Part 24 (1/2)

103. Remember, therefore, that it is of the very highest importance that you should know what you _are_, and determine to be the best that you may be; but it is of no importance whatever, except as it may contribute to that end, to know what you have been. Whether your Creator shaped you with fingers, or tools, as a sculptor would a lump of clay, or gradually raised you to manhood through a series of inferior forms, is only of moment to you in this respect--that in the one case you cannot expect your children to be n.o.bler creatures than you are yourselves--in the other, every act and thought of your present life may be hastening the advent of a race which will look back to you, their fathers (and you ought at least to have attained the dignity of desiring that it may be so), with incredulous disdain.

104. But that you _are_ yourselves capable of that disdain and dismay; that you are ashamed of having been apes, if you ever were so; that you acknowledge instinctively, a relation of better and worse, and a law respecting what is n.o.ble and base, which makes it no question to you that the man is worthier than the baboon--_this_ is a fact of infinite significance. This law of preference in your hearts is the true essence of your being, and the consciousness of that law is a more positive existence than any dependent on the coherence or forms of matter.

105. Now, but a few words more of mythology, and I have done. Remember that Athena holds the weaver's shuttle, not merely as an instrument of _texture_, but as an instrument of _picture_; the ideas of clothing, and of the warmth of life, being thus inseparably connected with those of graphic beauty and the brightness of life. I have told you that no art could be recovered among us without perfectness in dress, nor without the elementary graphic art of women, in divers colours of needlework.

There has been no nation of any art-energy, but has strenuously occupied and interested itself in this household picturing, from the web of Penelope to the tapestry of Queen Matilda, and the meshes of Arras and Gobelins.

106. We should then naturally ask what kind of embroidery Athena put on her own robe; ”[Greek: peplon heanon, poikilon hou r aute poiesato kai kame chersin].”

The subject of that [Greek: poikilia] of hers, as you know, was the war of the giants and G.o.ds. Now the real name of these giants, remember, is that used by Hesiod, ”[Greek: pelochonoi],” ”mud-begotten,” and the meaning of the contest between these and Zeus, [Greek: pelogonon elater], is, again, the inspiration of life into the clay, by the G.o.ddess of breath; and the actual confusion going on visibly before you, daily, of the earth, heaping itself into c.u.mbrous war with the powers above it.

107. Thus briefly, the entire material of Art, under Athena's hand, is the contest of life with clay; and all my task in explaining to you the early thought of both the Athenian and Tuscan schools will only be the tracing of this battle of the giants into its full heroic form, when, not in tapestry only--but in sculpture--and on the portal of the Temple of Delphi itself, you have the ”[Greek: klonos en teichesi lainoisi giganton],” and their defeat hailed by the pa.s.sionate cry of delight from the Athenian maids, beholding Pallas in her full power, ”[Greek: leusso Pallad' eman theon],” my own G.o.ddess. All our work, I repeat, will be nothing but the inquiry into the development of this the subject, and the pressing fully home the question of Plato about that embroidery--”And think you that there is verily war with each other among the G.o.ds? and dreadful enmities and battle, such as the poets have told, and such as our painters set forth in graven scripture, to adorn all our sacred rites and holy places; yes, and in the great Panathenaea themselves, the Peplus, full of such wild picturing, is carried up into the Acropolis--shall we say that these things are true, oh Euthuphron, right-minded friend?”

108. Yes, we say, and know, that these things are true; and true for ever: battles of the G.o.ds, not among themselves, but against the earth-giants. Battle prevailing age by age, in n.o.bler life and lovelier imagery; creation, which no theory of mechanism, no definition of force, can explain, the adoption and completing of individual form by individual animation, breathed out of the lips of the Father of Spirits.

And to recognize the presence in every knitted shape of dust, by which it lives and moves and has its being--to recognize it, revere, and show it forth, is to be our eternal Idolatry.

”Thou shalt not bow down to them, nor wors.h.i.+p them.”

”a.s.suredly no,” we answered once, in our pride; and through porch and aisle, broke down the carved work thereof, with axes and hammers.

Who would have thought the day so near when we should bow down to wors.h.i.+p, not the creatures, but their atoms,--not the forces that form, but those that dissolve them? Trust me, gentlemen, the command which is stringent against adoration of brutality, is stringent no less against adoration of chaos, nor is faith in an image fallen from heaven to be reformed by a faith only in the phenomenon of decadence. We have ceased from the making of monsters to be appeased by sacrifice;--it is well,--if indeed we have also ceased from making them in our thoughts.

We have learned to distrust the adorning of fair phantasms, to which we once sought for succour;--it is well, if we learn to distrust also the adorning of those to which we seek, for temptation; but the verity of gains like these can only be known by our confession of the divine seal of strength and beauty upon the tempered frame, and honour in the fervent heart, by which, increasing visibly, may yet be manifested to us the holy presence, and the approving love, of the Loving G.o.d, who visits the iniquities of the Fathers upon the Children, unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate Him, and shows mercy unto thousands in them that love Him, and keep His Commandments.

FOOTNOTES:

[118] I shall be obliged in future lectures, as. .h.i.therto in my other writings, to use the terms, Idolatry and Imagination in a more comprehensive sense; but here I use them for convenience sake, limitedly, to avoid the continual occurrence of the terms, n.o.ble and ign.o.ble, or false and true, with reference to modes of conception.

[119] ”And in sum, he himself (Prometheus) was the master-maker, and Athena worked together with him, breathing into the clay, and caused the moulded things to have soul (psyche) in them.”--LUCIAN, PROMETHEUS.

[120] His relations with the two great t.i.tans, Themis and Mnemosyne, belong to another group of myths. The father of Athena is the lower and nearer physical Zeus, from whom Metis, the mother of Athena, long withdraws and disguises herself.

[121] The Latin verses are of later date; the contemporary plain prose retains the Venetian gutturals and aspirates.

[122] The best modern ill.u.s.trated scientific works show perfect faculty of representing monkeys, lizards, and insects; absolute incapability of representing either a man, a horse, or a lion.

LECTURE IV.

LIKENESS.

_November, 1870._

109. You were probably vexed, and tired, towards the close of my last lecture, by the time it took us to arrive at the apparently simple conclusion, that sculpture must only represent organic form, and the strength of life in its contest with matter. But it is no small thing to have that ”[Greek: leusso Pallada]” fixed in your minds, as the one necessary sign by which you are to recognize right sculpture, and believe me you will find it the best of all things, if you can take for yourselves the saying from the lips of the Athenian maids, in its entirety, and say also--[Greek: leusso Pallad' eman theon]. I proceed to-day into the practical appliance of this apparently speculative, but in reality imperative, law.

110. You observe, I have hitherto spoken of the power of Athena, as over painting no less than sculpture. But her rule over both arts is only so far as they are zoographic;--representative, that is to say, of animal life, or of such order and discipline among other elements, as may invigorate and purify it. Now there is a speciality of the art of painting beyond this, namely, the representation of phenomena of colour and shadow, as such, without question of the nature of the things that receive them. I am now accordingly obliged to speak of sculpture and painting as distinct arts, but the laws which bind sculpture, bind no less the painting of the higher schools which has, for its main purpose, the showing beauty in human or animal form; and which is therefore placed by the Greeks equally under the rule of Athena, as the Spirit, first, of Life, and then of Wisdom in conduct.

111. First, I say, you are to ”see Pallas” in all such work, as the Queen of Life; and the practical law which follows from this, is one of enormous range and importance, namely, that nothing must be represented by sculpture, external to any living form, which does not help to enforce or ill.u.s.trate the conception of life. Both dress and armour may be made to do this, by great sculptors, and are continually so used by the greatest. One of the essential distinctions between the Athenian and Florentine schools is dependent on their treatment of drapery in this respect; an Athenian always sets it to exhibit the action of the body, by flowing with it, or over it, or from it, so as to ill.u.s.trate both its form and gesture; a Florentine, on the contrary, always uses his drapery to conceal or disguise the forms of the body, and exhibit mental emotion: but both use it to enhance the life, either of the body or soul; Donatello and Michael Angelo, no less than the sculptors of Gothic chivalry, enn.o.ble armour in the same way; but base sculptors carve drapery and armour for the sake of their folds and picturesqueness only, and forget the body beneath. The rule is so stern that all delight in mere incidental beauty, which painting often triumphs in, is wholly forbidden to sculpture;--for instance, in _painting_ the branch of a tree, you may rightly represent and enjoy the lichens and moss on it, but a sculptor must not touch one of them: they are inessential to the tree's life,--he must give the flow and bending of the branch only, else he does not enough ”see Pallas” in it.

Or to take a higher instance, here is an exquisite little painted poem, by Edward Frere; a cottage interior, one of the thousands which within the last two months[123] have been laid desolate in unhappy France.

Every accessory in the painting is of value--the fireside, the tiled floor, the vegetables lying upon it, and the basket hanging from the roof. But not one of these accessories would have been admissible in sculpture. You must carve nothing but what has life. ”Why”? you probably feel instantly inclined to ask me.--You see the principle we have got, instead of being blunt or useless, is such an edged tool that you are startled the moment I apply it. ”Must we refuse every pleasant accessory and picturesque detail, and petrify nothing but living creatures”?--Even so: I would not a.s.sert it on my own authority. It is the Greeks who say it, but whatever they say of sculpture, be a.s.sured, is true.