eminently an "undesigned coincidence," which is significant in proportion to the complexity of the things compared, and the multiplicity and exactness of the agreement between them.

Want of space compels us to leave much unsaid: There are many collateral questions raised in the progress of the argument which we should gladly have discussed. Such are the author's exposition of our Lord's temptation (chap. ii.); of the Baptist's testimony to our Lord as the Lamb of God (p. 5); of our Lord's treatment of the woman brought before Him in St. John viii. 1—11 (p. 102); of the words, "Father, forgive them" (p. 276). Such again are his answer to the complaint made against the Christian Church, that though it announced principles fundamentally irreconcileable with slavery, it never pronounced the institution itself unlawful (p. 138); and a passage ending with the words, "shocking it may be, but not therefore unchristian" (p. 278), in which we fancy we see a strong indication of sympathy with one of the two parties in the recent trans-Atlantic war, scarcely to have been expected after the previous discussion of the question of slavery. Such passages add greatly to the interest of the book, whether we accept or reject the author's opinion on the special point.

We commend, then, the "Ecce Homo" to the careful study of all who feel that on its great subject they have still much to learn, and can welcome light from whatever side it comes. The author has brought to his treatment of it rare powers, both of thought and of expression; a mind familiar with antiquity, yet in close contact with his own age; a deep sense of the infinite benefits of Christ's legislation, and of the Divine Majesty of Christ's character. If we have spoken freely of what we think errors and defects in the book, it is because we feel that it has at present, and deserves to have, a degree of influence upon the minds of educated and thinking men, such as very few books in any generation can exert.

EDWARD T. VAUGHAN.

NOTE. We are requested to state that the article on "Ecce Homo" was in print before its writer had read an admirable review of the book in the Guardian of February 11th, or was aware of the existence of a letter from the author of the book itself to the Editor of the Spectator, which is reprinted in that review.

ANCILLA DOMINI: THOUGHTS ON

CHRISTIAN ART.

SYM

II. SYMBOLISM AND THE GROTESQUE.

YMBOL, σύμβολον, συμβάλλω, σύμβολα, the two halves of a coin or like object which any two contracting parties broke between them and preserved; hence, a token, ticket, or tessera; a watchword, distinctive mark, or formula; the Creeds of the Church," &c., &c. Such is the set of ideas which a reference to Liddell and Scott, for one of the words we have to deal with, brings rapidly before

us.

Now words, like pictures, are tesseræ, or symbols of things or of thoughts and we wish, by way of beginning, to notice the primal connection between such symbols written and such symbols painted; between what logicians would call the representative symbol, and the vicarious or substituted symbol. The representative symbol is the hieroglyphic or picture: the vicarious symbol is the spelt word; the sound (pwv) expressed by letters; the name which stands in the mind instead of the thing, or the general notion of the thing. The bunch of grapes over a house-door, or the counterfeit presentment of a punch-bowl, represent the liquor to be had within; the note for five pounds passes vicariously for the five sovereigns, not at all resembling them and in the same way the picture calls its object to the spectator's mind, while the word passes current instead of it as a matter of convenience.

It needs no proof that these two early stages of symbolism, wordmaking and picture-making, go on together in the infancy of language.

This expression implies both poverty and progress, or continued effort in expressing new ideas. Accordingly we find that savage orators make great use of verbal symbolism by trope and figure; and civilized people are constantly driven to use similes (if they have invention enough to frame them) by mere paucity of words. New or progressive thought always finds the same difficulty in expressing itself, and surmounts it by the use of metaphor, symbol, image, figure, simile, &c., &c. We shall not go into the distinctions between these terms. They all involve the substitution of a more obvious or familiar idea (printed or spoken) for a more recondite or important one. We had better say what meaning we attach to the word Symbolism (in art) for the purposes of the present Essay.*

By Symbolism in art, poetic or pictorial, we understand the attempt to suggest higher, wider, purer, or deeper ideas by the use of simpler, humbler, or more familiar thoughts or objects. What we mean by the Grotesque in art is-1. That kind of art in which lofty or great ideas are represented by symbols necessarily inadequate to express them, so that some kind of quaintness and surprise is part of the result. 2. There is a grotesque of contrast, surprise, inconsistency, and irony, where the mind of the artist willingly faces great and terrible ideas in the state in which they are generally presented to it, i. e., associated with ordinary or ludicrous ones. In this case the result will combine elements of the terrible and the ludicrous in various proportions, from Dante's Demons to Shakspere's Witches, and from them again to Hogarth's graver works, and thence to George Cruikshank and the more serious caricature.

It is the first of these broad divisions of the grotesque which is more obviously symbolic. As will be noticed hereafter, many of the emblematic parts of Holy Scripture are of this nature, as the visions of Joseph or of Nebuchadnezzar. These are symbolic grotesques, since no man's mind can really picture them to itself. And thus, also, symbolism and the grotesque are especially concerned with the progress of imperfect art, which cannot say the thing it would. And all art is imperfect when it seeks its highest objects. St. Augustine spoke like a painter in the well-known words, "Fecisti nos ad Te, Domine; et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in Te." No man can do or express the thing he desires, here in this world. Whether it be in literature, where ideas are conveyed by means of words and letters; or in art, where they are expressed by forms and colours-ideas constantly have to be suggested to men's minds, which

*We have no other account to give of the word Grotesque than that it is an Italian adjective, connected with the idea of caverns and hollows, in which ancient and strange sculptures may have been found. Perhaps ideas of Pan and the Fauns, and suchlike cavern-haunting figures, combining noble with ignoble form, may have something to do with it.

they cannot entirely or at once manage.

All who are accustomed

to teach know the value of simile, especially in elementary teaching. They well know what a number of trite comparisons and cut-and-dry illustrations they are obliged to keep by them as the stock or instruments of their trade.

It seems, indeed, as if both art-symbols and word-symbols originated in this way, from the imperfection and the progress of men's natural means of communicating their ideas. But many ideas and representations are in their very nature symbolic. They answer our purpose when we exchange them with each other, but we know all the time. that neither our thought nor its picture can be adequate to or literally representative of its subject. In speaking of the eye, the arın, or the hand of God, Holy Scripture does not imply that a human body is any part of his attributes. What is said about his "repentance," or change of purpose, does not impute to Him the variations of man's will, because such words describe Him not actually, but by analogy. The same remark, indeed, applies to expressions which attribute to Him what are called human virtues. Even Mr. Maurice would probably allow that it may be said that human virtues are "symbolic of Divine perfections, rather than "similar" to them. So that all attempts to represent Divine or even angelic presences are essentially symbolic; and this may account for the daring efforts in that direction which have been made in continental art, by men probably of pious and reverent mind. They may be taken as pictorial analogies, and pass unrebuked.

*

But very noble and vivid ideas have been for ages conveyed to men's minds by the use of such symbols of God's presence as the hand with fingers raised in blessing; or the triangle, which points to the fundamental doctrine of the Faith. Of the Cross, as a token of His sacrifice for man, we need not speak. And as types like these convey high thoughts to the mind with a force which is quite independent of the speaker's power of expression, whether he use art-language or spoken language, there is no wonder if symbolism has been one of the most important means of all mental culture, high and low, early and late. Now there must have been a time when pictorial symbolism and symbolism in words were virtually the same thing, not merely analogous things as they are now. Art and letters, or literature, seem

* The following list contains most of the earlier Christian symbols in common use:The Fish, as an anagram, for our Lord.

The Ship of Souls, in architecture, as at Torcello; and in emblematic painting. (See
Essay I.)

The Dove, Anchor, and Lyre; the Palm-branch, Phoenix, Pelican, and Peacock. The most frequent Scriptural symbols are the Good Shepherd-which De Rossi considers as the earliest of all; the Fish, as typical of the Christian, one of the draught of the Church's net; the Vine, Lamb, and Olive; and also the Lion, Dragon, and Serpent.

to have begun absolutely in the same way. The first letters, so to speak, were rude sketches of things, or hieroglyphics. A further step was to make them phonetic, or symbols of sounds: in other words, to form an alphabet of letters, no longer visibly resembling names of objects, instead of a picture-alphabet of hieroglyphics, which did more or less resemble them. The invention of letters bears an analogy to the invention of moveable types, instead of the old stereotype blockbook. For example, Beth in Hebrew, or Beit in Arabic, is the name for a house or booth. The initial sound of this name is something like B, and is represented by, evidently formed from the old hieroglyphic picture of the object. Henceforth the sign is taken to represent the B initial sound only,* and may be used for any number of words, instead of being limited, as the hieroglyphic is, to one.

It will be seen that the phonetic system at once separated literature from art, inasmuch as writing of words and letters, which are vicarious signs of things, is entirely different from drawing pictures, which are representative signs of things. We may add two more illustrations from the Hebrew alphabet. Aleph, &, meaning "ox

as a name, was clearly once a rude sketch of that quadruped seen in perspective with exaggerated horns. Gimel in Arabic, or Gamal in Hebrew, is the name of "camel;" and the head and long waving neck (which mark the animal, especially at a distance, as the present writer has often observed in the desert) are traceable in the letter-sign. It is apparently finished off by a touch, indicating the tremendous fore-leg, shot out parallel with the ground at every stride, in the trot of the swift dromedary, which scorns the horse and his rider.

However, so great progress seems to have been made in pictorial writing, before the earliest times whose records we possess, that we cannot wonder if a long time elapsed before letter-alphabets were finally substituted for it. The extraordinary Egyptian gift of powerful outline must always have conveyed most vivid ideas to men's minds accordingly, Professor Rawlinson assures us that the old picture-writing was not entirely abandoned in Egypt till Christianity introduced the Coptic, a purely alphabetic compound of Greek and Egyptian character.

So much, however, for the infancy of human expression, which of course carries us back to Egyptian symbolisms. And here one cannot. help noticing how symbolism may be called one of the many voices of Religious Faith. The best remembered examples of it in Egypt bear witness to Immortality, and prefigure Death, and Judgment, and Punishment, and Mercy. These are the first efforts of the higher * See Professor Rawlinson's Appendix to his "Herodotus," vol. ii., pp. 256 et seq. The quotation from Clement's "Stromata" is particularly valuable.