Part 29 (1/2)
203. Here, on the right, in Plate XX., is an Indian bull, colossal, and elaborately carved, which you may take as a sufficient type of the bad art of all the earth. False in form, dead in heart, and loaded with wealth, externally. We will not ask the date of this; it may rest in the eternal obscurity of evil art, everywhere and for ever. Now, besides this colossal bull, here is a bit of Daedalus work, enlarged from a coin not bigger than a s.h.i.+lling: look at the two together, and you ought to know, henceforward, what Greek art means, to the end of your days.
204. In this aspect of it then, I say, it is the simplest and nakedest of lovely veracities. But it has another aspect, or rather another pole, for the opposition is diametric. As the simplest, so also it is the most complex of human art. I told you in my fifth Lecture, showing you the spotty picture of Velasquez, that an essential Greek character is a liking for things that are dappled. And you cannot but have noticed how often and how prevalently the idea which gave its name to the Porch of Polygnotus, ”[Greek: stoa poikile],” occurs to the Greeks as connected with the finest art. Thus, when the luxurious city is opposed to the simple and healthful one, in the second book of Plato's Polity, you find that, next to perfumes, pretty ladies, and dice, you must have in it ”[Greek: poikilia],” which observe, both in that place and again in the third book, is the separate art of joiners' work, or inlaying; but the idea of exquisitely divided variegation or division, both in sight and sound--the ”ravis.h.i.+ng division to the lute,” as in Pindar's ”[Greek: poikiloi hymnoi]”--runs through the compa.s.s of all Greek art-description; and if, instead of studying that art among marbles you were to look at it only on vases of a fine time, (look back, for instance, to Plate IV. here), your impression of it would be, instead of breadth and simplicity, one of universal spottiness and chequeredness, ”[Greek: en angeon Herkesin pampoikilois];” and of the artist's delighting in nothing so much as in crossed or starred or spotted things; which, in right places, he and his public both do unlimitedly.
Indeed they hold it complimentary even to a trout, to call him a ”spotty.” Do you recollect the trout in the tributaries of the Ladon, which Pausanias says were spotted, so that they were like thrushes and which, the Arcadians told him, could speak? In this last [Greek: poikilia], however, they disappointed him. ”I, indeed, saw some of them caught,” he says, ”but I did not hear any of them speak, though I waited beside the river till sunset.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE XXI.--THE BEGINNINGS OF CHIVALRY.]
205. I must sum roughly now, for I have detained you too long.
The Greeks have been thus the origin not only of all broad, mighty, and calm conception, but of all that is divided, delicate, and tremulous; ”variable as the shade, by the light quivering aspen made.” To them, as first leaders of ornamental design, belongs, of right, the praise of glistenings in gold, piercings in ivory, stainings in purple, burnis.h.i.+ngs in dark blue steel; of the fantasy of the Arabian roof--quartering of the Christian s.h.i.+eld,--rubric and arabesque of Christian scripture; in fine, all enlargement, and all diminution of adorning thought, from the temple to the toy, and from the mountainous pillars of Agrigentum to the last fineness of fretwork in the Pisan Chapel of the Thorn.
And in their doing all this, they stand as masters of human order and justice, subduing the animal nature guided by the spiritual one, as you see the Sicilian Charioteer stands, holding his horse-reins, with the wild lion racing beneath him, and the flying angel above, on the beautiful coin of early Syracuse; (lowest in Plate XXI).
And the beginnings of Christian chivalary were in that Greek bridling of the dark and the white horses.
206. Not that a Greek never made mistakes. He made as many as we do ourselves, nearly;--he died of his mistakes at last--as we shall die of them; but so far he was separated from the herd of more mistaken and more wretched nations--so far as he was Greek--it was by his rightness.
He lived, and worked, and was satisfied with the fatness of his land, and the fame of his deeds, by his justice, and reason, and modesty. He became _Graeculus esuriens_, little, and hungry, and every man's errand-boy, by his iniquity, and his compet.i.tion, and his love of talk.
But his Graecism was in having done, at least at one period of his dominion, more than anybody else, what was modest, useful, and eternally true; and as a workman, he verily did, or first suggested the doing of, everything possible to man.
Take Daedalus, his great type of the practically executive craftsman, and the inventor of expedients in craftsmans.h.i.+p, (as distinguished from Prometheus, the inst.i.tutor of moral order in art). Daedalus invents,--he, or his nephew,--
The potter's wheel, and all work in clay;
The saw, and all work in wood;
The masts and sails of s.h.i.+ps, and all modes of motion; (wings only proving too dangerous!)
The entire art of minute ornament;
And the deceptive life of statues.
By his personal toil, he involves the fatal labyrinth for Minos; builds an impregnable fortress for the Agrigentines; adorns healing baths among the wild parsley fields of Selinus; b.u.t.tresses the precipices of Eryx, under the temple of Aphrodite; and for her temple itself--finishes in exquisiteness the golden honeycomb.
207. Take note of that last piece of his art: it is connected with many things which I must bring before you when we enter on the study of architecture. That study we shall begin at the foot of the Baptistery of Florence, which, of all buildings known to me, unites the most perfect symmetry with the quaintest [Greek: poikilia]. Then, from the tomb of your own Edward the Confessor, to the farthest shrine of the opposite Arabian and Indian world, I must show you how the glittering and iridescent dominion of Daedalus prevails; and his ingenuity in division, interposition, and labyrinthine sequence, more widely still. Only this last summer I found the dark red ma.s.ses of the rough sandstone of Furness Abbey had been fitted by him, with no less pleasure than he had in carving them, into wedged hexagons--reminiscences of the honeycomb of Venus Erycina. His ingenuity plays around the framework of all the n.o.blest things; and yet the brightness of it has a lurid shadow. The spot of the fawn, of the bird, and the moth, may be harmless. But Daedalus reigns no less over the spot of the leopard and snake. That cruel and venomous power of his art is marked, in the legends of him, by his invention of the saw from the serpent's tooth; and his seeking refuge, under blood-guiltiness, with Minos, who can judge evil, and measure, or remit, the penalty of it, but not reward good: Rhadamanthus only can measure _that_; but Minos is essentially the recognizer of evil deeds ”conoscitor delle peccata,” whom, therefore, you find in Dante under the form of the [Greek: erpeton]. ”Cignesi con la coda tante volte, quantunque gradi vuol che giu sia messa.”
And this peril of the influence of Daedalus is twofold; first in leading us to delight in glitterings and semblances of things, more than in their form, or truth;--admire the harlequin's jacket more than the hero's strength; and love the gilding of the missal more than its words;--but farther, and worse, the ingenuity of Daedalus may even become b.e.s.t.i.a.l, an instinct for mechanical labour only, strangely involved with a feverish and ghastly cruelty:--(you will find this distinct in the intensely Daedal work of the j.a.panese); rebellious, finally, against the laws of nature and honour, and building labyrinths for monsters,--not combs for bees.
208. Gentlemen, we of the rough northern race may never, perhaps, be able to learn from the Greek his reverence for beauty: but we may at least learn his disdain of mechanism:--of all work which he felt to be monstrous and inhuman in its imprudent dexterities.
We hold ourselves, we English, to be good workmen. I do not think I speak with light reference to recent calamity, (for I myself lost a young relation, full of hope and good purpose, in the foundered s.h.i.+p _London_,) when I say that either an aeginetan or Ionian s.h.i.+pwright built s.h.i.+ps that could be fought from, though they were under water; and neither of them would have been proud of having built one that would fill and sink helplessly if the sea washed over her deck, or turn upside down if a squall struck her topsail.
Believe me, gentlemen, good workmans.h.i.+p consists in continence and common sense, more than in frantic expatiation of mechanical ingenuity; and if you would be continent and rational, you had better learn more of Art than you do now, and less of Engineering. What is taking place at this very hour,[138] among the streets, once so bright, and avenues once so pleasant, of the fairest city in Europe, may surely lead us all to feel that the skill of Daedalus, set to build impregnable fortresses, is not so wisely applied as in framing the [Greek: treton ponou]--the golden honeycomb.
FOOTNOTES:
[135] The closing Lecture, on the religious temper of the Florentine, though necessary for the complete explanation of the subject to my cla.s.s, at the time, introduced new points of inquiry which I do not choose to lay before the general reader until they can be examined in fuller sequence. The present volume, therefore, closes with the Sixth Lecture, and that on Christian art will be given as the first of the published course on Florentine Sculpture.
[136] These plates of coins are given for future reference and examination, not merely for the use made of them in this place. The Lacinian Hera, if a coin could be found unworn in surface, would be very n.o.ble; her hair is thrown free because she is the G.o.ddess of the cape of storms though in her temple, there, the wind never moved the ashes on its altar. (Livy, xxiv. 3.)
[137] Ancient Cities and Kings, Plate IV. No. 20.