There is one thing which I will venture to criticize in the lecture,--not positively, however. I cannot help believing that the deity whose name you spell _Schiva_ (probably after a German writer) is the same spelled Seeva, Siva, or Shiva, according to various English and French authors. If I am right, then I fear you were wrong in calling Schiva the _goddess_ of fire and destruction. The god, yes; but although many of these Hindoo deities, including Siva, are bi-sexual and self-engendering, as the embodiment of any force, they are masculine. Now Siva is the third person of the Hindoo trinity,--Brahma, the Creator; Vishnu, the Preserver; Siva, the Destroyer. Siva signifies the wrath of God. Fire is sacred to him, as it is an emblem of the Christian Siva, the _Holy Ghost_. Siva is the Holy Ghost of the Hindoo trinity; and as sins against the Holy Ghost are unforgiven, so are sins against Siva unforgiven. There is an awful legend that Brahma and Vishnu were once disputing as to greatness, when Siva suddenly towered between them as a pillar of fire. Brahma flew upward for ten myriads of years vainly striving to reach the flaming capital of that fiery column; Vishnu flew downward for ten thousand years without being able to reach its base. And the gods trembled. But this legend, symbolic and awful, signifies only that the height and depth of the vengeance of God is immeasurable even by himself. I think the _wife_ of Siva is Parvati. See if I am right. I have no works here to which I can refer on the subject.
There is to my mind a most fearful symbolism in the origin of five tones from the head of Siva. I cannot explain the idea; but it is a terrible one, and may symbolize a strange truth. All this Brahminism is half true; it conflicts not with any doctrine of science; its symbolism is only a monstrously-figured veil wrought to hide from the ignorant truths they cannot understand; and those elephant-headed or hundred-armed gods do but represent tremendous facts.
On the subject of Romanticism, I send you a translation from an article by Baudelaire. The last part of the chapter, applying wholly to romanticism in form and colour, hardly touches the subject in which you are most interested. His criticism of Raphael is very severe; that of Rembrandt enthusiastic. "The South," he says, is "brutal and positive in its conception of beauty, like a sculptor;" and he remarks that sculpture in the North is always rather picturesque than realistic. Winckelmann and Lessing long since pointed out, however, that antique art was never realistic; it was only a dream of human beauty deified and immortalized, and the ancients were true Romanticists in their day. I wonder what Baudelaire would have thought of our modern Pre-Raphaelites,--Rossetti, _et als_. Surely they are true Romanticists also; but I must not tire you with Romanticism.