Part 4 (1/2)

Here, in the historical account of Norman character, I must unwillingly stop for to-day--because, as you choose to spend your University money in building ball-rooms instead of lecture-rooms, I dare not keep you much longer in this black hole, with its nineteenth century ventilation. I try your patience--and tax your breath--only for a few minutes more in drawing the necessary corollaries respecting Norman art.[21]

[Footnote 21: Given at much greater length in the lecture, with diagrams from Iffley and Poictiers, without which the text of them would be unintelligible. The sum of what I said was a strong a.s.sertion of the incapacity of the Normans for any but the rudest and most grotesque sculpture,--Poictiers being, on the contrary, examined and praised as Gallic-French--not Norman.]

How far the existing British nation owes its military prowess to the blood of Normandy and Anjou, I have never examined its genealogy enough to tell you;--but this I can tell you positively, that whatever const.i.tutional order or personal valour the Normans enforced or taught among the nations they conquered, they did not at first attempt with their own hands to rival them in any of their finer arts, but used both Greek and Saxon sculptors, either as slaves, or hired workmen, and more or less therefore chilled and degraded the hearts of the men thus set to servile, or at best, hireling, labour.

In 1874, I went to see Etna, Scylla, Charybdis, and the tombs of the Norman Kings at Palermo; surprised, as you may imagine, to find that there wasn't a stroke nor a notion of Norman work in them. They are, every atom, done by Greeks, and are as pure Greek as the temple of aegina; but more rich and refined. I drew with accurate care, and with measured profile of every moulding, the tomb built for Roger II. (afterwards Frederick II. was laid in its dark porphyry). And it is a perfect type of the Greek-Christian form of tomb--temple over sarcophagus, in which the pediments rise gradually, as time goes on, into acute angles--get pierced in the gable with foils, and their sculptures thrown outside on their flanks, and become at last in the fourteenth century, the tombs of Verona. But what is the meaning of the Normans employing these Greek slaves for their work in Sicily (within thirty miles of the field of Himera)? Well, the main meaning is that though the Normans could build, they couldn't carve, and were wise enough not to try to, when they couldn't, as you do now all over this intensely comic and tragic town: but, here in England, they only employed the Saxon with a grudge, and therefore being more and more driven to use barren mouldings without sculpture, gradually developed the structural forms of archivolt, which breaking into the lancet, brighten and balance themselves into the symmetry of early English Gothic.

But even for the first decoration of the archivolt itself, they were probably indebted to the Greeks in a degree I never apprehended, until by pure happy chance, a friend gave me the clue to it just as I was writing the last pages of this lecture.

In the generalization of ornament attempted in the first volume of the 'Stones of Venice,' I supposed the Norman _zigzag_ (and with some practical truth) to be derived from the angular notches with which the blow of an axe can most easily decorate, or at least vary, the solid edge of a square fillet. My good friend, and supporter, and for some time back the single trustee of St. George's Guild, Mr. George Baker, having come to Oxford on Guild business, I happened to show him the photographs of the front of Iffley church, which had been collected for this lecture; and immediately afterwards, in taking him through the schools, stopped to show him the Athena of aegina as one of the most important of the Greek examples lately obtained for us by Professor Richmond. The statue is (rightly) so placed that in looking up to it, the plait of hair across the forehead is seen in a steeply curved arch. ”Why,” says Mr. Baker, pointing to it, ”there's the Norman arch of Iffley.” Sure enough, there it exactly was: and a moment's reflection showed me how easily, and with what instinctive fitness, the Norman builders, looking to the Greeks as their absolute masters in sculpture, and recognizing also, during the Crusades, the hieroglyphic use of the zigzag, for water, by the Egyptians, might have adopted this easily attained decoration at once as the sign of the element over which they reigned, and of the power of the Greek G.o.ddess who ruled both it and them.

I do not in the least press your acceptance of such a tradition, nor for the rest, do I care myself whence any method of ornament is derived, if only, as a stranger, you bid it reverent welcome. But much probability is added to the conjecture by the indisputable transition of the Greek egg and arrow moulding into the floral cornices of Saxon and other twelfth century cathedrals in Central France. These and other such transitions and exaltations I will give you the materials to study at your leisure, after ill.u.s.trating in my next lecture the forces of religious imagination by which all that was most beautiful in them was inspired.

LECTURE IV.

(_NOV. 8, 1884._)

THE PLEASURES OF FANCY.

_CUR DE LION TO ELIZABETH_

(1189 TO 1558).

In using the word ”Fancy,” for the mental faculties of which I am to speak to-day, I trust you, at your leisure, to read the Introductory Note to the second volume of 'Modern Painters' in the small new edition, which gives sufficient reason for practically including under the single term Fancy, or Fantasy, all the energies of the Imagination,--in the terms of the last sentence of that preface,--”the healthy, voluntary, and necessary,[22] action of the highest powers of the human mind, on subjects properly demanding and justifying their exertion.”

[Footnote 22: Meaning that all healthy minds possess imagination, and use it at will, under fixed laws of truthful perception and memory.]

I must farther ask you to read, in the same volume, the close of the chapter 'Of Imagination Penetrative,' pp. 120 to 130, of which the gist, which I must give as the first principle from which we start in our to-day's inquiry, is that ”Imagination, rightly so called, has no food, no delight, no care, no perception, except of truth; it is for ever looking under masks, and burning up mists; no fairness of form, no majesty of seeming, will satisfy it; the first condition of its existence is incapability of being deceived.”[23] In that sentence, which is a part, and a very valuable part, of the original book, I still adopted and used unnecessarily the ordinary distinction between Fancy and Imagination--Fancy concerned with lighter things, creating fairies or centaurs, and Imagination creating men; and I was in the habit always of implying by the meaner word Fancy, a voluntary Fallacy, as Wordsworth does in those lines to his wife, making of her a mere lay figure for the drapery of his fancy--

Such if thou wert, in all men's view An universal show, What would my Fancy have to do, My feelings to bestow.

But you will at once understand the higher and more universal power which I now wish you to understand by the Fancy, including all imaginative energy, correcting these lines of Wordsworth's to a more worthy description of a true lover's happiness. When a boy falls in love with a girl, you say he has taken a fancy for her; but if he love her rightly, that is to say for her n.o.ble qualities, you ought to say he has taken an imagination for her; for then he is endued with the new light of love which sees and tells of the mind in her,--and this neither falsely nor vainly. His love does not bestow, it discovers, what is indeed most precious in his mistress, and most needful for his own life and happiness. Day by day, as he loves her better, he discerns her more truly; and it is only the truth of his love that does so. Falsehood to her, would at once disenchant and blind him.

[Footnote 23: Vide pp. 124-5.]

In my first lecture of this year, I pointed out to you with what extreme simplicity and reality the Christian faith must have presented itself to the Northern Pagan's mind, in its distinction from his former confused and monstrous mythology. It was also in that simplicity and tangible reality of conception, that this Faith became to them, and to the other savage nations of Europe, Tutress of the real power of their imagination and it became so, only in so far as it indeed conveyed to them statements which, however in some respects mysterious, were yet most literally and brightly _true_, as compared with their former conceptions. So that while the blind cunning of the savage had produced only misshapen logs or scrawls; the _seeing_ imagination of the Christian painters created, for them and for all the world, the perfect types of the Virgin and of her Son; which became, indeed, Divine, by being, with the most affectionate truth, human.

And the a.s.sociation of this truth in loving conception, with the general honesty and truth of the character, is again conclusively shown in the feelings of the lover to his mistress; which we recognize as first reaching their height in the days of chivalry. The truth and faith of the lover, and his piety to Heaven, are the foundation, in his character, of all the joy in imagination which he can receive from the conception of his lady's--now no more mortal--beauty. She is indeed transfigured before him; but the truth of the transfiguration is greater than that of the lightless aspect she bears to others. When therefore, in my next lecture, I speak of the Pleasures of Truth, as distinct from those of the Imagination,--if either the limits or clearness of brief t.i.tle had permitted me, I should have said, _untransfigured_ truth;--meaning on the one side, truth which we have not heart enough to transfigure, and on the other, truth of the lower kind which is incapable of transfiguration. One may look at a girl till one believes she is an angel; because, in the best of her, she _is_ one; but one can't look at a c.o.c.kchafer till one believes it is a girl.

With this warning of the connection which exists between the honest intellect and the healthy imagination; and using henceforward the shorter word 'Fancy' for all inventive vision, I proceed to consider with you the meaning and consequences of the frank and eager exertion of the fancy on Religious subjects, between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries.

Its first, and admittedly most questionable action, the promotion of the group of martyr saints of the third century to thrones of uncontested dominion in heaven, had better be distinctly understood, before we debate of it, either with the Iconoclast or the Rationalist.

This apotheosis by the Imagination is the subject of my present lecture. To-day I only describe it,--in my next lecture I will discuss it.

Observe, however, that in giving such a history of the mental const.i.tution of nascent Christianity, we have to deal with, and carefully to distinguish, two entirely different orders in its accepted hierarchy:--one, scarcely founded at all on personal characters or acts, but mythic or symbolic; often merely the revival, the baptized resuscitation of a Pagan deity, or the personified omnipresence of a Christian virtue;--the other, a senate of Patres Conscripti of real persons, great in genius, and perfect, humanly speaking, in holiness; who by their personal force and inspired wisdom, wrought the plastic body of the Church into such n.o.ble form as in each of their epochs it was able to receive; and on the right understanding of whose lives, nor less of the affectionate traditions which magnified and illumined their memories, must absolutely depend the value of every estimate we form, whether of the nature of the Christian Church herself, or of the directness of spiritual agency by which she was guided.[24]

[Footnote 24: If the reader believes in no spiritual agency, still his understanding of the first letters in the Alphabet of History depends on his comprehending rightly the tempers of the people who _did_.]

An important distinction, therefore, is to be noted at the outset, in the objects of this Apotheosis, according as they are, or are not, real persons.