an's mind.

Sec. 19. First, perpetual tampering with death, whether there be occasion
to allude to it or not,--especially insisting upon its associations with
corruption. I do not pain the reader by dwelling on the details
illustrative of this feeling.

Secondly, Delight in dismemberment, dislocation, and distortion of
attitude. Distortion, to some extent, is a universal characteristic of
the German fifteenth and sixteenth century art; that is to say, there is
a general aptitude for painting legs across, or feet twisted round, or
bodies awkwardly bent, rather than anything in a natural position; and
Martin Schoengauer himself exhibits this defect in no small degree. But
here the finishing workman has dislocated nearly every joint which he
has exposed, besides knitting and twisting the muscles into mere knots
of cordage.

[Illustration: FIG. 113.]

What, however, only amounts to dislocation in the limbs of the human
figures, becomes actual dismemberment in the animals. Fig. 113 is a
faithful copy of a tree with two _birds_, one on its bough, and one
above it, seen in the background, behind a soldier's mace, in the
drawing of the Betrayal. In the engraving of this subject, by Schoengauer
himself, the mace does not occur; it has been put in by the finishing
workman, in order to give greater expression of savageness to the boughs
of the tree, which, joined with the spikes of the mace, form one mass of
disorganized angles and thorns, while the birds look partly as if being
torn to pieces, and partly like black spiders.

In the painting itself the sky also is covered with little detached and
bent white strokes, by way of clouds, and the hair of the figures torn
into ragged locks, like wood rent by a cannon shot.

[Illustration: FIG. 114.]

This tendency to dismember and separate everything is one of the eminent
conditions of a mind leaning to vice and ugliness; just as to connect
and harmonize everything is that of a mind leaning to virtue and beauty.
It is shown down to the smallest details; as, for instance, in the
spotted backgrounds, which, instead of being chequered with connected
patterns, as in the noble manuscripts (see Vol. III. Plate 7), are
covered with disorderly dashes and circles executed with a blunt pen or
brush, Fig. 114. And one of the borders is composed of various detached
heads cut off at the neck or shoulders without the slightest endeavor to
conceal or decorate the truncation. All this, of cours