This short selection is taken from the volume entitled _The Queen
of the Air_, in which Ruskin, fascinated by the deep significance
of the Greek myths and realizing the religious sincerity
underlying them, attempts to interpret those that cluster about
Athena. The book was published June 22, 1869. It is divided into
three "Lectures," parts of which actually were delivered as
lectures on different occasions, entitled respectively "Athena
Chalinitis" (Athena in the Heavens), "Athena Keramitis" (Athena
in the Earth), "Athena Ergane" (Athena in the Heart). The first
lecture is the only one which keeps to the title of the book; in
the others the legend is used merely as a starting-point for the
expression of various pregnant ideas on social and historical
problems. The book as a whole abounds in flashes of inspiration
and insight, and is a favourite with many readers of Ruskin.
Carlyle, in a letter to Froude, wrote: "Passages of that last
book, _Queen of the Air_, went into my heart like arrows."
In different places of my writings, and through many years of
endeavour to define the laws of art, I have insisted on this Tightness
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, so far as, by
any effort, I can put it into unmistakable words. And, first, here is
a very simple statement of it, given lately in a lecture on the
Architecture of the Valley of the Somme,[199] which will be better read
in this place than in its incidental connection with my account of the
porches of Abbeville.
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 passionate in the art, and
intensifies itself in all its noblest 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 honeycomb, by
a bee; a worm-cast 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
ignobly, if he is ignoble.
And always, from the least to the greatest, as the made thing is good
or bad, so is the maker of it.
You all use this faculty of judgment more or less, whether you
theoretically admit the principle or not. Take that floral gable;[200]
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.
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 valour and honour, teaches valour and
honour. Al art is either infection or education. It _must_ be one or
other of these.
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
assert 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 assertion 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
hardship 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 Dandolo, 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 soldiership 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 ideal 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.
Thus far of Abbeville building. Now I have here asserted two
things,--first, the foundation of art in moral character; next, the
foundation of moral character in war. I must make both these
assertions clearer, and prove them.
First, of the foundation of art in moral character. Of course art-gift
and amiability of disposition are two different things. A good man is
not necessarily a painter, nor does an eye for colour necessarily
imply an honest mind. But great art implies the union of both powers:
it is the expression, by an art-gift, of a pure soul. If the gift is
not there, we can have no art at all; and if the soul--and a right
soul too--is not there, the art is bad, however dexterous.
But also, remember, that the art-gift itself is only the result of the
moral character of generations. A bad woman may have a sweet voice;
but that sweetness of voice comes of the past morality of her race.
That she can sing with it at all, she owes to the determination of
laws of music by the morality of the past. Every act, every impulse,
of virtue and vice, affects in any creature, face, voice, nervous
power, and vigour and harmony of invention, at once. Perseverance in
rightness of human conduct, renders, after a certain number of
generations, human art possible; every sin clouds it, be it ever so
little a one; and persistent vicious living and following of pleasure
render, after a certain number of generations, all art impossible. Men
are deceived by the long-suffering of the laws of nature; and mistake,
in a nation, the reward of the virtue of its sires for the issue of
its own sins. The time of their visitation will come, and that
inevitably; for, it is always true, that if the fathers have eaten sour
grapes, the children's teeth are set on edge.[201] And for the
individual, as soon as you have learned to read, you may, as I have
said, know him to the heart's core, through his art. Let his art-gift
be never so great, and cultivated to the height by the schools of a
great race of men; and it is still but a tapestry thrown over his own
being and inner soul; and the bearing of it will show, infallibly,
whether it hangs on a man, or on a skeleton. If you are dim-eyed, you
may not see the difference in the fall of the folds at first, but
learn how to look, and the folds themselves will become transparent,
and you shall see through them the death's shape, or the divine one,
making the tissue above it as a cloud of light, or as a winding-sheet.
Then farther, observe, I have said (and you will find it true, and
that to the uttermost) that, as all lovely art is rooted in virtue, so
it bears fruit of virtue, and is didactic in its own nature. It is
often didactic also in actually expressed thought, as Giotto's,
Michael Angelo's, Dürer's, and hundreds more; but that is not its
special function,--it is didactic chiefly by being beautiful; but
beautiful with haunting thought, no less than with form, and full of
myths that can be read only with the heart.
For instance, at this moment there is open beside me as I write, a
page of Persian manuscript, wrought with wreathed azure and geld, and
soft green, and violet, and ruby and scarlet, into one field of pure
resplendence. It is wrought to delight the eyes only; and does delight
them; and the man who did it assuredly had eyes in his head; but not
much more. It is not didactic art, but its author was happy: and it
will do the good, and the harm, that mere pleasure can do. But,
opposite me, is an early Turner drawing of the lake of Geneva, taken
about two miles from Geneva, on the Lausanne road, with Mont Blanc in
the distance. The old city is seen lying beyond the waveless waters,
veiled with a sweet misty veil of Athena's weaving: a faint light of
morning, peaceful exceedingly, and almost colourless, shed from behind
the Voirons, increases into soft amber along the slope of the Salève,
and is just seen, and no more, on the fair warm fields of its summit,
between the folds of a white cloud that rests upon the grass, but
rises, high and towerlike, into the zenith of dawn above.
There is not as much colour in that low amber light upon the hill-side
as there is in the palest dead leaf. The lake is not blue, but grey in
mist, passing into deep shadow beneath the Voirons' pines; a few dark
clusters of leaves, a single white flower--scarcely seen--are all the
gladness given to the rocks of the shore. One of the ruby spots of the
eastern manuscript would give colour enough for all the red that is in
Turner's entire drawing. For the mere pleasure of the eye, there is
not so much in all those lines of his, throughout the entire
landscape, as in half an inch square of the Persian's page. What made
him take pleasure in the low colour that is only like the brown of a
dead leaf? in the cold grey of dawn--in the one white flower among the
rocks--in these--and no more than these?
He took pleasure in them because he had been bred among English fields
and hills; because the gentleness of a great race was in his heart,
and its power of thought in his brain; because he knew the stories of
the Alps, and of the cities at their feet; because he had read the
Homeric legends of the clouds, and beheld the gods of dawn, and the
givers of dew to the fields; because he knew the faces of the crags,
and the imagery of the passionate mountains, as a man knows the face
of his friend; because he had in him the wonder and sorrow concerning
life and death, which are the inheritance of the Gothic soul from the
days of its first sea kings; and also the compassion and the joy that
are woven into the innermost fabric of every great imaginative spirit,
born now in countries that have lived by the Christian faith with any
courage or truth. And the picture contains also, for us, just this
which its maker had in him to give; and can convey it to us, just so
far as we are of the temper in which it must be received. It is
didactic if we are worthy to be taught, no otherwise. The pure heart,
it will make more pure; the thoughtful, more thoughtful. It has in it
no words for the reckless or the base.
[199] _The Flamboyant Architecture of the Valley of the Somme_, a
lecture delivered at the Royal Institution, January 29, 1869.
[200] The elaborate pediment 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." [Ruskin.]
[201] _Jeremiah_ xxxi, 29.