Part 22 (1/2)

61. That is the conclusion at which we arrive, on the evidence presented by our historical sculpture. To complete the measure of ourselves, we must endeavour to estimate the rank of the two opposite schools of sculpture employed by us in the nominal service of religion, and in the actual service of vice.

I am aware of no statue of Christ, nor of any apostle of Christ, nor of any scene related in the New Testament, produced by us within the last three hundred years, which has possessed even superficial merit enough to attract public attention.

Whereas the steadily immoral effect of the formative art which we learn, more or less apishly, from the French schools, and employ, but too gladly, in manufacturing articles for the amus.e.m.e.nt of the luxurious cla.s.ses, must be ranked as one of the chief instruments used by joyful fiends and angry fates, for the ruin of our civilization.

If, after I have set before you the nature and principles of true sculpture, in Athens, Pisa, and Florence, you reconsider these facts,--(which you will then at once recognize as such),--you will find that they absolutely justify my a.s.sertion that the state of sculpture in modern England, as compared with that of the great Ancients, is literally one of corrupt and dishonourable death, as opposed to bright and fameful life.

62. And now, will you bear with me, while I tell you finally why this is so?

The cause with which you are personally concerned is your own frivolity; though essentially this is not your fault, but that of the system of your early training. But the fact remains the same, that here, in Oxford, you, a chosen body of English youth, in no wise care for the history of your country, for its present dangers, or its present duties.

You still, like children of seven or eight years old, are interested only in bats, b.a.l.l.s, and oars: nay, including with you the students of Germany and France, it is certain that the general body of modern European youth have their minds occupied more seriously by the sculpture and painting of the bowls of their tobacco-pipes, than by all the divinest workmans.h.i.+p and pa.s.sionate imagination of Greece, Rome, and Mediaeval Christendom.

63. But the elementary causes, both of this frivolity in you, and of worse than frivolity in older persons, are the two forms of deadly Idolatry which are now all but universal in England.

The first of these is the wors.h.i.+p of the Eidolon, or Phantasm of Wealth; wors.h.i.+p of which you will find the nature partly examined in the 37th paragraph of my _Munera Pulveris_; but which is briefly to be defined as the servile apprehension of an active power in Money, and the submission to it as the G.o.d of our life.

64. The second elementary cause of the loss of our n.o.bly imaginative faculty, is the wors.h.i.+p of the Letter, instead of the Spirit, in what we chiefly accept as the ordinance and teaching of Deity; and the apprehension of a healing sacredness in the act of reading the Book whose primal commands we refuse to obey.

No feather idol of Polynesia was ever a sign of a more shameful idolatry, than the modern notion in the minds of certainly the majority of English religious persons, that the Word of G.o.d, by which the heavens were of old, and the earth, standing out of the water and in the water,--the Word of G.o.d which came to the prophets, and comes still for ever to all who will hear it, (and to many who will forbear); and which, called Faithful and True, is to lead forth, in the judgment, the armies of heaven,--that this ”Word of G.o.d” may yet be bound at our pleasure in morocco, and carried about in a young lady's pocket, with ta.s.selled ribands to mark the pa.s.sages she most approves of.

65. Gentlemen, there has. .h.i.therto been seen no instance, and England is little likely to give the unexampled spectacle, of a country successful in the n.o.ble arts, yet in which the youths were frivolous, the maidens falsely religious, the men, slaves of money, and the matrons, of vanity.

Not from all the marble of the hills of Luni will such a people ever shape one statue that may stand n.o.bly against the sky; not from all the treasures bequeathed to them by the great dead, will they gather, for their own descendants, any inheritance but shame.

FOOTNOTES:

[113] Glance forward at once to - 75, read it, and return to this.

[114] There is a primary and vulgar sense of ”exhibited” in Lucian's mind; but the higher meaning is involved in it.

[115] In the Greek, ”ambrosial.” Recollect always that ambrosia, as food of G.o.ds, is the continual restorer of strength; that all food is ambrosial when it nourishes, and that the night is called ”ambrosial”

because it restores strength to the soul through its peace, as, in the 23rd Psalm, the stillness of waters.

[116] I have italicised this final promise of blessedness, given by the n.o.ble Spirit of Workmans.h.i.+p. Compare Carlyle's 5th Latter-day pamphlet, throughout; but especially pp. 12-14, in the first edition.

[117] ”Falsely represented,” would be the better expression. In the cast of the tomb of Queen Eleanor, for a single instance, the Gothic foliage of which one essential virtue is its change over every s.h.i.+eld, is represented by a repet.i.tion of casts from one mould, of which the design itself is entirely conjectural.

LECTURE III.

IMAGINATION.

_November, 1870._

66. The princ.i.p.al object of the preceding lecture (and I choose rather to incur your blame for tediousness in repeating, than for obscurity in defining it), was to enforce the distinction between the ign.o.ble and false phase of Idolatry, which consists in the attribution of a spiritual power to a material thing; and the n.o.ble and truth-seeking phase of it, to which I shall in these lectures[118] give the general term of Imagination;--that is to say, the invention of material symbols which may lead us to contemplate the character and nature of G.o.ds, spirits, or abstract virtues and powers, without in the least implying the actual presence of such Beings among us, or even their possession, in reality, of the forms we attribute to them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 2.]

67. For instance, in the ordinarily received Greek type of Athena, on vases of the Phidian time (sufficiently represented in the opposite woodcut), no Greek would have supposed the vase on which this was painted to be itself Athena, nor to contain Athena inside of it, as the Arabian fisherman's casket contained the genie; neither did he think that this rude black painting, done at speed as the potter's fancy urged his hand, represented anything like the form or aspect of the G.o.ddess herself. Nor would he have thought so, even had the image been ever so beautifully wrought. The G.o.ddess might, indeed, visibly appear under the form of an armed virgin, as she might under that of a hawk or a swallow, when it pleased her to give such manifestation of her presence; but it did not, therefore, follow that she was constantly invested with any of these forms, or that the best which human skill could, even by her own aid, picture of her, was, indeed, a likeness of her. The real use, at all events, of this rude image, was only to signify to the eye and heart the facts of the existence, in some manner, of a Spirit of wisdom, perfect in gentleness, irresistible in anger; having also physical dominion over the air which is the life and breadth of all creatures, and clothed, to human eyes, with aegis of fiery cloud, and raiment of falling dew.