age (the pterodactyl), known very well by its fossil remains, if clothed with flesh and provided with limbs and wings, would make a creature in some respects like the dragon of fairy tales.
The mythical gigantic kraken of the northern seas has a legitimate descendant, and is simply an exaggerated type of the giant architeuthis of the coast of Newfoundland, of which a specimen has recently been exhibited in this city.
The "roc" of Sindbad the Sailor was not much larger than the epiornis of Madagascar and the dinornis of New Zealand, more than twice the size of the ostrich. The Eastern imagination, on the basis of these great birds actually coexisting with man, would naturally put on the wings which birds of this type did not possess, and then the transportation of a man into the "Valley of Diamonds" would be quite possible.
These forms could hardly have been imagined by barbarous man; they must have had their prototypes in nature: they are, therefore, not ideal forms, but, in a zoölogical sense, real forms.
An artist may be ignorant of history, chronology, and zoölogy, as well as of anatomy and physiology, and may be a perfect child in bis knowledge of common things beyond his immediate every-day sight. Even Raphael, Albert Dürer, Salvator Rosa, Vandyke, Paul Veronese, Poussin, and many others, have greatly erred in these respects. Instances might easily be mentioned, but I will merely allude to them to show that art has not always been true to nature and fact, and to say that we are not only at liberty, but in duty bound, to protest against all untruthfulness, whether it offend the eye or the reason.
Let me not be understood as pretending to say that there is no art or beauty in purely fanciful creations in painting or sculpture. There is a place, and a genuine one, for the allegorical, the symbolic, the mysterious, the unreal, if you will, in art; but such art, from the very fact of its unreality, untruthfulness, and impossibility, is, I maintain, a lower type than that which is strictly natural and true. Wings of angels, as messengers of glad tidings or guardian spirits, are, as fanciful creations, beautiful, though untrue; winged heads, as suggesting the swiftness of thought and intelligence, are acceptable as symbolic, though impossible: but all such creations should take a subordinate position in art, and in proportion as the symbolism departs from the true, the known, and the conceivable. We must not confound the results of the imagination, which exaggerates possible parts seen, or supposed to be seen, in nature, with the wholly unreal products of the fancy; we may admit their beauty, but, however definite and pleasing their outlines, if their combinations, when tested by reason, are impossible, they must be regarded as lower than the natural. They may answer for gas-fixtures, monuments, memorial windows, and various articles of household decoration, but not for anything demanding admiration and following as a work of high art.
Let me now bring to your remembrance a few celebrated works of
