that of the Hellespontic, (Plate 9, opposite). I do not know why
Botticelli chose her for the spirit of prophecy in old age; but he has
made this the most interesting plate of the series in the definiteness
of its connection with the work from Dante, which becomes his own
prophecy in old age. The fantastic yet solemn treatment of the gnarled
wood occurs, as far as I know, in no other engravings but this, and the
illustrations to Dante; and I am content to leave it, with little
comment, for the reader's quiet study, as showing the exuberance of
imagination which other men at this time in Italy allowed to waste
itself in idle arabesque, restrained by Botticelli to his most earnest
purposes; and giving the withered tree-trunks, hewn for the rude throne
of the aged prophetess, the same harmony with her fading spirit which
the rose has with youth, or the laurel with victory. Also in its
weird characters, you have the best example I can show you of the orders
of decorative design which are especially expressible by engraving, and
which belong to a group of art instincts scarcely now to be understood,
much less recovered, (the influence of modern naturalistic imitation
being too strong to be conquered)--the instincts, namely, for the
arrangement of pure line, in labyrinthine intricacy, through which the
grace of order may give continual clue. The entire body of ornamental
design, connected with writing, in the Middle Ages seems as if it were a
sensible symbol, to the eye and brain, of the methods of error and
recovery, the minglings of crooked with straight, and perverse with
progressive, which constitute the great problem of human morals and
fate; and when I chose the title for the collected series of these
lectures, I hoped to have justified it by careful analysis of the
methods of labyrinthine ornament, which, made sacred by Theseian
traditions,[BC] and beginning, in imitation of physical truth, with the
spiral waves of the waters of Babylon as the Assyrian carved them,
entangled in their returns the eyes of men, on Greek vase and Christian
manuscript--till they closed in the arabesques which sprang round the
last luxury of Venice and Rome.
But the labyrinth of life itself, and its more and more interwoven
occupation, become too manifold, and too difficult for me; and of the
time wasted in the blind lanes of it, perhaps that spent in analysis or
recommendation of the art to which men's present conduct makes them
insensible, has been chiefly cast away. On the walls of the little room
where I finally revise this lecture,[BD] hangs an old silken sampler of
great-grandame's work: representing the domestic life of Abraham:
chiefly the stories of Isaac and Ishmael. Sarah at her tent-door,
watching, with folded arms, the dismissal of Hagar: above, in a
wilderness full of fruit trees, birds, and butterflies, little Ishmael
lying at the root of a tree, and the spent bottle under another; Hagar
in prayer, and the angel appearing to her out of a wreathed line of
gloomily undulating clouds, which, with a dark-rayed sun in the midst,
surmount the entire composition in two arches, out of which descend
shafts of (I suppose) beneficent rain; leaving, however, room, in the
corner opposite to Ishmael's angel, for Isaac's, who stays Abraham in
the sacrifice; the ram in the thicket, the squirrel in the plum tree
above him, and the grapes, pears, apples, roses, and daisies of the
foreground, being all wrought with involution of such ingenious
needlework as may well rank, in the patience, the natural skill, and the
innocent pleasure of it, with the truest works of Florentine engraving.
Nay; the actual tradition of many of the forms of ancient art is in many
places evident,--as, for instance, in the spiral summits of the flames
of the wood on the altar, which are like a group of first-springing
fern. On the wall opposite is a smaller composition, representing
Justice with her balance and sword, standing between the sun and moon,
with a background of pinks, borage, and corn-cockle: a third is only a
cluster of tulips and iris, with two Byzantine peacocks; but the spirits
of Penelope and Ariadne reign vivid in all the work--and the richness of
pleasurable fancy is as great still, in these silken labors, as in the
marble arches and golden roof of the cathedral of Monreale.
But what is the use of explaining or analyzing it? Such work as this
means the patience and simplicity of all feminine life; and can be
produced, among _us_ at least, no more. Gothic tracery itself, another
of the instinctive labyrinthine intricacies of old, though analyzed to
its last section, has become now the symbol only of a foolish
ecclesiastical sect, retained for their shibboleth, joyless and
powerless for all good. The very labyrinth of the grass and flowers of
our fields, though dissected to its last leaf, is yet bitten bare, or
trampled to slime, by the Minotaur of our lust; and for the traceried
spire of the poplar by the brook, we possess but the four-square furnace
tower, to mingle its smoke with heaven's thunder-clouds.[BE]
We will look yet at one sampler more of the engraved work, done in the
happy time when flowers were pure, youth simple, and imagination
gay,--Botticelli's Libyan Sibyl.
Glance back first to the Hellespontic, noting the close fillet, and the
cloth bound below the face, and then you will be prepared to understand
the last I shall show you, and the loveliest of the southern
Pythonesses.
[Illustration: X.
Grass of the Desert.]
222. A less deep thinker than Botticelli would have made her parched
with thirst, and burnt with heat. But the voice of God, through nature,
to the Arab or the Moor, is not in the thirst, but in the fountain--not
in the desert, but in the grass of it. And this Libyan Sibyl is the
spirit of wild grass and flowers, springing in desolate places.
You see, her diadem is a wreath of them; but the blossoms of it are not
fastening enough for her hair, though it is not long yet--(she is only
in reality a Florentine girl of fourteen or fifteen)--so the little
darling knots it under her ears, and then makes herself a necklace of
it. But though flowing hair and flowers are wild and pretty, Botticelli
had not, in these only, got the power of Spring marked to his mind. Any
girl might wear flowers; but few, for ornament, would be likely to wear
grass. So the Sibyl shall have grass in her diadem; not merely
interwoven and bending, but springing and strong. You thought it ugly
and grotesque at first, did not you? It was made so, because precisely
what Botticelli wanted you to look at.
But that's not all. This conical cap of hers, with one bead at the
top,--considering how fond the Florentines are of graceful head-dresses,
this seems a strange one for a young girl. But, exactly as I know the
angel of Victory to be Greek, at his Mount of Pity, so I know this
head-dress to be taken from a Greek coin, and to be meant for a Greek
symbol. It is the Petasus of Hermes--the mist of morning over the dew.
Lastly, what will the Libyan Sibyl say to you? The letters are large on
her tablet. Her message is the oracle from the temple of the Dew: "The
dew of thy birth is as the womb of the morning."--"Ecce venientem diem,
et latentia aperientem, tenebit gremio gentium regina."
223. Why the daybreak came not then, nor yet has come, but only a deeper
darkness; and why there is now neither queen nor king of nations, but
every man doing that which is right in his own eyes, I would fain go on,
partly to tell you, and partly to meditate with you: but it is not our
work for to-day. The issue of the Reformation which these great
painters, the scholars of Dante, began, we may follow, farther, in the
study to which I propose to lead you, of the lives of Cimabue and
Giotto, and the relation of their work at Assisi to the chapel and
chambers of the Vatican.
224. To-day let me finish what I have to tell you of the style of
southern engraving. What sudden bathos in the sentence, you think! So
contemptible the question of style, then, in painting, though not in
literature? You study the 'style' of Homer; the style, perhaps, of
Isaiah; the style of Horace, and of Massillon. Is it so vain to study
the style of Botticelli?
In all cases, it is equally vain, if you think of their style first. But
know their purpose, and then, their way of speaking is worth thinking
of. These apparently unfinished and certainly unfilled outlines of the
Florentine,--clumsy work, as Vasari thought them,--as Mr. Otley and most
of our English amateurs still think them,--are these good or bad
engraving?
You may ask now, comprehending their motive, with some hope of answering
or being answered rightly. And the answer is, They are the finest
gravers' work ever done yet by human hand. You may teach, by process of
discipline and of years, any youth of good artistic capacity to engrave
a plate in the modern manner; but only the noblest passion, and the
tenderest patience, will ever engrave one line like these of Sandro
Botticelli.
225. Passion, and patience! Nay, even these you may have to-day in
England, and yet both be in vain. Only a few years ago, in one of our
northern iron-foundries, a workman of intense power and natural
art-faculty set himself to learn engraving;--made his own tools; gave
all the spare hours of his laborious life to learn their use; learnt it;
and engraved a plate which, in manipulation, no professional engraver
would be ashamed of. He engraved his blast furnace, and the casting of a
beam of a steam engine. This, to him, was the power of God,--it was his
life. No greater earnestness was ever given by man to promulgate a
Gospel. Nevertheless, the engraving is absolutely worthless. The blast
furnace _is not_ the power of God; and the life of the strong spirit was
as much consumed in the flames of it, as ever driven slave's by the
burden and heat of the day.
How cruel to say so, if he yet lives, you think! No, my friends; the
cruelty will be in you, and the guilt, if, having been brought here to
learn that God is your Light, you yet leave the blast furnace to be the
only light of England.
226. It has been, as I said in the note above (Sec. 200), with extreme pain
that I have hitherto limited my notice of our own great engraver and
moralist, to the points in which the disadvantages of English
art-teaching made him inferior to his trained Florentine rival. But,
that these disadvantages were powerless to arrest or ignobly depress
him;--that however failing in grace and scholarship, he should never
fail in truth or vitality; and that the precision of his unerring
hand[BF]--his inevitable eye--and his rightly judging heart--should
place him in the first rank of the great artists not of England only,
but of all the world and of all time:--that _this_ was possible to him,
was simply because he lived a _country_ life. Bewick himself,
Botticelli himself, Apelles himself, and twenty times Apelles, condemned
to slavery in the hell-fire of the iron furnace, could have
done--NOTHING. Absolute paralysis of all high human faculty _must_
result from labor near fire. The poor engraver of the piston-rod had
faculties--not like Bewick's, for if he had had those, he never would
have endured the degradation; but assuredly, (I know this by his work,)
faculties high enough to have made him one of the most accomplished
figure painters of his age. And they are scorched out of him, as the sap
from the grass in the oven: while on his Northumberland hill-sides,
Bewick grew into as stately life as their strongest pine.
227. And therefore, in words of his, telling consummate and unchanging
truth concerning the life, honor, and happiness of England, and bearing
directly on the points of difference between class and class which I
have not dwelt on without need, I will bring these lectures to a close.
"I have always, through life, been of opinion that there is no business
of any kind that can be compared to that of a man who farms his own
land. It appears to me that every earthly pleasure, with health, is
within his reach. But numbers of these men (the old statesmen) were
grossly ignorant, and in exact proportion to that ignorance they were
sure to be offensively proud. This led them to attempt appearing above
their station, which hastened them on to their ruin; but, indeed, this
disposition and this kind of conduct invariably leads to such results.
There were many of these lairds on Tyneside; as well as many who held
their lands on the tenure of 'suit and service,' and were nearly on the
same level as the lairds. Some of the latter lost their lands (not
fairly, I think) in a way they could not help; many of the former, by
their misdirected pride and folly, were driven into towns, to slide away
into nothingness, and to sink into oblivion, while their 'ha' houses'
(halls), that ought to have remained in their families from generation
to generation, have moldered away. I have always felt extremely grieved
to see the ancient mansions of many of the country gentlemen, from
somewhat similar causes, meet with a similar fate. The gentry should,
in an especial manner, prove by their conduct that they are guarded
against showing any symptom of foolish pride; at the same time that they
soar above every meanness, and that their conduct is guided by truth,
integrity, and patriotism. If they wish the people to partake with them
in these good qualities, they must set them the example, without which
no real respect can ever be paid to them. Gentlemen ought never to
forget the respectable station they hold in society, and that they are
the natural guardians of public morals and may with propriety be
considered as the head and the heart of the country, while 'a bold
peasantry' are, in truth, the arms, the sinews, and the strength of the
same; but when these last are degraded, they soon become dispirited and
mean, and often dishonest and useless."
* * * * *
"This singular and worthy man[BG] was perhaps the most invaluable
acquaintance and friend I ever met with. His moral lectures and advice
to me formed a most important succedaneum to those imparted by my
parents. His wise remarks, his detestation of vice, his industry, and
his temperance, crowned with a most lively and cheerful disposition,
altogether made him appear to me as one of the best of characters. In
his workshop I often spent my winter evenings. This was also the case
with a number of young men who might be considered as his pupils; many
of whom, I have no doubt, he directed into the paths of truth and
integrity, and who revered his memory through life. He rose early to
work, lay down when he felt weary, and rose again when refreshed. His
diet was of the simplest kind; and he ate when hungry, and drank when
dry, without paying regard to meal-times. By steadily pursuing this mode
of life he was enabled to accumulate sums of money--from ten to thirty
pounds. This enabled him to get books, of an entertaining and moral
tendency, printed and circulated at a cheap rate. His great object was,
by every possible means, to promote honorable feelings in the minds of
youth, and to prepare them for becoming good members of society. I have
often discovered that he did not overlook ingenious mechanics, whose
misfortunes--perhaps mismanagement--had led them to a lodging in
Newgate. To these he directed his compassionate eye, and for the
deserving (in his estimation), he paid their debt, and set them at
liberty. He felt hurt at seeing the hands of an ingenious man tied up in
prison, where they were of no use either to himself or to the community.
This worthy man had been educated for a priest; but he would say to me,
'Of a "trouth," Thomas, I did not like their ways.' So he gave up the
thoughts of being a priest, and bent his way from Aberdeen to Edinburgh,
where he engaged himself to Allan Ramsay, the poet, then a bookseller at
the latter place, in whose service he was both shopman and bookbinder.
From Edinburgh he came to Newcastle. Gilbert had had a liberal education
bestowed upon him. He had read a great deal, and had reflected upon what
he had read. This, with his retentive memory, enabled him to be a
pleasant and communicative companion. I lived in habits of intimacy with
him to the end of his life; and, when he died, I, with others of his
friends, attended his remains to the grave at the Ballast Hills."
And what graving on the sacred cliffs of Egypt ever honored them, as
that grass-dimmed furrow does the mounds of our Northern land?
FOOTNOTES:
[AS] The world was not then ready for Le Pere Hyacinthe;--but the real
gist of the matter is that Lippi did, openly and bravely, what the
highest prelates in the Church did basely and in secret; also he loved,
where they only lusted; and he has been proclaimed therefore by
them--and too foolishly believed by us--to have been a shameful person.
Of his true life, and the colors given to it, we will try to learn
something tenable, before we end our work in Florence.
[AT] I insert supplementary notes, when of importance, in the text of
the lecture, for the convenience of the general reader.
[AU] Mr. Charles F. Murray.
[AV] Some notice of this picture is given at the beginning of my third
Morning in Florence, 'Before the Soldan.'
[AW] I am bitterly sorry for the pain which my partial references to the
man whom of all English artists whose histories I have read, I most
esteem, have given to one remaining member of his family. I hope my
meaning may be better understood after she has seen the close of this
lecture.
[AX] Read Ezekiel xviii.
[AY] See also the account by Dr. Woltmann of the picture of the Triumph
of Riches. 'Holbein and his Time,' p. 352.
[AZ] These words are engraved in the plate, as spoken by the Virgin.
[BA] Cosimo Rosselli, especially chosen by the Pope for his gay
coloring.
[BB] I am not certain of their order at this distance of time.
[BC] Callimachus, 'Delos,' 304, etc.
[BD] In the Old King's Arms Hotel, Lancaster.
[BE] A manufacturer wrote to me the other day, "We don't _want_ to make
smoke!" Who said they did?--a hired murderer does not want to commit
murder, but does it for sufficient motive. (Even our shipowners don't
want to drown their sailors; they will only do it for sufficient
motive.) If the dirty creatures _did_ want to make smoke, there would be
more excuse for them: and that they are not clever enough to consume it,
is no praise to them. A man who can't help his hiccough leaves the room:
why do they not leave the England they pollute?
[BF] I know no drawing so subtle as Bewick's, since the fifteenth
century, except Holbein's and Turner's. I have been greatly surprised
lately by the exquisite water-color work in some of Stothard's smaller
vignettes; but he cannot set the line like Turner or Bewick.
[BG] Gilbert Gray, bookbinder. I have to correct the inaccurate--and
very harmfully inaccurate, expression which I used of Bewick, in Love's
Meinie (Sec. 3), 'a printer's lad at Newcastle.' His first master was a
goldsmith and engraver, else he could never have been an artist. I am
very heartily glad to make this correction, which establishes another
link of relation between Bewick and Botticelli; but my error was partly
caused by the impression which the above description of his "most
invaluable friend" made on me, when I first read it.
Much else that I meant to correct, or promised to explain, in this
lecture, must be deferred to the Appendix; the superiority of the Tuscan
to the Greek Aphrodite I may perhaps, even at last, leave the reader to
admit or deny as he pleases, having more important matters of debate on
hand. But as I mean only to play with Proserpina during the spring, I
will here briefly anticipate a statement I mean in the Appendix to
enforce, namely, of the extreme value of colored copies by hand, of
paintings whose excellence greatly consists in color, as auxiliary to
engravings of them. The prices now given without hesitation for nearly
worthless original drawings by fifth-rate artists, would obtain for the
misguided buyers, in something like a proportion of ten to one, most
precious copies of drawings which can only be represented at all in
engraving by entire alteration of their treatment, and abandonment of
their finest purposes. I feel this so strongly that I have given my best
attention, during upwards of ten years, to train a copyist to perfect
fidelity in rendering the work of Turner; and having now succeeded in
enabling him to produce facsimiles so close as to look like replicas,
facsimiles which I must sign with my own name and his, in the very work
of them, to prevent their being sold for real Turner vignettes, I can
obtain no custom for him, and am obliged to leave him to make his bread
by any power of captivation his original sketches may possess in the
eyes of a public which maintains a nation of copyists in Rome, but is
content with black and white renderings of great English art; though
there is scarcely one cultivated English gentleman or lady who has not
been twenty times in the Vatican, for once that they have been in the
National Gallery.
NOTES.
228. I. The following letter, from one of my most faithful readers,
corrects an important piece of misinterpretation in the text. The waving
of the reins must be only in sign of the fluctuation of heat round the
Sun's own chariot:--
"Spring Field, Ambleside,
"February 11, 1875.
"Dear Mr. Ruskin,--Your fifth lecture on Engraving I have to hand.
"Sandro intended those wavy lines meeting under the Sun's right[BH]
hand, (Plate V.) primarily, no doubt, to represent the four ends of the
four reins dangling from the Sun's hand. The flames and rays are seen to
continue to radiate from the platform of the chariot between and beyond
these ends of the reins, and over the knee. He may have wanted to
acknowledge that the warmth of the earth was Apollo's, by making these
ends of the reins spread out separately and wave, and thereby inclose a
form like a flame. But I cannot think it.
"Believe me,
"Ever yours truly,
"CHAS. WM. SMITH."
II. I meant to keep labyrinthine matters for my Appendix; but the
following most useful by-words from Mr. Tyrwhitt had better be read at
once:--
"In the matter of Cretan Labyrinth, as connected by Virgil with the
Ludus Trojae, or equestrian game of winding and turning, continued in
England from twelfth century; and having for last relic the maze[BI]
called 'Troy Town,' at Troy Farm, near Somerton, Oxfordshire, which
itself resembles the circular labyrinth on a coin of Cnossus in Fors
Clavigera. (Letter 23, p. 12.)
"The connecting quotation from Virg., AEn., V. 588, is as follows:
'Ut quondam Creta fertur Labyrinthus in alta
Parietibus textum caecis iter, ancipitemque
Mille viis habuisse dolum, qua signa sequendi
Falleret indeprensus et inremeabilis error.
Haud alio Teucruen nati vestigia cursu
Impediunt, texuntque fagas et proelia ludo,
Delphinum similes.'"
Labyrinth of Ariadne, as cut on the Downs by shepherds from time
immemorial,--
Shakespeare, 'Midsummer Night's Dream,' Act ii., sc. 2:
"_Oberon._ The nine-men's morris[BJ] is filled up with mud;
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green
By lack of tread are undistinguishable."
The following passage, 'Merchant of Venice,' Act iii., sc. 2, confuses
(to all appearance) the Athenian tribute to Crete, with the story of
Hesione: and may point to general confusion in the Elizabethan mind
about the myths:
"_Portia._ ... with much more love
Than young Alcides, when he did reduce
The virgin-tribute paid by howling Troy
To the sea monster."[BK]
Theseus is the Attic Hercules, however; and Troy may have been a sort of
house of call for mythical monsters, in the view of midland shepherds.
FOOTNOTES:
[BH] "Would not the design have looked better, to us, on the plate than
on the print? On the plate, the reins would be in the left hand; and the
whole movement be from the left to the right? The two different forms
that the radiance takes would symbolize respectively heat and light,
would they not?"
[BI] Strutt, pp. 97-8, ed. 1801.
[BJ] Explained as "a game still played by the shepherds, cowkeepers,"
etc., in the midland counties.
[BK] See Iliad, 20, 145.
[Illustration: XI.
"Obediente Domino voci hominis."]
APPENDIX.
ARTICLE I.
NOTES ON THE PRESENT STATE OF ENGRAVING IN ENGLAND.
229. I have long deferred the completion of this book, because I had
hoped to find time to show, in some fullness, the grounds for my
conviction that engraving, and the study of it, since the development of
the modern finished school, have been ruinous to European knowledge of
art. But I am more and more busied in what I believe to be better work,
and can only with extreme brevity state here the conclusions of many
years' thought.