The Crown of Wild Olive Part 23

80. Read the inscription written on the sarcophagus (Plate V.), at the extremity of which this angel is sculptured. It stands in an open recess in the rude brick wall of the west front of the church of St. John and Paul at Venice, being the tomb of the two doges, father and son, Jacopo and Lorenzo Tiepolo. This is the inscription:--

"Quos natura pares studiis, virtutibus, arte Edidit, ill.u.s.tres genitor natusque, sepulti Hac sub rupe Duces. Venetum charissima proles Theupula collatis dedit hos celebranda triumphis.

Omnia presentis donavit predia templi Dux Jacobus: valido fixit moderamine leges Urbis, et ingratam redimens certamine Jadram Dalmatiosque dedit patrie, post, Marte subactas Graiorum pelago maculavit sanguine cla.s.ses.

Suscipit oblatos princeps Laurentius Istros, Et domuit rigidos, ingenti strage cadentes, Bononie populos. Hinc subdita Cervia cessit.

Fundavere vias pacis; fortique relicta Re, superos sacris petierunt mentibus ambo.

"Dominus Jachobus hobiit[121] M.CCLI.

Dominus Laurentius hobiit M.CCLXXVIII."

You see, therefore, this tomb is an invaluable example of thirteenth century sculpture in Venice. In Plate VI., you have an example of the (coin) sculpture of the date accurately corresponding in Greece to the thirteenth century in Venice, when the meaning of symbols was everything and the workmanship comparatively nothing. The upper head is an Athena, of Athenian work in the seventh or sixth century--(the coin itself may have been struck later, but the archaic type was retained). The two smaller impressions below are the front and obverse of a coin of the same age from Corinth, the head of Athena on one side, and Pegasus, with the archaic Koppa, on the other. The smaller head is bare, the hair being looped up at the back and closely bound with an olive branch. You are to note this general outline of the head, already given in a more finished type in Plate II., as a most important elementary form in the finest sculpture, not of Greece only, but of all Christendom. In the upper head the hair is restrained still more closely by a round helmet, for the most part smooth, but embossed with a single flower tendril, having one bud, one flower, and above it, two olive leaves. You have thus the most absolutely restricted symbol possible to human thought of the power of Athena over the flowers and trees of the earth. An olive leaf by itself could not have stood for the sign of a tree, but the two can, when set in position of growth.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE VI.--ARCHAIC ATHENA OF ATHENS AND CORINTH.]

I would not give you the reverse of the coin on the same plate, because you would have looked at it only, laughed at it, and not examined the rest; but here it is, wonderfully engraved for you (Fig. 6): of it we shall have more to say afterwards.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 6.]

81. And now as you look at these rude vestiges of the religion of Greece, and at the vestiges, still ruder, on the Ducal tomb, of the religion of Christendom, take warning against two opposite errors.

There is a school of teachers who will tell you that nothing but Greek art is deserving of study, and that all our work at this day should be an imitation of it.

Whenever you feel tempted to believe them, think of these portraits of Athena and her owl, and be a.s.sured that Greek art is not in all respects perfect, nor exclusively deserving of imitation.

There is another school of teachers who will tell you that Greek art is good for nothing; that the soul of the Greek was outcast, and that Christianity entirely superseded its faith, and excelled its works.

Whenever you feel tempted to believe _them_, think of this angel on the tomb of Jacopo Tiepolo; and remember, that Christianity, after it had been twelve hundred years existent as an imaginative power on the earth, could do no better work than this, though with all the former power of Greece to help it; nor was able to engrave its triumph in having stained its fleets in the seas of Greece with the blood of her people, but between barbarous imitations of the pillars which that people had invented.

82. Receiving these two warnings, receive also this lesson; In both examples, childish though it be, this Heathen and Christian art is alike sincere, and alike vividly imaginative: the actual work is that of infancy; the thoughts, in their visionary simplicity, are also the thoughts of infancy, but in their solemn virtue, they are the thoughts of men.

We, on the contrary, are now, in all that we do, absolutely without sincerity;--absolutely, therefore, without imagination, and without virtue. Our hands are dexterous with the vile and deadly dexterity of machines; our minds filled with incoherent fragments of faith, which we cling to in cowardice, without believing, and make pictures of in vanity, without loving. False and base alike, whether we admire or imitate, we cannot learn from the Heathen's art, but only pilfer it; we cannot revive the Christian's art, but only galvanize it; we are, in the sum of us, not human artists at all, but mechanisms of conceited clay, masked in the furs and feathers of living creatures, and convulsed with voltaic spasms, in mockery of animation.

83. You think, perhaps, that I am using terms unjustifiable in violence.

They would, indeed, be unjustifiable, if, spoken from this chair, they were violent at all. They are, unhappily, temperate and accurate,--except in shortcoming of blame. For we are not only impotent to restore, but strong to defile, the work of past ages. Of the impotence, take but this one, utterly humiliatory, and, in the full meaning of it, ghastly, example. We have lately been busy embanking, in the capital of the country, the river which, of all its waters, the imagination of our ancestors had made most sacred, and the bounty of nature most useful. Of all architectural features of the metropolis, that embankment will be, in future, the most conspicuous; and in its position and purpose it was the most capable of n.o.ble adornment.

For that adornment, nevertheless, the utmost which our modern poetical imagination has been able to invent, is a row of gas-lamps. It has, indeed, farther suggested itself to our minds as appropriate to gas-lamps set beside a river, that the gas should come out of fishes'

tails; but we have not ingenuity enough to cast so much as a smelt or a sprat for ourselves; so we borrow the shape of a Neapolitan marble, which has been the refuse of the plate and candlestick shops in every capital of Europe for the last fifty years. We cast _that_ badly, and give l.u.s.tre to the ill-cast fish with lacquer in imitation of bronze. On the base of their pedestals, towards the road, we put for advertis.e.m.e.nt's sake, the initials of the casting firm; and, for farther originality and Christianity's sake, the caduceus of Mercury; and to adorn the front of the pedestals towards the river, being now wholly at our wit's end, we can think of nothing better than to borrow the door-knocker which--again for the last fifty years--has disturbed and decorated two or three millions of London street-doors; and magnifying the marvellous device of it, a lion's head with a ring in its mouth (still borrowed from the Greek), we complete the embankment with a row of heads and rings, on a scale which enables them to produce, at the distance at which only they can be seen, the exact effect of a row of sentry boxes.

84. Farther. In the very centre of the city, and at the point where the Embankment commands a view of Westminster Abbey on one side and of St.

Paul's on the other--that is to say, at precisely the most important and stately moment of its whole course--it has to pa.s.s under one of the arches of Waterloo Bridge, which, in the sweep of its curve, is as vast--it alone--as the Rialto at Venice, and scarcely less seemly in proportions. But over the Rialto, though of late and debased Venetian work, there still reigns some power of human imagination: on the two flanks of it are carved the Virgin and the Angel of the Annunciation; on the keystone the descending Dove. It is not, indeed, the fault of living designers that the Waterloo arch is nothing more than a gloomy and hollow heap of wedged blocks of blind granite. But just beyond the damp shadow of it, the new Embankment is reached by a flight of stairs, which are, in point of fact, the princ.i.p.al approach to it, a-foot, from central London; the descent from the very midst of the metropolis of England to the banks of the chief river of England; and for this approach, living designers _are_ answerable.

85. The princ.i.p.al decoration of the descent is again a gas-lamp, but a shattered one, with a bra.s.s crown on the top of it or, rather, half-crown, and that turned the wrong way, the back of it to the river and causeway, its flame supplied by a visible pipe far wandering along the wall; the whole apparatus being supported by a rough cross-beam.

Fastened to the centre of the arch above is a large placard, stating that the Royal Humane Society's drags are in constant readiness, and that their office is at 4, Trafalgar Square. On each side of the arch are temporary, but dismally old and battered boardings, across two angles capable of unseemly use by the British public. Above one of these is another placard, stating that this is the Victoria Embankment. The steps themselves--some forty of them--descend under a tunnel, which the shattered gas-lamp lights by night, and nothing by day. They are covered with filthy dust, shaken off from infinitude of filthy feet; mixed up with shreds of paper, orange-peel, foul straw, rags, and cigar ends, and ashes; the whole agglutinated, more or less, by dry saliva into slippery blotches and patches; or, when not so fastened, blown dismally by the sooty wind hither and thither, or into the faces of those who ascend and descend. The place is worth your visit, for you are not likely to find elsewhere a spot which, either in costly and ponderous brutality of building, or in the squalid and indecent accompaniment of it, is so far separated from the peace and grace of nature, and so accurately indicative of the methods of our national resistance to the Grace, Mercy, and Peace of Heaven.

86. I am obliged always to use the English word "Grace" in two senses, but remember that the Greek [Greek: charis] includes them both (the bestowing, that is to say of Beauty and Mercy); and especially it includes these in the pa.s.sage of Pindar's first ode, which gives us the key to the right interpretation of the power of sculpture in Greece. You remember that I told you, in my Sixth Introductory Lecture (- 151), that the mythic accounts of Greek sculpture begin in the legends of the family of Tantalus; and especially in the most grotesque legend of them all, the inlaying of the ivory shoulder of Pelops. At that story Pindar pauses--not, indeed, without admiration, nor alleging any impossibility in the circ.u.mstances themselves, but doubting the careless hunger of Demeter--and gives his own reading of the event, instead of the ancient one. He justifies this to himself, and to his hearers, by the plea that myths have, in some sort, or degree, ([Greek: pou ti]), led the mind of mortals beyond the truth: and then he goes on:--

"Grace, which creates everything that is kindly and soothing for mortals, adding honour, has often made things at first untrustworthy, become trustworthy through Love."

87. I cannot, except in these lengthened terms, give you the complete force of the pa.s.sage; especially of the [Greek: apiston emesato pioton]--"made it trustworthy by pa.s.sionate desire that it should be so"--which exactly describes the temper of religious persons at the present day, who are kindly and sincere, in clinging to the forms of faith which either have long been precious to themselves, or which they feel to have been without question instrumental in advancing the dignity of mankind. And it is part of the const.i.tution of humanity--a part which, above others, you are in danger of unwisely contemning under the existing conditions of our knowledge, that the things thus sought for belief with eager pa.s.sion, do, indeed, become trustworthy to us; that, to each of us, they verily become what we would have them; the force of the [Greek: menis] and [Greek: mneme] with which we seek after them, does, indeed, make them powerful to us for actual good or evil; and it is thus granted to us to create not only with our hands things that exalt or degrade our sight, but with our hearts also, things that exalt or degrade our souls; giving true substance to all that we hoped for; evidence to things that we have not seen, but have desired to see; and calling, in the sense of creating, things that are not, as though they were.

88. You remember that in distinguishing 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 worship 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 shines 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 rushing 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 ship-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.