES PETITS-TOITS,” | 27 |
| “LONELINESS,” | 29 |
| “THE WAVE,” | 31 |
| “NOCTURNE,” | 33 |
| “THE GAP,” | 35 |
| “THE VIADUCT,” | 37 |
| “THE PATH TO THE MOON,” | 39 |
| “DIANA,” | 41 |
| “ALL THY WAVES ARE GONE OVER ME,” | 43 |
| “MAMMON,” | 45 |
| “ST. GEORGE,” | 47 |
| “TEMPTATION,” | 49 |
| “SANCTA DEI GENITRIX,” | 51 |
| “THE ANGEL OF DEATH,” | 53 |
| “ASCENDING INTO HEAVEN,” | 55 |
| “ROSA MYSTICA,” | 57 |
| “ASSUMPTIO,” | 59 |
| “BE STRONG,” | 61 |
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In England, which has made great Symbolic Art, mostpeople dislike an art if they are told it is symbolic,for they confuse symbol and allegory. Even Johnson’sDictionary sees no great difference, for it calls a Symbol“That which comprehends in its figure a representation ofsomething else;” and an Allegory, “A figurative discourse,in which something other is intended than is contained inthe words literally taken.” It is only a very modernDictionary that calls a Symbol “The sign or representationof any moral thing by the images or properties of naturalthings,” which, though an imperfect definition, is notunlike “The things below are as the things above” ofthe Emerald Tablet of Hermes!The Faery Queen andThe Pilgrim’s Progress have been so important in Englandthat Allegory has overtopped Symbolism, and for a timehas overwhelmed it in its own downfall. William Blakewas perhaps the first modern to insist on a difference;and the other day, when I sat for my portrait to a GermanSymbolist in Paris, whose talk was all of his love forSymbolism and his hatred for Allegory, his definitions8were the same as William Blake’s, of whom he knewnothing. William Blake has written, “Vision or imagination”—meaningsymbolism by these words—“is a representationof what actually exists, really or unchangeably.Fable or Allegory is formed by the daughters of Memory.”The German insisted in broken English, and with manygestures, that Symbolism said things which could not besaid so perfectly in any other way, and needed but a rightinstinct for its understanding; while Allegory said thingswhich could be said as well, or better, in another way,and needed a right knowledge for its understanding. Theone gave dumb things voices, and bodiless things bodies;while the other read a meaning—which had never lackedits voice or its body—into something heard or seen, andloved less for the meaning than for its own sake. The onlysymbols he cared for were the shapes and motions of thebody; ears hidden by the hair, to make one think of a mindbusy with inner voices; and a head so bent that back andneck made the one curve, as in Blake’sVision of Bloodthirstiness,to call up an emotion of bodily strength; andhe would not put even a lily, or a rose, or a poppy into apicture to express purity, or love, or sleep, because hethought such emblems were allegorical, and had theirmeaning by a traditional and not by a natural right. Isaid that the rose, and the lily, and the poppy were somarried, by their colour, and their odour, and their use, tolove and purity and sleep, or to other symbols of love9and purity and sleep, and had been so long a part of theimagination of the world, that a symbolist might use themto help out his meaning without becoming an allegorist.I think I quoted the lily in the hand of the angel inRossetti’sAnnunciation, and the lily in the jar in hisChildhood of Mary Virgin, and thought they made themore important symbols,—the women’s bodies, and theangels’ bodies, and the clear morning light, take thatplace, in the great procession of Christian symbols, wherethey can alone have all their meaning and all their beauty.
It is hard to say where Allegory and Symbolismmelt into one another, but it is not hard to say whereeither comes to its perfection; and though one maydoubt whether Allegory or Symbolism is the greater inthe horns of Michael Angelo’sMoses, one need not doubtthat its symbolism has helped to awaken the modernimagination; while Tintoretto’sOrigin of the Milky Way,which is Allegory without any Symbolism, is, apart fromits fine painting, but a moment’s amusement for ourfancy. A hundred generations might write out whatseemed the meaning of the one, and they would writedifferent meanings, for no symbol tells all its meaningto any generation; but when you have said, “Thatwoman there is Juno, and the milk out of her breast ismaking the Milky Way,” you have told the meaning ofthe other, and the fine painting, which has added somuch unnecessary beauty, has not told it better.
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2. All Art that is not mere story-telling, or mereportraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of thosesymbolic talismans which mediæval magicians made withcomplex colours and forms, and bade their patientsponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for itentangles, in complex colours and forms, a part ofthe Divine Essence. A person or a landscape that isa part of a story or a portrait, evokes but so muchemotion as the story or the portrait can permit withoutloosening the bonds that make it a story or a portrait;but if you liberate a person or a landscape from thebonds of motives and their actions, causes and theireffects, and from all bonds but the bonds of your love,it will change under your eyes, and become a symbolof an infinite emotion, a perfected emotion, a part of theDivine Essence; for we love nothing but the perfect,and our dreams make all things perfect, that we maylove them. Religious and visionary people, monks andnuns, and medicine-men, and opium-eaters, see symbols intheir trances; for religious and visionary thought is thoughtabout perfection and the way to perfection; and symbolsare the only things free enough from all bonds to speakof perfection.
Wagner’s dramas, Keats’ odes, Blake’s pictures andpoems, Calvert’s pictures, Rossetti’s pictures, Villiersde Lisle Adam’s plays, and the black-and-white artof M. Herrmann, Mr. Beardsley, Mr. Ricketts, and11Mr. Horton, the lithographs of Mr. Shannon, andthe pictures of Mr. Whistler, and the plays of M.Maeterlinck, and the poetry of Verlaine, in our ownday, but differ from the religious art of Giotto andhis disciples in having accepted all symbolisms, thesymbolism of the ancient shepherds and star-gazers,that symbolism of bodily beauty which seemed a wickedthing to Fra Angelico, the symbolism in day and night, andwinter and summer, spring and autumn, once so greata part of an older religion than Christianity; and inhaving accepted all the Divine Intellect, its anger andits pity, its waking and its sleep, its love and its lust,for the substance of their art. A Keats or a Calvert isas much a symbolist as a Blake or a Wagner; buthe is a fragmentary symbolist, for while he evokes inhis persons and his landscapes an infinite emotion, aperfected emotion, a part of the Divine Essence, hedoes not set his symbols in the great procession asBlake would have him, “in a certain order, suited tohis ‘imaginative energy.’” If you paint a beautiful womanand fill her face, as Rossetti filled so many faces, withan infinite love, a perfected love, “one’s eyes meet nomortal thing when they meet the light of her peacefuleyes,” as Michael Angelo said of Vittoria Colonna;but one’s thoughts stray to mortal things, and ask, maybe,“Has her love gone from her, or is he coming?” or “Whatpredestinated unhappiness has made the shadow in her12eyes?” If you paint the same face, and set a wingedrose or a rose of gold somewhere about her, one’s thoughtsare of her immortal sisters, Pity and Jealousy, and of hermother, Ancestral Beauty, and of her high kinsmen,the Holy Orders, whose swords make a continual musicbefore her face. The systematic mystic is not thegreatest of artists, because his imagination is toogreat to be bounded by a picture or a song, andbecause only imperfection in a mirror of perfection,or perfection in a mirror of imperfection, delight ourfrailty. There is indeed a systematic mystic in everypoet or painter who, like Rossetti, delights in atraditional Symbolism, or, like Wagner, delights in apersonal Symbolism; and such men often fall into trances,or have waking dreams. Their thought wanders fromthe woman who is Love herself, to her sisters and herforebears, and to all the great procession; and so augusta beauty moves before the mind, that they forget thethings which move before the eyes. William Blake, whowas the chanticleer of the new dawn, has written: “Ifthe spectator could enter into one of these images of hisimagination, approaching them on the fiery chariot ofhis contemplative thought, if ... he could make afriend and companion of one of these images of wonder,which always entreat him to leave mortal things (as hemust know), then would he arise from the grave, thenwould he meet the Lord in the air, and then he would be13happy.” And again, “The world of imagination is theworld of Eternity. It is the Divine bosom into whichwe shall all go after the death of the vegetated body.The world of imagination is infinite and eternal, whereasthe world of generation or vegetation is finite andtemporal. There exist in that eternal world the eternalrealities of everything which we see reflected in thevegetable glass of nature.”
Every visionary knows that the mind’s eye soon comesto see a capricious and variable world, which the willcannot shape or change, though it can call it up and banishit again. I closed my eyes a moment ago, and a companyof people in blue robes swept by me in a blinding light,and had gone before I had done more than see little rosesembroidered on the hems of their robes, and confused,blossoming apple boughs somewhere beyond them, andrecognised one of the company by his square, black,curling beard. I have often seen him; and one night ayear ago, I asked him questions which he answered byshowing me flowers and precious stones, of whose meaningI had no knowledge, and seemed too perfected a soulfor any knowledge that cannot be spoken in symbol ormetaphor.
Are he and his blue-robed companions, and their like,“the Eternal realities” of which we are the reflection “inthe vegetable glass of nature,” or a momentary dream?To answer is to take sides in the only controversy in14which it is greatly worth taking sides, and in the only controversywhich may never be decided.
3. Mr. Horton, who is a disciple of “The Brotherhoodof the New Life,” which finds the way to God in wakingdreams, has his waking dreams, but more detailed andvivid than mine; and copies them in his drawings as ifthey were models posed for him by some unearthly master.A disciple of perhaps the most mediæval movement inmodern mysticism, he has delighted in picturing the streetsof mediæval German towns, and the castles of mediævalromances; and, at moments, as inAll Thy waves are goneover me, the images of a kind of humorous piety like thatof the mediæval miracle-plays and moralities. Alwaysinteresting when he pictures the principal symbols of hisfaith, the woman ofRosa Mystica andAscending intoHeaven, who is the Divine womanhood, the man-at-arms ofSt. George andBe Strong, who is the Divine manhood, heis at his best in picturing the Magi, who are the wisdom ofthe world, uplifting their thuribles before the Christ, who isthe union of the Divine manhood and the Divine womanhood.The rays of the halo, the great beams of themanger, the rich ornament of the thuribles and of the cloaks,make up a pattern where the homeliness come of his pitymixes with an elaborateness come of his adoration. Eventhe phantastic landscapes, the entangled chimneys against15a white sky, the dark valley with its little points of light,the cloudy and fragile towns and churches, are part of thehistory of a soul; for Mr. Horton tells me that he hasmade them spectral, to make himself feel all things but awaking dream; and whenever spiritual purpose mixes withartistic purpose, and not to its injury, it gives it a newsincerity, a new simplicity. He tried at first to copy hismodels in colour, and with little mastery over colour wheneven great mastery would not have helped him, and veryliterally: but soon found that you could only represent aworld where nothing is still for a moment, and wherecolours have odours and odours musical notes, by formaland conventional images, midway between the scenery andpersons of common life, and the geometrical emblems onmediæval talismans. His images are still few, though theyare becoming more plentiful, and will probably be alwaysbut few; for he who is content to copy common life neednever repeat an image, because his eyes show him alwayschanging scenes, and none that cannot be copied; but theremust always be a certain monotony in the work of the Symbolist,who can only make symbols out of the things thathe loves. Rossetti and Botticelli have put the same faceinto a number of pictures; M. Maeterlinck has put amysterious comer, and a lighthouse, and a well in a woodinto several plays; and Mr. Horton has repeated againand again the woman ofRosa Mystica, and the man-at-armsofBe Strong; and has put the crooked way ofThe16Path to the Moon, “the straight and narrow way” intoSt.George, and an old drawing inThe Savoy; the abyss ofThe Gap, the abyss which is always under all things, intodrawings that are not in this book; and the wave ofTheWave, which is God’s overshadowing love, intoAll Thywaves are gone over me.
These formal and conventional images were at first butparts of his waking dreams, taken away from the parts thatcould not be drawn; for he forgot, as Blake often forgot,that you should no more draw the things the mind has seenthan the things the eyes have seen, without consideringwhat your scheme of colour and line, or your shape andkind of paper can best say: but his later drawings,SanctaDei Genitrix andAscending into Heaven for instance, showthat he is beginning to see his waking dreams over againin the magical mirror of his art. He is beginning, too, todraw more accurately, and will doubtless draw as accuratelyas the greater number of the more visionary Symbolists,who have never, from the days when visionary Symbolistscarved formal and conventional images of stone in Assyriaand Egypt, drawn as accurately as men who are interestedin things and not in the meaning of things. His art isimmature, but it is more interesting than the mature art ofour magazines, for it is the reverie of a lonely and profoundtemperament.
W. B. YEATS.
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THIS BOOK WAS PRINTED BY MESSRS. MORRISON AND GIBB, TANFIELD, EDINBURGH.
THE BLOCKS WERE ENGRAVED BY THE ART REPRODUCTION COMPANY, LONDON.
MM. RODIN, FANTIN-LATOUR, ANDLEGROS.
Three Lithographed Drawings byWill Rothenstein.In aWrapper. Price£2, 2s.each set.
*⁎* These Portraits were made from sittings given in Paris in 1897. Only fiftycopies of each drawing were printed (by Mr. Way), and the stones have been destroyed.Twenty-five sets (each drawing on hand-made Van Guelder paper and signed by theArtist) now remain for sale.
MR. AUBREY BEARDSLEY.
A Lithographed Drawing byWill Rothenstein.Price£1, 1s.
*⁎* No later Portrait than this appears to have been made. After the first fewtrial proofs only fifty copies were printed, and the stone has been destroyed. Thefew copies now offered are all numbered and signed Artist’s Proofs.
PIRANESI’S “CARCERI.”
Sixteen Plates, each measuring 21 by 16 inches over all, with anIntroduction byE. J. Oldmeadow. Two hundred copiesonly.Price£2, 2s.net.
[Nearly ready.
A BOOK OF GIANTS.
Drawn, engraved, and written byWilliam Strang.Fcap. 4to,in a binding designed by the Author. Price2s. 6d.net.
*⁎* “A Book of Giants” contains twelve original wood engravings, accompaniedby humorous verses. Admirers and collectors of Mr. Strang’s etchings will hasten toacquire copies of this, his first published set of woodcuts; but its interest for a widerpublic, and as a children’s book, should be only a degree less great.
Twenty-five copies, printed from the original blocks, will be hand-coloured byMr. Strang. Particulars of this edition may be obtained from the Publishers.
A BOOK OF IMAGES.
Drawn byW. T. Horton, and Introduced byW. B. Yeats.Fcap. 8vo, boards. Price2s. 6d.net.
*⁎* This book contains twenty-four drawings, including a set of Imaginary Landscapesand a number of Mystical Pieces.
VERISIMILITUDES.
A Volume of Stories byRudolf Dircks.Imperial 16mo, cloth,gilt.3s. 6d.
The Manchester Courier:—“Mr. Dircks is one of the cleverest writers of theday.... Sure analysis of character, artistic use of incident.... The volume will behighly valued by lovers of short stories.”
The Star:—“Good work. Mr. Dircks has insight and the courage to effacehimself; he is uncompromisingly true to his subjects; and he knows to a hair’s-breadthwhat a short story can and cannot do.... Well worth reprinting in theexquisite form given them by the publishers.”
The Whitehall Review:—“Great and nervous originality.... A masterlyobserver.... A number of pictures of the emotions, drawn with a fearless truth thatis as delightful as it is rare, ... by a genuine artist.”
SHADOWS AND FIREFLIES.
ByLouis Barsac.Imp. 16mo, bevelled and extra gilt. Price3s. 6d.net.Second Edition.
The Outlook:—“Mr. Barsac has a genuine gift of expression and a refinedsense of natural beauty.”
“J. D.” inThe Star:—“The sonnets attain a particularly high level.The EarthShip ... is splendidly imagined and splendidly wrought.... In all there is strongevidence of original poetical talent.”
The New Age:—“One of the most promising efforts of the younger muse sincethe early volumes of Mr. William Watson and Mr. John Davidson.”
THE LITTLE CHRISTIAN YEAR:
A Book of Prayers and Verses.Medium 16mo, parchment, gilttop. Price2s. 6d.net.
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THE DOME.
A Quarterly.One Hundred pages, Pott 4to, boards. Price1s.net, or5s.per annum, post free.
*⁎* Each number ofThe Dome contains about twenty examples of Music,Architecture, Literature, Drawing, Painting, and Engraving, including several ColouredPlates. Among the Contributors to the first five numbers are—Louis Barsac,Laurence Binyon, Vernon Blackburn, H. W. Brewer, Ingeborg von Bronsart, L.Dougall, Olivier Destrée, Campbell Dodgson, Edward Elgar, Charles Holmes,Laurence Housman, W. T. Horton, Edgardo Levi, Liza Lehmann, Alice Meynell,J. Moorat, W. Nicholson, Charles Pears, Stephen Phillips, Beresford Pite, J. F.Runciman, Byam Shaw, Arthur Symons, Francis Thompson, F. Vielé-Griffin, GleesonWhite, J. E. Woodmeald, Paul Woodroffe, and W. B. Yeats.
Simple typographical errors were corrected.Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were madeconsistent when a predominant preference was foundin the original book; otherwise they were not changed.
The illustrations have no captions.
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