painfulness of
Raffaelle's treatment of the massacre of the innocents. Fuseli affirms
of it that, "in dramatic gradation he disclosed all the mother through
every image of pity and of terror." If this be so, I think the
philosophical spirit has prevailed over the imaginative. The imagination
never errs, it sees all that is, and all the relations and bearings of
it, but it would not have confused the mortal frenzy of maternal terror
with various development of maternal character. Fear, rage, and agony,
at their utmost pitch, sweep away all character: humanity itself would
be lost in maternity, the woman would become the mere personification of
animal fury or fear. For this reason all the ordinary representations of
this subject are, I think, false and cold: the artist has not heard the
shrieks, nor mingled with the fugitives, he has sat down in his study to
twist features methodically, and philosophize over insanity. Not so
Tintoret. Knowing or feeling, that the expression of the human face was
in such circumstances not to be rendered, and that the effort could only
end in an ugly falsehood, he denies himself all aid from the features,
he feels that if he is to place himself or us in the midst of that
maddened multitude, there can be no time allowed for watching
expression. Still less does he depend on details of murder or
ghastliness of death; there is no blood, no stabbing or cutting, but
there is an awful substitute for these in the chiaroscuro. The scene is
the outer vestibule of a palace, the slippery marble floor is fearfully
barred across by sanguine shadows, so that our eyes seem to become
bloodshot and strained with strange horror and deadly vision; a lake of
life before them, like the burning seen of the doomed Moabite on the
water that came by the way of Edom; a huge flight of stairs, without
parapet, descends on the left; down this rush a crowd of women mixed
with the murderers; the child in the arms of one has been seized by the
limbs, she hurls herself over the edge, and falls head downmost,
dragging the child out of the grasp by her weight;--she will be dashed
dead in a second: two others are farther in flight, they reach the edge
of a deep river,--the water is beat into a hollow by the force of their
plunge;--close to us is the great struggle, a heap of the mothers
entangled in one mortal writhe with each other and the swords, one of
the murderers dashed down and crushed beneath them, the sword of another