Part 5 (1/2)
97. It will take me many a day yet--if days, many or few, are given me-- to disentangle in anywise the proud and practised disguises of religious creeds from the instinctive arts which, grotesquely and indecorously, yet with sincerity, strove to embody them, or to relate. But I think the reader, by help even of the imperfect indications already given to him, will be able to follow, with a continually increasing security, the vestiges of the Myth of Athena; and to reanimate its almost evanescent shade, by connecting it with the now recognized facts of existent nature which it, more or less dimly, reflected and foretold. I gather these facts together in brief.
98. The deep of air that surrounds the earth enters into union with the earth at its surface, and with its waters, so as to be the apparent cause of their ascending into life. First, it warms them, and shades, at once, staying the heat of the sun's rays in its own body, but warding their force with its clouds. It warms and cools at once, with traffic of balm and frost; so that the white wreaths are withdrawn from the field of the Swiss peasant by the glow of Libyan rock. It gives its own strength to the sea; forms and fills every cell of its foam; sustains the precipices, and designs the valleys of its waves; gives the gleam to their moving under the night, and the white fire to their plains under sunrise; lifts their voices along the rocks, bears above them the spray of birds, pencils through them the dimpling of unfooted sands. It gathers out of them a portion in the hollow of its hand: dyes, with that, the hills into dark blue, and their glaciers with dying rose; inlays with that, for sapphire, the dome in which it has to set the cloud; shapes out of that the heavenly flocks: divides them, numbers, cherishes, bears them on its bosom, calls them to their journeys, waits by their rest; feeds from them the brooks that cease not, and strews with them the dews that cease. It spins and weaves their fleece into wild tapestry, rends it, and renews; and flits and flames, and whispers, among the golden threads, thrilling them with a plectrum of strange fire that traverses them to and fro, and is enclosed in them like life.
It enters into the surface of the earth, subdues it, and falls together with it into fruitful dust, from which can be moulded flesh; it joins itself, in dew, to the substance of adamant, and becomes the green leaf out of the dry ground; it enters into the separated shapes of the earth it has tempered, commands the ebb and flow of the current of their life, fills their limbs with its own lightness, measures their existence by its indwelling pulse, moulds upon their lips the words by which one soul can be known to another; is to them the hearing of the ear, and the beating of the heart; and, pa.s.sing away, leaves them to the peace that hears and moves no more.
99. This was the Athena of the greatest people of the days of old. And opposite to the temple of this Spirit of the breath, and life-blood, of man and beast, stood, on the Mount of Justice, and near the chasm which was haunted by the G.o.ddess-Avengers, an altar to a G.o.d unknown,-- proclaimed at last to them, as one who, indeed, gave to all men, life, and breath, and all things; and rain from heaven, filling their hearts with rain from heaven, filling their hearts with food and gladness; a G.o.d who had made of one blood all nations of men who dwell on the face of all the earth, and had determined the times of their fate, and the bounds of their habitation.
100. We ourselves, fretted here in our narrow days, know less, perhaps, in very deed, than they, what manner of spirit we are of, or what manner of spirit we ignorantly wors.h.i.+p. Have we, indeed, desired the Desire of all nations? and will the Master whom we meant to seem, and the Messenger in whom we thought we delighted, confirm, when He comes to His temple,-- or not find in its midst,--the tables heavy with gold for bread, and the seats that are bought with the price of the dove? Or is our own land also to be left by its angered Spirit,--left among those, where suns.h.i.+ne vainly sweet, and pa.s.sionate folly of storm, waste themselves in the silent places of knowledge that has pa.s.sed away, and of tongues that have ceased?
This only we may discern a.s.suredly; this, every true light of science, every mercifully-granted power, every wisely-restricted thought, teach us more clearly day by day, that in the heavens above, and the earth beneath, there is one continual and omnipotent presence of help, and of peace, for all men who know that they live, and remember that they die.
III.
ATHENA ERGANE.*
(Athena in the Heart.)
* ”Athena the worker, or having rule over work.” The name was first give to her by the Athenians.
VARIOUS NOTES RELATING TO THE CONCEPTION OF ATHENA AS THE DIRECTRESS OF THE IMAGINATION AND WILL.
101. I have now only a few words to say, bearing on what seems to me present need, respecting the third function of Athena, conceived as the directress of human pa.s.sion, resolution, and labor.
Few words, for I am not yet prepared to give accurate distinction between the intellectual rule of Athena and that of the Muses; but, broadly, the Muses, with their king, preside over meditative, historical, and poetic arts, whose end is the discovery of light or truth, and the creation of beauty; but Athena rules over moral pa.s.sion, and practically useful art.
She does not make men learned, but prudent and subtle; she does not teach them to make their work beautiful, but to make it right.
In different places of my writings, and though many years of endeavor to define the laws of art, I have insisted on this rightness in work, and on its connection with virtue of character, in so many partial ways, that the impression left on the reader's mind--if, indeed, it was ever impressed at all--has been confused and uncertain. In beginning the series of my corrected works, I wish this principle (in my own mind the foundation of every other) to be made plain, if nothing else is; and will try, therefore, to make it so, as far as, by any effort, I can put it into unmistakable words. And, at first, here is a very simple statement of it, given lately in a lecture on the Architecture of the Valley of the Somme, which will be better read in this place than in its incidental connection with my account of the porches of Abbeville.
102. I had used, in a preceding part of the lecture, the expression, ”by what faults” this Gothic architecture fell. We continually speak thus of works of art. We talk of their faults and merits, as of virtues and vices. What do we mean by talking of the faults of a picture, or the merits of a piece of stone?
The faults of a work of art are the faults of its workman, and its virtues his virtues.
Great art is the expression of the mind of a great man, and mean art, that of the want of mind of a weak man. A foolish person builds foolishly, and a wise one, sensibly; a virtuous one, beautifully; and a vicious one, basely. If stone work is well put together, it means that a thoughtful man planned it, and a careful man cut it, and an honest man cemented it. If it has too much ornament, it means that its carver was too greedy of pleasure; if too little, that he was rude, or insensitive, or stupid, and the like. So that when once you have learned how to spell these most precious of all legends,--pictures and buildings,--you may read the characters of men, and of nations, in their art, as in a mirror; nay, as in a microscope, and magnified a hundredfold; for the character becomes pa.s.sionate in the art, and intensifies itself in all its n.o.blest or meanest delights. Nay, not only as in a microscope, but as under a scalpel, and in dissection; for a man may hide himself from you, or misrepresent himself to you every other way; but he cannot in his work: there, be sure, you have him to the inmost. All that he likes, all that he sees,--all that he can do,--his imagination, his affections, his perseverance, his impatience, his clumsiness, cleverness, everything is there. If the work is a cobweb, you know it was made by a spider; if a honey-comb, by a bee; a wormcast is thrown up by a worm, and a nest wreathed by a bird; and a house built by a man, worthily, if he is worthy, and ign.o.bly if he is ign.o.ble.
And always, from the least to the greatest, as the made thing is good or bad, so is the maker of it.
103. You will use this faculty of judgment more or less, whether you theoretically admit the principle or not. Take that floral gable;* you don't suppose the man who built Stonehenge could have built that, or that the man who built that, would have built Stonehenge? Do you think an old Roman would have liked such a piece of filigree work? or that Michael Angelo would have spent his time in twisting these stems of roses in and out? Or, of modern handicraftsmen, do you think a burglar, or a brute, or a pickpocket could have carved it? Could Bill Sykes have done it? or the Dodger, dexterous with finger and tool? You will find in the end, that no man could have done it but exactly the man who did it; and by looking close at it, you may, if you know your letters, read precisely the manner of man he was.
* The elaborate pendiment above the central porch at the west end of Rouen Cathedral, pierced into a transparent web of tracery, and enriched with a border of ”twisted eglantine.”
104. Now I must insist on this matter, for a grave reason. Of all facts concerning art, this is the one most necessary to be known, that, while manufacture is the work of hands only, art is the work of the whole spirit of man; and as that spirit is, so is the deed of it; and by whatever power of vice or virtue any art is produced, the same vice or virtue it reproduces and teaches. That which is born of evil begets evil; and that which is born of valor and honor, teaches valor and honor.
All art is either infection or education. It must be one or other of these.
105. This, I repeat, of all truths respecting art, is the one of which understanding is the most precious, and denial the most deadly. And I a.s.sert it the more, because it has of late been repeatedly, expressly, and with contumely, denied, and that by high authority; and I hold it one of the most sorrowful facts connected with the decline of the arts among us, that English gentlemen, of high standing as scholars and artists, should have been blinded into the acceptance, and betrayed into the a.s.sertion of a fallacy which only authority such as theirs could have rendered for an instant credible. For the contrary of it is written in the history of all great nations; it is the one sentence always inscribed on the steps of their thrones; the one concordant voice in which they speak to us out of their dust.
All such nations first manifest themselves as a pure and beautiful animal race, with intense energy and imagination. They live lives of hards.h.i.+p by choice, and by grand instinct of manly discipline; they become fierce and irresistible soldiers; the nation is always its own army, and their king, or chief head of government, is always their first soldier.
Pharaoh, or David, or Leonidas, or Valerius, or Barbarossa, or Coeur de Lion, or St. Louis, or Dandalo, or Frederick the Great,--Egyptian, Jew, Greek, Roman, German, English, French, Venetian,--that is inviolable law for them all; their king must be their first soldier, or they cannot be in progressive power. Then, after their great military period, comes the domestic period; in which, without betraying the discipline of war, they add to their great soldiers.h.i.+p the delights and possessions of a delicate and tender home-life; and then, for all nations, is the time of their perfect art, which is the fruit, the evidence, the reward of their national idea of character, developed by the finished care of the occupations of peace. That is the history of all true art that ever was, or can be; palpably the history of it,--unmistakably,--written on the forehead of it in letters of light,--in tongues of fire, by which the seal of virtue is branded as deep as ever iron burnt into a convict's flesh the seal of crime. But always, hitherto, after the great period, has followed the day of luxury, and pursuit of the arts for pleasure only. And all has so ended.