174 SYMBIOGENESIS 



who is snaring a lizard with a noose of grass. "The meaning 

 is only comprehensible on this explanation, and with it the 

 work appears in. all its life-like truth and harmony." 



True beauty, i.e., the truth of form which we call beauty, 

 which I consider antithetic to monstrosity or deformity, is 

 generally at home amongst the industrious and connected with 

 wholesome industry. It does not, of course, depend on any 

 particular industry, but rather on the whole attitude to life of 

 a race generally. The question of beauty as resulting from 

 proper activities becomes a national matter, as has been well 

 perceived by those anxious to raise the level of the community, 

 by those who are " das Land der Griechen mit der Seele 

 suchend." 



The art of predaceous nations, according to Ruskin, repre- 

 sents living creatures " under some distorted and monstrous 

 form," and this is what it means to him: 



It thus indicates that the people who practise it are cut off from 

 all private sources of healthy knowledge or natural delight ; that they 

 have wilfully sealed up and put aside the entire volume of the world, 

 and have got nothing to read, nothing to dwell upon but that imagina- 

 tion of the thoughts of their hearts, of which we are told that "it is 

 only evil continually." 



When Art is occupied in the function in which she is 

 serviceable, she is herself strengthened by the service, 

 according to Ruskin, and the same must be said of all 

 organic form. Let us bear in mind also the need of restraint 

 in symmetry and in good art generally, as Ruskin tells us : 



But the last phase of good Gothic has no room to spare : it rises 

 as high as it can on narrowest foundation, stands in perfect strength 

 with the least possible substance in its bars, connects niche with niche 

 and line with line in an exquisite harmony, from which no stone can 

 be removed and to which you can add not a pinnacle ; and yet introduces 

 in rich, though now more calculated profusion, the living element of 

 its sculpture sculpture in the quartrefoils, sculpture in the brackets, 

 sculpture in the gargoyles, sculpture in the niches, sculpture in the ridges 

 and hollows of its mouldings not a shadow without meaning, and not 

 a light without life. 



L'arte pura e magra. 



