1 8 Land & Water April 4, 19 18 
Angels and Ministers: By John Ruan 
.JWSiiSiafJ 
If 
Clio and the Children 
Hy Charles Sims 
1915 
DREAMS, visions, apparitions, and mythological 
and allegorical figures ought to be treated 
frankly in art, for art is concerned with reality,, 
and reality is a thing of the mind. For the 
purposes of art, there is very little difference 
— as regards reality — between an angel and a stockbroker. 
If anything, the advantage in reality is on the side of the 
angel becajUse the stockbroker is more dependent on circum- 
stances. An angel is an angel all the time, but a stockbroker 
exists only so long as there is a stock exchange. In art the 
important thing is not whether a thing is true, but whether 
it is believed. 
Mr. Edward Carpenter wrrfte a book or an essay — I am 
not sure which — called Angels' Wings. I have never been 
able to get hold of it, and consequently I do not know 
whether or not I am plagiarising him. If I am, so much 
the better, because that will be two opinions instead of one. 
Anyhow, it has always seemed to me that the reality of art 
at any period could be judged from its treatment of angels' 
wings. If you look at the wing of an angel by Fra Angelico, 
or Botticelli, or the Byzantine mosaic workers, or Mestrovic, 
the Serbian sculptor, or at the wing of a Greek or an Egyptian 
sphinx, you will ?ee that there is no attempt to make it look 
like the wing of a bird. There is no attempt at plausibility, 
and therefore the idea of impossible anatomy never enters 
• your head. 
But in the angels of even such great painters as Rembrandt 
and G. F. Watts — not to speak of the angels of Gustave Dore, 
German Christmas cards, and modern R.A.s — the wings are 
painted lOvC the wings of a bird, with palpable feathers. 
That is to say, there is an attempt at plausibility. It is the 
same with the treatment of the Nimbus or Glory. In the 
works of the Primitives it is painted uncompromisingly as a 
Hat plate or circle of gold ; but in the works of inferior artists 
— inferior, that is to say, in faith — it is made to look like an 
emanation of the figure, "the aura" of modern psychical 
terminology. The paradoxical result is that y'du accept the 
Fra Angelico or Botticelli angel as a reality — a creature of 
the mind, an idea made visible ; while you wink at the 
German Christmas-card angel as a polite fiction for the 
ediiication of children. 
There is nothing more detestable in art than the attempt 
to give plausibility to miracles by approximating them to 
natural phenomena. The implication is that if people 
stick at your miracle you can always wriggle out of it by 
giving a pseudo-scieptific explanation. Almost always the 
explanation is much less convincing than the miracle ; as 
the little girl's explanation, when rebuked for falsehood, that 
God said: "Don't mention it. Miss Brown; I have often 
mistaken those big yellow dogs for lions, myself." This was 
much less credible than the positive assertion that she had 
seen a real lion in Kensington Gardens. 
These reflections are prompted by the picture of " Clio and 
the Children : 1915," by Mr. Charles Sims. If I remember 
rightly, Mr. Sims has been blamed before now for his habit 
of introducing mythological or allegorical figures, creatures of 
the mind, into everyday surroundings. That is really one 
of his great merits as an artist ; the reality that he gives to 
creatures of the mind — or of faith, if you like to put it that 
way. Clio, the Muse of Historj', embodies an idea tliat is 
real because it is universally accepted. She is at least as 
real as Betty and Sue and Tom ; and why should she not 
be painted with the same reality ? The children, at any 
rate, have no doubt of her reality. They are awed not by 
her presence, but at the reading of her scroll. If the picture 
has a defect, it is not the realit}' of Clio, but the realism — a 
very different thing — of the children and the land.scapc. As 
compared with Clio, they arc mere phenomena. 
The slight discrepancy, not enough to hurt the picture, is 
interesting because it puts us on the track of a difficulty that 
does not exist in any art except that of painting : the rival 
claims of bodily and mental vision. There is not the same 
difficulty in writing because, even in the most realistic study, 
everything has to be translated into mental terms before it 
can be described in words. The painter, unless he forswears 
mental vision — when he becomes inferior to the camera — 
is constantly bothered bj- two categories. He is like a man 
having to do a sum in mixed vulgar and decimal fractions, 
and forbidden to convert one into the other. Personally 
— and I have the support of Blake, at any rate — I am inclined 
to believe that he is only self-forbidden ; that if he plumped 
for mental vision his difficulties would disappear. 
Blake said some interesting things on this point. Defending 
his illustrations to "The Bard, from Gray," he wrote : 
The connoisseurs and artists who have made objections to Mr. 
B 's mode of representing .spirits with real bodies would do 
well to consider that the Venus, the Minerva, the Jupiter, and 
Apollo, which they admire in Greek statues, are all of them 
representations of spiritual existences of gods immortal, to the 
mortal perishing organ of sight ; and yet tliey are embodied 
and organised in solid marble. . . . The Prophets describe 
what they saw in Vision as real and existing men, whom they 
saw with theip- imaginative and immortal organs ; the Apostles 
the same ; the clearer the organ, the more distinct the object. 
A Spirit and a Vision are not, as the modern philosophy .supposes, 
a cloudy vapour, or a nothing ; they are organised and minutely 
articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature 
can produce. 
Elsewhere he speaks of the necessity for definitcncss in the 
treatment of the ideas of ordinary perishable things. " Yet 
the oak dies as well as the lettuce ; but its eternal -image or 
individuality never dies, but renews by its seed." 
Well, all artists cannot expect to have the imagination of 
William Blake, but they can at least give to their visions the 
reality he demanded, instead of trying to make them plau.'^ible 
with "auras" and things. And if tliey are to be introduced 
into ordinary or perishable surroundings the best way to 
obtain consistency is not to lower the vision to the critical 
standard of bodily eyesight, but to raise the perishable 
surroundings to the standard of the mirid's eye. 
