Part 23 (1/2)
80. Read the inscription written on the sarcophagus (Plate V.), at the extremity of which this angel is sculptured. It stands in an open recess in the rude brick wall of the west front of the church of St. John and Paul at Venice, being the tomb of the two doges, father and son, Jacopo and Lorenzo Tiepolo. This is the inscription:--
”Quos natura pares studiis, virtutibus, arte Edidit, ill.u.s.tres genitor natusque, sepulti Hac sub rupe Duces. Venetum charissima proles Theupula collatis dedit hos celebranda triumphis.
Omnia presentis donavit predia templi Dux Jacobus: valido fixit moderamine leges Urbis, et ingratam redimens certamine Jadram Dalmatiosque dedit patrie, post, Marte subactas Graiorum pelago maculavit sanguine cla.s.ses.
Suscipit oblatos princeps Laurentius Istros, Et domuit rigidos, ingenti strage cadentes, Bononie populos. Hinc subdita Cervia cessit.
Fundavere vias pacis; fortique relicta Re, superos sacris petierunt mentibus ambo.
”Dominus Jachobus hobiit[121] M.CCLI.
Dominus Laurentius hobiit M.CCLXXVIII.”
You see, therefore, this tomb is an invaluable example of thirteenth century sculpture in Venice. In Plate VI., you have an example of the (coin) sculpture of the date accurately corresponding in Greece to the thirteenth century in Venice, when the meaning of symbols was everything and the workmans.h.i.+p comparatively nothing. The upper head is an Athena, of Athenian work in the seventh or sixth century--(the coin itself may have been struck later, but the archaic type was retained). The two smaller impressions below are the front and obverse of a coin of the same age from Corinth, the head of Athena on one side, and Pegasus, with the archaic Koppa, on the other. The smaller head is bare, the hair being looped up at the back and closely bound with an olive branch. You are to note this general outline of the head, already given in a more finished type in Plate II., as a most important elementary form in the finest sculpture, not of Greece only, but of all Christendom. In the upper head the hair is restrained still more closely by a round helmet, for the most part smooth, but embossed with a single flower tendril, having one bud, one flower, and above it, two olive leaves. You have thus the most absolutely restricted symbol possible to human thought of the power of Athena over the flowers and trees of the earth. An olive leaf by itself could not have stood for the sign of a tree, but the two can, when set in position of growth.
[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE VI.--ARCHAIC ATHENA OF ATHENS AND CORINTH.]
I would not give you the reverse of the coin on the same plate, because you would have looked at it only, laughed at it, and not examined the rest; but here it is, wonderfully engraved for you (Fig. 6): of it we shall have more to say afterwards.
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 6.]
81. And now as you look at these rude vestiges of the religion of Greece, and at the vestiges, still ruder, on the Ducal tomb, of the religion of Christendom, take warning against two opposite errors.
There is a school of teachers who will tell you that nothing but Greek art is deserving of study, and that all our work at this day should be an imitation of it.
Whenever you feel tempted to believe them, think of these portraits of Athena and her owl, and be a.s.sured that Greek art is not in all respects perfect, nor exclusively deserving of imitation.
There is another school of teachers who will tell you that Greek art is good for nothing; that the soul of the Greek was outcast, and that Christianity entirely superseded its faith, and excelled its works.
Whenever you feel tempted to believe _them_, think of this angel on the tomb of Jacopo Tiepolo; and remember, that Christianity, after it had been twelve hundred years existent as an imaginative power on the earth, could do no better work than this, though with all the former power of Greece to help it; nor was able to engrave its triumph in having stained its fleets in the seas of Greece with the blood of her people, but between barbarous imitations of the pillars which that people had invented.
82. Receiving these two warnings, receive also this lesson; In both examples, childish though it be, this Heathen and Christian art is alike sincere, and alike vividly imaginative: the actual work is that of infancy; the thoughts, in their visionary simplicity, are also the thoughts of infancy, but in their solemn virtue, they are the thoughts of men.
We, on the contrary, are now, in all that we do, absolutely without sincerity;--absolutely, therefore, without imagination, and without virtue. Our hands are dexterous with the vile and deadly dexterity of machines; our minds filled with incoherent fragments of faith, which we cling to in cowardice, without believing, and make pictures of in vanity, without loving. False and base alike, whether we admire or imitate, we cannot learn from the Heathen's art, but only pilfer it; we cannot revive the Christian's art, but only galvanize it; we are, in the sum of us, not human artists at all, but mechanisms of conceited clay, masked in the furs and feathers of living creatures, and convulsed with voltaic spasms, in mockery of animation.
83. You think, perhaps, that I am using terms unjustifiable in violence.
They would, indeed, be unjustifiable, if, spoken from this chair, they were violent at all. They are, unhappily, temperate and accurate,--except in shortcoming of blame. For we are not only impotent to restore, but strong to defile, the work of past ages. Of the impotence, take but this one, utterly humiliatory, and, in the full meaning of it, ghastly, example. We have lately been busy embanking, in the capital of the country, the river which, of all its waters, the imagination of our ancestors had made most sacred, and the bounty of nature most useful. Of all architectural features of the metropolis, that embankment will be, in future, the most conspicuous; and in its position and purpose it was the most capable of n.o.ble adornment.
For that adornment, nevertheless, the utmost which our modern poetical imagination has been able to invent, is a row of gas-lamps. It has, indeed, farther suggested itself to our minds as appropriate to gas-lamps set beside a river, that the gas should come out of fishes'
tails; but we have not ingenuity enough to cast so much as a smelt or a sprat for ourselves; so we borrow the shape of a Neapolitan marble, which has been the refuse of the plate and candlestick shops in every capital of Europe for the last fifty years. We cast _that_ badly, and give l.u.s.tre to the ill-cast fish with lacquer in imitation of bronze. On the base of their pedestals, towards the road, we put for advertis.e.m.e.nt's sake, the initials of the casting firm; and, for farther originality and Christianity's sake, the caduceus of Mercury; and to adorn the front of the pedestals towards the river, being now wholly at our wit's end, we can think of nothing better than to borrow the door-knocker which--again for the last fifty years--has disturbed and decorated two or three millions of London street-doors; and magnifying the marvellous device of it, a lion's head with a ring in its mouth (still borrowed from the Greek), we complete the embankment with a row of heads and rings, on a scale which enables them to produce, at the distance at which only they can be seen, the exact effect of a row of sentry boxes.
84. Farther. In the very centre of the city, and at the point where the Embankment commands a view of Westminster Abbey on one side and of St.
Paul's on the other--that is to say, at precisely the most important and stately moment of its whole course--it has to pa.s.s under one of the arches of Waterloo Bridge, which, in the sweep of its curve, is as vast--it alone--as the Rialto at Venice, and scarcely less seemly in proportions. But over the Rialto, though of late and debased Venetian work, there still reigns some power of human imagination: on the two flanks of it are carved the Virgin and the Angel of the Annunciation; on the keystone the descending Dove. It is not, indeed, the fault of living designers that the Waterloo arch is nothing more than a gloomy and hollow heap of wedged blocks of blind granite. But just beyond the damp shadow of it, the new Embankment is reached by a flight of stairs, which are, in point of fact, the princ.i.p.al approach to it, a-foot, from central London; the descent from the very midst of the metropolis of England to the banks of the chief river of England; and for this approach, living designers _are_ answerable.
85. The princ.i.p.al decoration of the descent is again a gas-lamp, but a shattered one, with a bra.s.s crown on the top of it or, rather, half-crown, and that turned the wrong way, the back of it to the river and causeway, its flame supplied by a visible pipe far wandering along the wall; the whole apparatus being supported by a rough cross-beam.
Fastened to the centre of the arch above is a large placard, stating that the Royal Humane Society's drags are in constant readiness, and that their office is at 4, Trafalgar Square. On each side of the arch are temporary, but dismally old and battered boardings, across two angles capable of unseemly use by the British public. Above one of these is another placard, stating that this is the Victoria Embankment. The steps themselves--some forty of them--descend under a tunnel, which the shattered gas-lamp lights by night, and nothing by day. They are covered with filthy dust, shaken off from infinitude of filthy feet; mixed up with shreds of paper, orange-peel, foul straw, rags, and cigar ends, and ashes; the whole agglutinated, more or less, by dry saliva into slippery blotches and patches; or, when not so fastened, blown dismally by the sooty wind hither and thither, or into the faces of those who ascend and descend. The place is worth your visit, for you are not likely to find elsewhere a spot which, either in costly and ponderous brutality of building, or in the squalid and indecent accompaniment of it, is so far separated from the peace and grace of nature, and so accurately indicative of the methods of our national resistance to the Grace, Mercy, and Peace of Heaven.
86. I am obliged always to use the English word ”Grace” in two senses, but remember that the Greek [Greek: charis] includes them both (the bestowing, that is to say of Beauty and Mercy); and especially it includes these in the pa.s.sage of Pindar's first ode, which gives us the key to the right interpretation of the power of sculpture in Greece. You remember that I told you, in my Sixth Introductory Lecture (- 151), that the mythic accounts of Greek sculpture begin in the legends of the family of Tantalus; and especially in the most grotesque legend of them all, the inlaying of the ivory shoulder of Pelops. At that story Pindar pauses--not, indeed, without admiration, nor alleging any impossibility in the circ.u.mstances themselves, but doubting the careless hunger of Demeter--and gives his own reading of the event, instead of the ancient one. He justifies this to himself, and to his hearers, by the plea that myths have, in some sort, or degree, ([Greek: pou ti]), led the mind of mortals beyond the truth: and then he goes on:--
”Grace, which creates everything that is kindly and soothing for mortals, adding honour, has often made things at first untrustworthy, become trustworthy through Love.”
87. I cannot, except in these lengthened terms, give you the complete force of the pa.s.sage; especially of the [Greek: apiston emesato pioton]--”made it trustworthy by pa.s.sionate desire that it should be so”--which exactly describes the temper of religious persons at the present day, who are kindly and sincere, in clinging to the forms of faith which either have long been precious to themselves, or which they feel to have been without question instrumental in advancing the dignity of mankind. And it is part of the const.i.tution of humanity--a part which, above others, you are in danger of unwisely contemning under the existing conditions of our knowledge, that the things thus sought for belief with eager pa.s.sion, do, indeed, become trustworthy to us; that, to each of us, they verily become what we would have them; the force of the [Greek: menis] and [Greek: mneme] with which we seek after them, does, indeed, make them powerful to us for actual good or evil; and it is thus granted to us to create not only with our hands things that exalt or degrade our sight, but with our hearts also, things that exalt or degrade our souls; giving true substance to all that we hoped for; evidence to things that we have not seen, but have desired to see; and calling, in the sense of creating, things that are not, as though they were.