Part 23 (2/2)

88. You remember that in distinguis.h.i.+ng Imagination from Idolatry, I referred you to the forms of pa.s.sionate affection with which a n.o.ble people commonly regards the rivers and springs of its native land. Some conception of personality or of spiritual power in the stream, is almost necessarily involved in such emotion; and prolonged [Greek: charis] in the form of grat.i.tude, the return of Love for benefits continually bestowed, at last alike in all the highest and the simplest minds, when they are honourable and pure, makes this untrue thing trustworthy; [Greek: apiston emesato piston], until it becomes to them the safe basis of some of the happiest impulses of their moral nature. Next to the marbles of Verona, given you as a primal type of the sculpture of Christianity, moved to its best energy in adorning the entrance of its temples, I have not unwillingly placed, as your introduction to the best sculpture of the religion of Greece, the forms under which it represented the personality of the fountain Arethusa. But, without restriction to those days of absolute devotion, let me simply point out to you how this untrue thing, made true by Love, has intimate and heavenly authority even over the minds of men of the most practical sense, the most shrewd wit, and the most severe precision of moral temper. The fair vision of Sabrina in _Comus_, the endearing and tender promise, ”Fies n.o.bilium tu quoque fontium,” and the joyful and proud affection of the great Lombard's address to the lakes of his enchanted land,--

Te, Lari maxume, teque Fluctibus et fremitu a.s.surgens, Benace, marino,

may surely be remembered by you with regretful piety, when you stand by the blank stones which at once restrain and disgrace your native river, as the final wors.h.i.+p rendered to it by modern philosophy. But a little incident which I saw last summer on its bridge at Wallingford, may put the contrast of ancient and modern feeling before you still more forcibly.

89. Those of you who have read with attention (none of us can read with too much attention), Moliere's most perfect work, the _Misanthrope_, must remember Celimene's description of her lovers, and her excellent reason for being unable to regard with any favour, ”notre grand flandrin de vicomte,--depuis que je l'ai vu, trois quarts d'heure durant, cracher dans un puits pour faire des ronds.” That sentence is worth noting, both in contrast to the reverence paid by the ancients to wells and springs, and as one of the most interesting traces of the extension of the loathsome habit among the upper cla.s.ses of Europe and America, which now renders all external grace, dignity, and decency, impossible in the thoroughfares of their princ.i.p.al cities. In connection with that sentence of Moliere's you may advisably also remember this fact, which I chanced to notice on the bridge of Wallingford. I was walking from end to end of it, and back again, one Sunday afternoon of last May, trying to conjecture what had made this especial bend and ford of the Thames so important in all the Anglo-Saxon wars. It was one of the few sunny afternoons of the bitter spring, and I was very thankful for its light, and happy in watching beneath it the flow and the glittering of the cla.s.sical river, when I noticed a well-dressed boy, apparently just out of some orderly Sunday-school, leaning far over the parapet; watching, as I conjectured, some bird or insect on the bridge-b.u.t.tress. I went up to him to see what he was looking at; but just as I got close to him, he started over to the opposite parapet, and put himself there into the same position, his object being, as I then perceived, to spit from both sides upon the heads of a pleasure party who were pa.s.sing in a boat below.

90. The incident may seem to you too trivial to be noticed in this place. To me, gentlemen, it was by no means trivial. It meant, in the depth of it, such absence of all true [Greek: charis], reverence, and intellect, as it is very dreadful to trace in the mind of any human creature, much more in that of a child educated with apparently every advantage of circ.u.mstance in a beautiful English country town, within ten miles of our University. Most of all, is it terrific when we regard it as the exponent (and this, in truth, it is), of the temper which, as distinguished from former methods, either of discipline or recreation, the present tenor of our general teaching fosters in the mind of youth;--teaching which a.s.serts liberty to be a right, and obedience a degradation; and which, regardless alike of the fairness of nature and the grace of behaviour, leaves the insolent spirit and degraded senses to find their only occupation in malice, and their only satisfaction in shame.

91. You will, I hope, proceed with me, not scornfully any more, to trace, in the early art of a n.o.ble heathen nation, the feeling of what was at least a better childishness than this of ours; and the efforts to express, though with hands yet failing, and minds oppressed by ignorant phantasy, the first truth by which they knew that they lived; the birth of wisdom and of all her powers of help to man, as the reward of his resolute labour.

92. ”[Greek: Aphaistou technaisi].” Note that word of Pindar in the Seventh Olympic. This axe-blow of Vulcan's was to the Greek mind truly what Clytemnestra falsely a.s.serts hers to have been ”[Greek: tes de dexias cheros ergon dikaias tektonos]”; physically, it meant the opening of the blue through the rent clouds of heaven, by the action of local terrestrial heat of Hephaestus as opposed to Apollo, who s.h.i.+nes on the surface of the upper clouds, but cannot pierce them; and, spiritually, it meant the first birth of prudent thought out of rude labour, the clearing-axe in the hand of the woodman being the practical elementary sign of his difference from the wild animals of the wood. Then he goes on, ”From the high head of her Father, Athenaia rus.h.i.+ng forth, cried with her great and exceeding cry; and the Heaven trembled at her, and the Earth Mother.” The cry of Athena, I have before pointed out, physically distinguishes her, as the spirit of the air, from silent elemental powers; but in this grand pa.s.sage of Pindar it is again the mythic cry of which he thinks; that is to say, the giving articulate words, by intelligence, to the silence of Fate. ”Wisdom crieth aloud, she uttereth her voice in the streets,” and Heaven and Earth tremble at her reproof.

93. Uttereth her voice in ”the streets.” For all men, that is to say; but to what work did the Greeks think that her voice was to call them?

What was to be the impulse communicated by her prevailing presence; what the sign of the people's obedience to her?

This was to be the sign--”But she, the G.o.ddess herself, gave to them to prevail over the dwellers upon earth, _with best-labouring hands in every art. And by their paths there were the likenesses of living and of creeping things_; and the glory was deep. For to the cunning workman, greater knowledge comes, undeceitful.”

94. An infinitely pregnant pa.s.sage, this, of which to-day you are to note mainly these three things: First, that Athena is the G.o.ddess of Doing, not at all of sentimental inaction. She is begotten, as it were, of the woodman's axe; her purpose is never in a word only, but in a word and a blow. She guides the hands that labour best, in every art.

95. Secondly. The victory given by Wisdom, the worker, to the hands that labour best, is that the streets and ways, [Greek: keleuthoi], shall be filled by likenesses of living and creeping things?

Things living, and creeping! Are the Reptile things not alive then? You think Pindar wrote that carelessly? or that, if he had only known a little modern anatomy, instead of ”reptile” things, he would have said ”monochondylous” things? Be patient, and let us attend to the main points first.

Sculpture, it thus appears, is the only work of wisdom that the Greeks care to speak of; they think it involves and crowns every other.

Image-making art; _this_ is Athena's, as queenliest of the arts.

Literature, the order and the strength of word, of course belongs to Apollo and the Muses; under Athena are the Substances and the Forms of things.

96, Thirdly. By this forming of Images there is to be gained a ”deep”--that is to say--a weighty, and prevailing, glory; not a floating nor fugitive one. For to the cunning workman, greater knowledge comes, ”undeceitful.”

”[Greek: Daenti]” I am forced to use two English words to translate that single Greek one. The ”cunning” workman, thoughtful in experience, touch, and vision of the thing to be done; no machine, witless, and of necessary motion; yet not cunning only, but having perfect habitual skill of hand also; the confirmed reward of truthful doing. Recollect, in connection with this pa.s.sage of Pindar, Homer's three verses about getting the lines of s.h.i.+p-timber true, (_Il._ xv. 410)

[Greek: ”All' oste stathme dory neion exithynei tektonos en palamesi daemonos, hos ra te pases ed eide sophies, upothemosynesin Athenes,”]

and the beautiful epithet of Persephone, ”[Greek: daeira],” as the Tryer and Knower of good work; and remembering these, trust Pindar for the truth of his saying, that to the cunning workman--(and let me solemnly enforce the words by adding--that to him _only_,) knowledge comes undeceitful.

97. You may have noticed, perhaps, and with a smile, as one of the paradoxes you often hear me blamed for too fondly stating, what I told you in the close of my Third Introductory Lecture, that ”so far from art's being immoral, little else except art is moral.” I have now farther to tell you, that little else, except art, is wise; that all knowledge, unaccompanied by a habit of useful action, is too likely to become deceitful, and that every habit of useful action must resolve itself into some elementary practice of manual labour. And I would, in all sober and direct earnestness advise you, whatever may be the aim, predilection, or necessity of your lives, to resolve upon this one thing at least, that you will enable yourselves daily to do actually with your hands, something that is useful to mankind. To do anything well with your hands, useful or not;--to be, even in trifling, [Greek: palamesi daemon] is already much;--when we come to examine the art of the middle ages I shall be able to show you that the strongest of all influences of right then brought to bear upon character was the necessity for exquisite manual dexterity in the management of the spear and bridle; and in your own experience most of you will be able to recognize the wholesome effect, alike on body and mind, of striving, within proper limits of time, to become either good batsmen, or good oarsmen. But the bat and the racer's oar are children's toys. Resolve that you will be men in usefulness, as well as in strength; and you will find that then also, but not till then, you can become men in understanding; and that every fine vision and subtle theorem will present itself to you thenceforward undeceitfully, [Greek: hypothemosynesin Athenes].

98. But there is more to be gathered yet from the words of Pindar. He is thinking, in his brief, intense way, at once of Athena's work on the soul, and of her literal power on the dust of the Earth. His ”[Greek: keleuthoi]” is a wide word meaning all the paths of sea and land.

Consider, therefore, what Athena's own work _actually is_--in the literal fact of it. The blue, clear air _is_ the sculpturing power upon the earth and sea. Where the surface of the earth is reached by that, and its matter and substance inspired with, and filled by that, organic form becomes possible. You must indeed have the sun, also, and moisture; the kingdom of Apollo risen out of the sea: but the sculpturing of living things, shape by shape, is Athena's, so that under the brooding spirit of the air, what was without form, and void brings forth the moving creature that hath life.

99. That is her work then--the giving of Form; then the separately Apolline work is the giving of Light; or, more strictly, Sight: giving that faculty to the retina to which we owe not merely the idea of light, but the existence of it; for light is to be defined only as the sensation produced in the eye of an animal, under given conditions; those same conditions being, to a stone, only warmth or chemical influence, but not light. And that power of seeing, and the other various personalities and authorities of the animal body, in pleasure and pain, have never, hitherto, been, I do not say, explained, but in any wise touched or approached by scientific discovery. Some of the conditions of mere external animal form and of muscular vitality have been shown; but for the most part that is true, even of external form, which I wrote six years ago. ”You may always stand by Form against Force. To a painter, the essential character of anything is the form of it, and the philosophers cannot touch that. They come and tell you, for instance, that there is as much heat, or motion, or calorific energy (or whatever else they like to call it), in a tea-kettle, as in a gier-eagle. Very good: that is so; and it is very interesting. It requires just as much heat as will boil the kettle, to take the gier-eagle up to his nest, and as much more to bring him down again on a hare or a partridge. But we painters, acknowledging the equality and similarity of the kettle and the bird in all scientific respects, attach, for our part, our princ.i.p.al interest to the difference in their forms. For us, the primarily cognisable facts, in the two things, are, that the kettle has a spout, and the eagle a beak; the one a lid on its back, the other a pair of wings; not to speak of the distinction also of volition, which the philosophers may properly call merely a form or mode of force--but, then to an artist, the form or mode is the gist of the business.”

100. As you will find that it is, not to the artist only, but to all of us. The laws under which matter is collected and constructed are the same throughout the universe: the substance so collected, whether for the making of the eagle, or the worm, may be a.n.a.lyzed into gaseous ident.i.ty; a diffusive vital force, apparently so closely related to mechanically measurable heat as to admit the conception of its being itself mechanically measurable, and unchanging in total quant.i.ty, ebbs and flows alike through the limbs of men, and the fibres of insects.

But, above all this, and ruling every grotesque or degraded accident of this, are two laws of beauty in form, and of n.o.bility in character, which stand in the chaos of creation between the Living and the Dead, to separate the things that have in them a sacred and helpful, from those that have in them an accursed and destroying, nature; and the power of Athena, first physically put forth in the sculpturing of these [Greek: zoa and erpeta], these living and reptile things, is put forth, finally, in enabling the hearts of men to discern the one from the other; to know the unquenchable fires of the Spirit from the unquenchable fires of Death; and to choose, not unaided, between submission to the Love that cannot end, or to the Worm that cannot die.

101. The unconsciousness of their antagonism is the most notable characteristic of the modern scientific mind; and I believe no credulity or fallacy admitted by the weakness (or it may sometimes rather have been the strength) of early imagination, indicates so strange a depression beneath the due scale of human intellect, as the failure of the sense of beauty in form, and loss of faith in heroism of conduct, which have become the curses of recent science,[122] art, and policy.

102. That depression of intellect has been alike exhibited in the mean consternation confessedly felt on one side, and the mean triumph apparently felt on the other, during the course of the dispute now pending as to the origin of man. Dispute for the present, not to be decided, and of which the decision is to persons in the modern temper of mind, wholly without significance: and I earnestly desire that you, my pupils, may have firmness enough to disengage your energies from investigation so premature and so fruitless, and sense enough to perceive that it does not matter how you have been made, so long as you are satisfied with being what you are. If you are dissatisfied with yourselves, it ought not to console, but humiliate you, to imagine that you were once seraphs; and if you are pleased with yourselves, it is not any ground of reasonable shame to you if, by no fault of your own, you have pa.s.sed through the elementary condition of apes.

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