ver conceive of God, but thrust away all thought and memory
of him, and in his real terribleness and omnipresence fear him not nor
know him, yet are of real, acute, piercing, and ignoble fear, haunted
for evermore; fear inconceiving and desperate that calls to the rocks,
and hides in the dust; and hence the peculiar baseness of the expression
of terror, a baseness attributed to it in all times, and among all
nations, as of a passion atheistical, brutal, and profane. So also, it
is always joined with ferocity, which is of all passions the least
human; for of sensual desires there is license to men, as necessity; and
of vanity there is intellectual cause, so that when seen in a brute it
is pleasant and a sign of good wit; and of fear there is at times
necessity and excuse, as being allowed for prevention of harm; but of
ferocity there is no excuse nor palliation, but it is pure essence of
tiger and demon, and it casts on the human face the paleness alike of
the horse of Death, and the ashes of hell.

Sec. 30. Such expressions how sought by painters powerless and impious.

Wherefore, of all subjects that can be admitted to sight, the
expressions of fear and ferocity are the most foul and detestable, and
so there is in them I know not what sympathetic attractiveness for minds
cowardly and base, as the vulgar of most nations, and forasmuch as they
are easily rendered by men who can render nothing else, they are often
trusted in by the herd of painters incapable and profane, as in that
monstrous abortion of the first room of the Louvre, called the Deluge,
whose subject is pure, acute, mortal fear; and so generally the
senseless horrors of the modern French schools, spawn of the guillotine:
also there is not a greater test of grandeur or meanness of mind than
the expressions it will seek for and develop in the features and forms
of men in fierce strife, whether determination and devotion, and all the
other attributes of that unselfishness which constitutes heroism, as in
the warrior of Agasias; and distress not agitated nor unworthy, though
mortal, as in the Dying Gladiator, or brutal ferocity and butchered
agony, of which the lowest and least palliated examples are those
battles of Salvator Rosa, which none but a man, base-born and
thief-bred, could have dwelt upon for an instant without sickening, of
which I will only name that example in the Pitti palace, wherein the
chief figure in the foreground is a man with his arm cu