anding. The one
gave dumb things voices, and bodiless things bodies; while the other read
a meaning--which had never lacked its voice or its body--into something
heard or seen, and loved less for the meaning than for its own sake. The
only symbols he cared for were the shapes and motions of the body; ears
hidden by the hair, to make one think of a mind busy with inner voices;
and a head so bent that back and neck made the one curve, as in Blake's
'Vision of Bloodthirstiness,' to call up an emotion of bodily strength;
and he would not put even a lily, or a rose, or a poppy into a picture to
express purity, or love, or sleep, because he thought such emblems were
allegorical, and had their meaning by a traditional and not by a natural
right. I said that the rose, and the lily, and the poppy were so married,
by their colour and their odour, and their use, to love and purity and
sleep, or to other symbols of love and purity and sleep, and had been so
long a part of the imagination of the world, that a symbolist might use
them to help out his meaning without becoming an allegorist. I think I
quoted the lily in the hand of the angel in Rossetti's 'Annunciation,' and
the lily in the jar in his 'Childhood of Mary Virgin,' and thought they
made the more important symbols, the women's bodies, and the angels'
bodies, and the clear morning light, take that place, in the great
procession of Christian symbols, where they can alone have all their
meaning and all their beauty.

It is hard to say where Allegory and Symbolism melt into one another, but
it is not hard to say where either comes to its perfection; and though one
may doubt whether Allegory or Symbolism is the greater in the horns of
Michael Angelo's 'Moses,' one need not doubt that its symbolism has helped
to awaken the modern imagination; while Tintoretto's 'Origin of the Milky
Way,' which is Allegory without any Symbolism, is, apart from its fine
painting, but a moment's amusement for our fancy. A hundred generations
might write out what seemed the meaning of the one, and they would write
different meanings, for no symbol tells all its meaning to any generation;
but when you have said, 'That woman there is Juno, and the milk out of her
breast is making the Milky Way,' you have told the meaning of the other,
and the fine painting, which has added so much irrelevant beauty, has not
told it better.

All Art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic,
and