id to have
executed the prison set "during the delirium of fever." This is of the
same calibre as the clotted nonsense about Poe composing when
intoxicated or Liszt playing after champagne. It is a credible
anecdote for Philistines who do not realise that even the maddest
caprice, whether in black and white, marble, music, or verse, must be
executed in silence and cold blood. Piranesi simply gave wing to his
fancy, recalling the more vivid of his nightmares--as did Coleridge,
De Quincey, Poe, Baudelaire, and the rest of the drug-steeped choir.
We recall one plate of Piranesi's in which a miserable devil climbs a
staircase suspended over an abyss; as he mounts each step the lower
one crumbles into the depths below.

The agony of the man (do you recall The Torture by Hope of Villiers de
l'Isle-Adam?) is shown in his tense, crouching attitude, his hands
clawing the masonry above him. Nature is become a monstrous fever,
existence a shivering dread. You overhear the crash of stone into the
infernal cellarage--where awaits the hunted wretch perhaps a worse
fate than on the pinnacles above. It is a companion piece to Martin's
Sadak searching for the Waters of Oblivion. Another plate depicts with
ingenuity terraces superimposed upon terraces, archways spaced like
massive music, narrow footways across which race ape-like men, half
naked, eagerly preparing some terrible punishments for criminals
handcuffed and guarded. They are to walk a sharp-spiked bridge.
Gigantic chains swing across stony precipices, a lamp depends from a
roof whose outlines are merged in the gray dusk of dreams. There is
cruelty, horror, and a sense of the wickedly magnificent in the
ensemble. What crimes were committed to merit such atrocious
punishment? The boldness and clearness of it all! With perspicacity
George Saintsbury wrote of Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Anthony: "It
is the best example of dream literature that I know--most writers who
have tried this style have erred, inasmuch as they have endeavoured to
throw a portion of the mystery with which the waking mind invests
dreams over the dream itself. Any one's experience is sufficient to
show that this is wrong. The events of dreams, as they happen, are
quite plain and matter of fact, and it is only in the intervals that
any suspicion occurs to the dreamer."

Certainly Piranesi remembered his dreams. He is a realist in his
delineation of details, though the sweep and breadth of an ideal
design