(Athena in the Earth.)
* "Athena, fit for being made into pottery." I coin the expression as a
counterpart of 'ge parthenia', "Clay intact."
STUDY, SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE PRECEDING LECTURE, OF THE SUPPOSED AND
ACTUAL RELATIONS OF ATHENA TO THE VITAL FORCE IN MATERIAL ORGANISM
51. It has been easy to decipher approximately the Greek conception of
the physical power of Athena in cloud and sky, because we know ourselves
what clouds and skies are, and what the force of the wind is in forming
them. But it is not at all easy to trace the Greek thoughts about the
power of Athena in giving life, because we do not ourselves know clearly
what life is, or in what way the air is necessary to it, or what there
is, besides the air, shaping the forms that it is put into. And it is
comparatively of small consequence to find out what the Greeks thought
or meant, until we have determined what we ourselves think, or mean, when
we translate the Greek word for "breathing" into the Latin-English word
"spirit."
52. But it is of great consequence that you should fix in your minds--
and hold, against the baseness of mere materialism on the one hand, and
against the fallacies of controversial speculation on the other--the
certain and practical sense of this word "spirit;" the sense in which you
all know that its reality exists, as the power which shaped you into your
shape, and by which you love and hate when you have received that shape.
You need not fear, on the one hand, that either the sculpturing or the
loving power can ever be beaten down by the philosophers into a metal, or
evolved by them into a gas; but on the other hand, take care that you
yourself, in trying to elevate your conception of it, do not lose its
truth in a dream, or even in a word. Beware always of contending for
words: you will find them not easy to grasp, if you know them in several
languages. This very word, which is so solemn in your mouths, is one of
the most doubtful. In Latin it means little more than breathing, and may
mean merely accent; in French it is not breath, but wit, and our
neighbors are therefore obliged, even in their most solemn expressions,
to say "wit" when we say "ghost." In Greek, "pneuma," the word we
translate "ghost," means either wind or breath, and the relative word
"psyche" has, perhaps, a more subtle power; yet St. Paul's words
"pneumatic body" and "psychic body" involve a difference in his mind
which no words will explain. But in Greek and in English, and in Saxon
and in Hebrew, and in every articulate tongue of humanity the "spirit of
man" truly means his passion and virtue, and is stately according to the
height of his conception, and stable according to the measure of his
endurance.
53. Endurance, or patience, that is the central sign of spirit; a
constancy against the cold and agony of death; and as, physically, it is
by the burning power of the air that the heat of the flesh is sustained,
so this Athena, spiritually, is the queen of all glowing virtue, the
unconsuming fire and inner lamp of life. And thus, as Hephæstus is lord
of the fire of the hand, and Apollo of the fire of the brain, so Athena
of the fire of the heart; and as Hercules wears for his chief armor the
skin of the Nemean lion, his chief enemy, whom he slew; and Apollo has
for his highest name "the Pythian," from his chief enemy, the Python
slain; so Athena bears always on her breast the deadly face of her chief
enemy slain, the Gorgonian cold, and venomous agony, that turns living
men to stone.
54. And so long as you have the fire of the heart within you, and know
the reality of it, you need to be under no alarm as to the possibility
of its chemical or mechanical analysis. The philosophers are very
humorous in their ecstasy of hope about it; but the real interest of
their discoveries in this direction is very small to humankind. It is
quite true that the tympanum of the ear vibrates under sound, and that
the surface of the water in a ditch vibrates too; but the ditch hears
nothing for all that; and my hearing is still to me as blessed a mystery
as ever, and the interval between the ditch and me quite as great. If
the trembling sound in my ears was once of the marriage-bell which began
my happiness, and is now of the passing-bell which ends it, the
difference between those two sounds to me cannot be counted by the number
of concussions. There have been some curious speculations lately as to
the conveyance of mental consciousness by "brain-waves." What does it
matter how it is conveyed? The consciousness itself is not a wave. It
may be accompanied here or there by any quantity of quivers and shakes,
up or down, of anything you can find in the universe that is shakable--
what is that to me? My friend is dead, and my--according to modern views
--vibratory sorrow is not one whit less, or less mysterious, to me, than
my old quiet one.
55. Beyond, and entirely unaffected by, any questionings of this kind,
there are, therefore, two plain facts which we should all know: first,
that there is a power which gives their several shapes to things, or
capacities of feeling; and that we can increase or destroy both of these
at our will. By care and tenderness, we can extend the range of lovely
life in plants and animals; by our neglect and cruelty, we can arrest it,
and bring pestilence in its stead. Again, by right discipline we can
increase our strength of noble will and passion or destroy both. And
whether these two forces are local conditions of the elements in which
they appear, or are part of a great force in the universe, out of which
they are taken, and to which they must be restored, is not of the
slightest importance to us in dealing with them; neither is the manner
of their connection with light and air. What precise meaning we ought to
attach to expressions such as that of the prophecy to the four winds that
the dry bones might be breathed upon, and might live, or why the presence
of the vital power should be dependent on the chemical action of air, and
its awful passing away materially signified by the rendering up of that
breath or ghost, we cannot at present know, and need not at any time
dispute. What we assuredly know is that the states of life and death are
different, and the first more desirable than the other, and by effort
attainable, whether we understand being "born of the spirit" to signify
having the breath of heaven in our flesh, or its power in our hearts.
56. As to its power on the body, I will endeavor to tell you, having
been myself much led into studies involving necessary reference both to
natural science and mental phenomena, what, at least, remains to us after
science has done its worst; what the myth of Athena, as a formative and
decisive power, a spirit of creation and volition, must eternally mean
for all of us.
57. It is now (I believe I may use the strong word) "ascertained" that
heat and motion are fixed in quantity, and measurable in the portions
that we deal with. We can measure portions of power, as we can measure
portions of space; while yet, as far as we know, space may be infinite,
and force infinite. There may be heat as much greater than the sun's, as
the sun's heat is greater than a candle's: and force as much greater than
the force by which the world swings, as that is greater than the force by
which a cobweb trembles. Now, on hear and force, life is inseparably
dependent; and I believe, also, on a form of substance, which the
philosophers call "protoplasm." I wish they would use English instead of
Greek words. When I want to know why a leaf is green, they tell me it is
colored by "chlorophyll," which at first sounds very instructive; but if
they would only say plainly that a leaf is colored green by a thing which
is called "green leaf," we should see more precisely how far we had got.
However, it is a curious fact that life is connected with a cellular
structure called protoplasm, or in English, "first stuck together;"
whence, conceivably through deuteroplasms, or second stickings, and
tritoplasms, or third stickings,* we reach the highest plastic phase in
the human pottery, which differs from common chinaware, primarily, by a
measurable degree of heat, developed in breathing, which it borrows from
the rest of the universe while it lives, and which it as certainly
returns to the rest of the universe, when it dies.
58. Again, with this heat certain assimilative powers are connected,
which the tendency of recent discovery is to simplify more and more into
modes of one force; or finally into mere motion, communicable in various
states, but not destructible. We will assume that science has done its
utmost; and that every chemical or animal force is demonstrably
resolvable into heat or motion, reciprocally changing into each other.
I would myself like better, in order of thought, to consider motion as a
mode of heat than heat as a mode of motion; still, granting that we have
got thus far, we have yet to ask, What is heat? or what is motion? What
is this "primo mobile," this transitional power, in which all things
live, and move, and have their being? It is by definition something
different from matter, and we may call it as we choose, "first cause," or
"first light," or "first heat;" but we can show no scientific proof of
its not being personal, and coinciding with the ordinary conception of a
supporting spirit in all things.
59. Still, it is not advisable to apply the word "spirit" or "breathing"
to it, while it is only enforcing chemical affinities; but, when the
chemical affinities are brought under the influence of the air, and of
the sun's heat, the formative force enters and entirely different phase.
It does not now merely crystallize indefinite masses, but it gives to
limited portions of matter the power of gathering, selectively, other
elements proper to them, and binding those elements into their own
peculiar and adopted form.
This force, now properly called life, or breathing, or spirit, is
continually creating its own shell of definite shape out of the wreck
around it; and this is what I meant by saying, in the "Ethics of the
Dust," "you may always stand by form against force." For the mere force
of junction is not spirit; but the power that catches out of chaos
charcoal, water, lime, or what not, and fastens them down into a given
form, is properly called "spirit;" and we shall not diminish, but
strengthen our conception of this creative energy by recognizing its
presence in lower states of matter than our own; such recognition being
enforced upon us by delight we instinctively receive from all the forms
of matter which manifest it; and yet more, by the glorifying of those
forms, in the parts of them that are most animated, with the colors that
are pleasantest to our senses. The most familiar instance of this is the
best, and also the most wonderful: the blossoming of plants.
60. The spirit in the plant--that is to say, its power of gathering dead
matter out of the wreck round it, and shaping it into its own chosen
shape--is of course strongest at the moment of its flowering, for it then
not only gathers, but forms, with the greatest energy.
And where this life is in at full power, its form becomes invested with
aspects that are chiefly delightful to our own human passions; namely, at
first, with the loveliest outlines of shape; and, secondly, with the most
brilliant phases of the primary colors, blue, yellow, and red or white,
the unison of all; and, to make it all more strange, this time of
peculiar and perfect glory is associated with relations of the plants or
blossoms to each other, correspondent to the joy of love in human
creatures, and having the same object in the continuance of the race.
Only, with respect to plants, as animals, we are wrong in speaking as if
the object of this strong life were only the bequeathing of itself. The
flower is the end or proper object of the seed, not the seed of the
flower. The reason for seeds is that flowers may be; not the reason of
flowers that seeds may be. The flower itself is the creature which the
spirit makes; only, in connection with its perfectness is placed the
giving birth to its successor.
61. The main fact then, about a flower is that it is part of the plant's
form developed at the moment of its intensest life; and this inner
rapture is usually marked externally for us by the flush of one or more
of the primary colors. What the character of the flower shall be,
depends entirely upon the portion of the plant into which this rapture of
spirit has been put. Sometimes the life is put into its outer sheath,
and then the outer sheath becomes white and pure, and full of strength
and grace; sometimes the life is put into the common leaves, just under
the blossom, and they become scarlet or purple; sometimes the life is put
into the stalks of the flower and they flush blue; sometimes into its
outer enclosure or calyx; mostly into its inner cup; but, in all cases,
the presence of the strongest life is asserted by characters in which the
human sight takes pleasure, and which seem prepared with distinct
reference to us, or rather, bear, in being delightful, evidence of having
been produced by the power of the same spirit as our own.
62. And we are led to feel this still more strongly because all the
distinctions of species,* both in plants and animals, appear to have
similar connection with human character. Whatever the origin of species
may be, or however those species, once formed, may be influenced by
external accident, the groups into which birth or accident reduce them
have distinct relation to the spirit of man. It is perfectly possible,
and ultimately conceivable, that the crocodile and the lamb may have
descended from the same ancestral atom of protoplasm; and that the
physical laws of the operation of calcareous slime and of meadow grass,
on that protoplasm, may in time have developed the opposite natures and
aspects of the living frames but the practically important fact for us
is the existence of a power which creates that calcareous earth itself,
--which creates, that separately--and quartz, separately; and gold,
separately; and charcoal, separately; and then so directs the relation
of these elements as that the gold shall destroy the souls of men by
being yellow; and the charcoal destroy their souls by being hard and
bright; and the quartz represent to them an ideal purity; and the
calcareous earth, soft, shall beget crocodiles, and dry and hard, sheep;
and that the aspects and qualities of these two products, crocodiles and
lambs, shall be, the one repellant to the spirit of man, the other
attractive to it, in a quite inevitable way; representing to him states
of moral evil and good; and becoming myths to him of destruction or
redemption, and, in the most literal sense, "words" of God.
* The facts on which I am about to dwell are in nowise antagonistic to
the theories which Mr. Darwin's unwearied and unerring investigations are
every day rendering more probable. The æsthetic relations of species are
independent of their origin. Nevertheless, it has always seemed to me
in what little work I have done upon organic forms, as if the species
mocked us by their deliberate imitation of each other when they met; yet
did not pass one into another.
63. And the force of these facts cannot be escaped from by the thought
that there are species innumerable, passing into each other by regular
gradations, out of which we choose what we must love or dread, and say
they were indeed prepared for us. Species are not innumerable; neither
are they now connected by consistent gradation. They touch at certain
points only; and even then are connected, when we examine them deeply,
in a kind of reticulated way, not in chains, but in chequers; also,
however connected, it is but by a touch of the extremities, as it were,
and the characteristic form of the species is entirely individual. The
rose nearly sinks into a grass in the sanguisorba; but the formative
spirit does not the less clearly separate the ear of wheat from the
dog-rose, and oscillate with tremulous constancy round the central forms
of both, having each their due relation to the mind of man. The great
animal kingdoms are connected in the same way. The bird through the
penguin drops towards the fish, and the fish in the cetacean reascends
to the mammal, yet there is no confusion of thought possible between the
perfect forms of an eagle, a trout, and a war-horse, in their relations
to the elements, and to man.
64. Now we have two orders of animals to take some note of in connection
with Athena, and one vast order of plants, which will illustrate this
matter very sufficiently for us.
The orders of animals are the serpent and the bird: the serpent, in which
the breath or spirit is less than in any other creature, and the
earth-power the greatest; the bird, in which the breath or spirit is more
full than in any other creature, and the earth-power least.
65. We will take the bird first. It is little more than a drift of the
air in all its quills, it breathes through its whole frame and flesh and
glows with air in its flying, like blown flames; it rests upon the air,
subdues it, surpasses it, outraces it,--is the air, conscious of itself,
conquering itself, ruling itself.
Also, in the throat of the bird is given the voice of the air. All that
in the wind itself is weak, wild, useless in sweetness, is knit together
in its song. As we may imagine the wild form of the bird's wings, so the
wild voice of the cloud into its ordered and commanded voice; unwearied,
rippling through the clear heaven in its gladness, interpreting all
intense passion through the soft spring nights, bursting into acclaim and
rapture of choir at daybreak, or lisping and twittering among the boughs
and hedges through heat of day, like little winds that only make the
cowslip bells shake, and ruffle the petals of the wild rose.
66. Also, upon the plumes of the bird are put the colors of the air; on
these the gold of the cloud, that cannot be gathered by any covetousness;
the rubies of the clouds, that are not the price of Athena, but are
Athena; the vermillion of the cloud-bar, and the flame of the
cloud-crest, and the snow of the cloud, and its shadow, and the melted
blue of the deep wells of the sky,--all these, seized by the creating
spirit, and woven by Athena herself into films and threads of plume; with
wave on wave following and fading along breast, and throat, and opened
wings, infinite as the dividing of the foam and the sifting of the
sea-sand; even the white down of the cloud seeming to flutter up between
the stronger plumes,--seen, but too soft for touch.
And so the Spirit of the Air is put into, and upon, this created form;
and it becomes, through twenty centuries, the symbol of divine help,
descending, as the Fire, to speak but as the Dove, to bless.
67. Next, in the serpent we approach the source of a group of myths,
world-wide, founded on great and common human instincts, respecting which
I must note one or two points which bear intimately on all our subject.
For it seems to me that the scholars who are at present occupied in
interpretation of human myths have most of them forgotten that there are
any such thing as natural myths, and that the dark sayings of men may be
both difficult to read, and not always worth reading. And, indeed, all
guidance to the right sense of the human and variable myths will probably
depend on our first getting at the sense of the natural and invariable
ones. The dead hieroglyph may have meant this or that; the living
hieroglyph means always the same; but remember, it is just as much a
hieroglyph as the other; nay, more,--a "sacred or reserved sculpture," a
thing with an inner language. The serpent crest of the king's crown, or
of the god's, on the pillars of Egypt, is a mystery, but the serpent
itself, gliding past the pillar's foot, is it less a mystery? Is there,
indeed, no tongue, except the mute forked flash from its lips, in that
running brook of horror on the ground?
68. Why that horror? We all feel it, yet how imaginative it is, how
disproportioned to the real strength of the creature! There is more
poison in an ill-kept drain, in a pool of dish-washing at a cottage door,
than in the deadliest asp of Nile. Every back yard which you look down
into from the railway as it carries you out by Vauxhall or Deptford,
holds its coiled serpent; all the walls of those ghastly suburbs are
enclosures of tank temples for serpent worship; yet you feel no horror in
looking down into them as you would if you saw the livid scales, and
lifted head. There is more venom, mortal, inevitable, in a single word,
sometimes, or in the gliding entrance of a wordless thought than ever
"vanti Libia con sua rena." But that horror is of the myth, not of the
creature. There are myriads lower than this, and more loathsome, in the
scale of being; the links between dead matter and animation drift
everywhere unseen. But it is the strength of the base element that is so
dreadful in the serpent; it is the very omnipotence of the earth. That
rivulet of smooth silver, how does it flow, think you? It literally rows
on the earth, with every scale for an oar; it bites the dust with the
ridges of its body. Watch it, when it moves slowly. A wave, but without
wind! a current, but with no fall! all the body moving at the same
instant, yet some of it to one side, some to another, or some forward,
and the rest of the coil backwards, but all with the same calm will and
equal way, no contraction, no extension; one soundless, causeless, march
of sequent rings, and spectral processions of spotted dust, with
dissolution in its fangs, dislocation in its coils. Startle it, the
winding stream will become a twisted arrow; the wave of poisoned life
will lash through the grass like a cast lance.* It scarcely breathes
with its one lung (the other shriveled and abortive); it is passive
to the sun and shade, and is cold or hot like a stone; yet "it can
outclimb the monkey, outswim the fish, outleap the zebra, outwrestle the
athlete, and crush the tiger."** It is a divine hieroglyph of the
demoniac power of the earth, of the entire earthly nature. As the bird
is the clothed power of the air, so this is the clothed power of the
dust; as the bird is the symbol of the spirit of life, so this is the
grasp and sting of death.
* I cannot understand this swift forward motion of serpents. The seizure
of prey by the constrictor, though invisibly swift, is quite simple in
mechanism; it is simply the return to its coil of an opened watch-spring,
and is just as instantaneous. But the steady and continuous motion,
without a visible fulcrum (for the whole body moves at the same instant,
and I have often seen even small snakes glide as fast as I could walk),
seems to involve a vibration of the scales quite too rapid to be
conceived. The motion of the crest and dorsal fin of the hippocampus,
which is one of the intermediate types between serpent and fish, perhaps
gives some resemblance of it, dimly visible, for the quivering turns the
fin into a mere mist. The entrance of the two barbs of a bee's sting by
alternate motion, "the teeth of one barb acting as a fulcrum for the
other," must be something like the serpent motion on a small scale.
** Richard Owen.
69. Hence the continual change in the interpretation put upon it in
various religions. As the worm of corruption, it is the mightiest of all
adversaries of the gods--the special adversary of their light and
creative power--Python against Apollo. As the power of the earth against
the air, the giants are serpent-bodied in the Gigantomachia; but as the
power of the earth upon the seed--consuming it into new life ("that which
thou sowest is not quickened except it die")--serpents sustain the
chariot of the spirit of agriculture.
70. Yet on the other hand, there is a power in the earth to take away
corruption, and to purify (hence the very fact of burial, and many uses
of earth, only lately known): and in this sense the serpent is a healing
spirit,--the representative of Æsculapius, and of Hygieia; and is a
sacred earth-type in the temple of the native earth of Athens; so that
its departure from the temple was a sign to the Athenians that they were
to leave their homes. And then, lastly, as there is a strength and
healing in the earth, no less than the strength of air, so there is
conceived to be a wisdom of earth no less than a wisdom of the spirit;
and when its deadly power is killed, its guiding power becomes true; so
that the Python serpent is killed at Delphi, where yet the oracle is from
the breath of the earth.
71. You must remember, however, that in this, as in every other
instance, I take the myth at its central time. This is only the meaning
of the serpent to the Greek mind which could conceive an Athena. Its
first meaning to the nascent eyes of men, and its continued influence
over degraded races, are subjects of the most fearful mystery. Mr.
Fergusson has just collected the principal evidence bearing on the matter
in a work of very great value, and if you read his opening chapters, they
will put you in possession of the circumstances needing chiefly to be
considered. I cannot touch upon any of them here, except only to point
out that, though the doctrine of the so-called "corruption of human
nature," asserting that there is nothing but evil in humanity, is just
as blasphemous and false as a doctrine of the corruption of physical
nature would be, asserting there was nothing but evil in the earth,--
there is yet the clearest evidence of a disease, plague, or cretinous
imperfection of development, hitherto allowed to prevail against the
greater part of the races of men; and this in monstrous ways, more full
of mystery than the serpent-being itself. I have gathered for you
tonight only instances of what is beautiful in Greek religion; but even
in its best time there were deep corruptions in other phases of it, and
degraded forms of many of its deities, all originating in a misunderstood
worship of lower races, little less than these corrupted forms of
devotion can be found, all having a strange and dreadful consistency with
each other, and infecting Christianity, even at its strongest periods,
with fatal terror of doctrine, and ghastliness of symbolic conception,
passing through fear into frenzied grotesque, and thence into sensuality.
In the Psalter of St. Louis itself, half of its letters are twisted
snakes; there is scarcely a wreathed ornament, employed in Christian
dress, or architecture, which cannot be traced back to the serpent's
coil; and there is rarely a piece of monkish decorated writing in the
world that is not tainted with some ill-meant vileness of grotesque,--
nay, the very leaves of the twisted ivy-pattern of the fourteenth century
can be followed back to wreaths for the foreheads of bacchanalian gods.
And truly, it seems to me, as I gather in my mind the evidences of insane
religion, degraded art, merciless war, sullen toil, detestable pleasure,
and vain or vile hope, in which the nations of the world have lived since
first they could bear record of themselves--it seems to me, I say, as if
the race itself were still half-serpent, not extricated yet from its
clay; a lacertine breed of bitterness--the glory of it emaciate with
cruel hunger, and blotted on the leaf a glittering slime, and in the sand
a useless furrow.
72. There are no myths, therefore, by which the moral state and fineness
of intelligence of different races can be so deeply tried or measured, as
by those of the serpent and the bird; both of them having an especial
relation to the kind of remorse for sin, or for the grief in fate, of
which the national minds that spoke by them had been capable. The
serpent and vulture are alike emblems of immortality and purification
among races which desired to be immortal and pure; and as they recognize
their own misery, the serpent becomes to them the scourge of the Furies,
and the vulture finds its eternal prey in their breast. The bird long
contests among the Egyptians with the still received serpent symbol of
power. But the Draconian image of evil is established in the serpent
Apap; while the bird's wings, with the globe, become part of a better
symbol of deity, and the entire form of the vulture, as an emblem of
purification, is associated with the earliest conception of Athena. In
the type of the dove with the olive branch, the conception of the spirit
of Athena in renewed life prevailing over ruin is embodied for the whole
of futurity; while the Greeks, to whom, in a happier climate and higher
life than that of Egypt, the vulture symbol of cleansing became
unintelligible, took the eagle instead for their hieroglyph of supreme
spiritual energy, and it thenceforward retains its hold on the human
imagination, till it is established among Christian myths as the
expression of the most exalted form of evangelistic teaching. The
special relation of Athena to her favorite bird we will trace presently;
the peacock of Hera, and dove of Aphrodite, are comparatively unimportant
myths; but the bird power is soon made entirely human by the Greeks in
their flying angel of victory (partially human, with modified meaning of
evil, in the Harpy and Siren); and thenceforward it associates itself
with the Hebrew cherubim, and has had the most singular influence on the
Christian religion by giving its wings to render the conception of angels
mysterious and untenable, and check rational endeavor to determine the
nature of subordinate spiritual agency; while yet it has given to that
agency a vague poetical influence of the highest value in its own
imaginative way.
73. But with the early serpent-worship there was associated another,
that of the groves, of which you will also find the evidence exhaustively
collected in Mr. Fergussen's work. This tree-worship may have taken a
dark form when associated with the Draconian one; or opposed, as in
Judea, to a purer faith; but in itself, I believe, it was always healthy,
and though it retains little definite hieroglyphic power in subsequent
religion, it becomes, instead of symbolic, real; the flowers and trees
are themselves beheld and beloved with a half-worshipping delight, which
is always noble and healthful.
And it is among the most notable indications of the volition of the
animating power that we find the ethical signs of good and evil set on
these also, as well as upon animals; the venom of the serpent, and in
some respects its image also, being associated even with the passionless
growth of the leaf out of the ground; while the distinctions of species
seem appointed with more definite ethical address to the intelligence of
man as their material products become more useful to him.
74. I can easily show this, and, at the same time, make clear the
relation to other plants of the flowers which especially belong to
Athena, by examining the natural myths in the groups of the plants which
would be used at any country dinner, over which Athena would, in her
simplest household authority, cheerfully rule here in England. Suppose
Horace's favorite dish of beans, with the bacon; potatoes; some savory
stuffing of onions and herbs, with the meat; celery, and a radish or
two, with the cheese; nuts and apples for desert, and brown bread.
75. The beans are, from earliest time, the most important and
interesting of the seeds of the great tribe of plants from which came the
Latin and French name for all kitchen vegetables,--things that are
gathered with the hand--podded seeds that cannot be reaped, or beaten, or
shaken down, but must be gathered green. "Leguminous" plants, all of
them having flowers like butterflies, seeds in (frequently pendent) pods,
--"lætum siliqua quassante legumen"--smooth and tender leaves, divided
into many minor ones; strange adjuncts of tendril, for climbing (and
sometimes of thorn); exquisitely sweet, yet pure scents of blossom, and
almost always harmless, if not serviceable seeds. It is of all tribes
of plants the most definite, its blossoms being entirely limited in their
parts, and not passing into other forms. It is also the most usefully
extended in range and scale; familiar in the height of the forest--
acacia, laburnum, Judas-tree; familiar in the sown field--bean and vetch
and pea; familiar in the pasture--in every form of clustered clover and
sweet trefoil tracery; the most entirely serviceable and human of all
orders of plants.
76. Next, in the potato, we have the scarcely innocent underground stem
of one of a tribe set aside for evil; having the deadly nightshade for
its queen, and including the henbane, the witch's mandrake, and the worst
natural curse of modern civilization--tobacco.* And the strange thing
about this tribe is, that though thus set aside for evil, they are not a
group distinctly separate from those that are happier in function. There
is nothing in other tribes of plants like the form of the bean blossom;
but there is another family of forms and structure closely connected with
this venomous one. Examine the purple and yellow bloom of the common
hedge nightshade; you will find it constructed exactly like some of the
forms of the cyclamen; and, getting this clue, you will find at last the
whole poisonous and terrible group to be--sisters of the primulas!
* It is not easy to estimate the demoralizing effect on the youth of
Europe of the cigar, in enabling them to pass their time happily in
idleness.
The nightshades are, in fact, primroses with a curse upon them; and a
sign set in their petals, by which the deadly and condemned flowers may
always be known from the innocent ones,--that the stamens of the
nightshades are between the lobes, and of the primulas, opposite the
lobes, of the corolla.
77. Next, side by side, in the celery and radish, you have the two great
groups of unbelled and cruciferous plants; alike in conditions of rank
among herbs: both flowering in clusters; but the unbelled group, flat,
the crucifers, in spires: both of them mean and poor in the blossom, and
losing what beauty they have by too close crowding; both of them having
the most curious influence on human character in the temperate zones of
the earth, from the days of the parsley crown, and hemlock drink, and
mocked Euripidean chervil, until now; but chiefly among the northern
nations, being especially plants that are of some humble beauty, and (the
crucifers) of endless use, when they are chosen and cultivated; but that
run to wild waste, and are the signs of neglected ground, in their rank
or ragged leaves and meagre stalks, and pursed or podded seed clusters.
Capable, even under cultivation, of no perfect beauty, thought reaching
some subdued delightfulness in the lady's smock and the wallflower; for
the most part they have every floral quality meanly, and in vain,--they
are white without purity; golden, without preciousness; redundant,
without richness; divided, without fineness; massive, without strength;
and slender, without grace. Yet think over that useful vulgarity of
theirs; and of the relations of German and English peasant character to
its food of kraut and cabbage (as of Arab character to its food of
palm-fruit), and you will begin to feel what purposes of the forming
spirit are in these distinctions of species.
78. Next we take the nuts and apples,--the nuts representing one of the
groups of catkined trees, whose blossoms are only tufts and dust; and the
other, the rose tribe, in which fruit and flower alike have been the
types to the highest races of men, of all passionate temptation, or pure
delight, from the coveting of Eve to the crowing of the Madonna, above
the
"Rosa sempiterna,
Che si dilata, rigrada, e ridole
Odor di lode al Sol."
We have no time now for these, we must go on to the humblest group of
all, yet the most wonderful, that of the grass which has given us our
bread; and from that we will go back to the herbs.
79. The vast family of plants which, under rain, make the earth green
for man, and, under sunshine, give him bread, and, in their springing in
the early year, mixed with their native flowers, have given us (far more
than the new leaves of trees) the thought and word of "spring," divide
themselves broadly into three great groups--the grasses, sedges, and
rushes. The grasses are essentially a clothing for healthy and pure
ground, watered by occasional rain, but in itself dry, and fit for all
cultivated pasture and corn. They are distinctively plants with round
and jointed stems, which have long green flexible leaves, and heads of
seed, independently emerging from them. The sedges are essentially the
clothing of waste and more or less poor or uncultivated soils, coarse in
their structure, frequently triangular in stem--hence called "acute" by
Virgil--and with their heads of seed not extricated from their leaves.
Now, in both the sedges and grasses, the blossom has a common structure,
though undeveloped in the sedges, but composed always of groups of double
husks, which have mostly a spinous process in the centre, sometimes
projecting into a long awn or beard; this central process being
characteristic also of the ordinary leaves of mosses, as if a moss were
a kind of ear of corn made permanently green on the ground, and with a
new and distinct fructification. But the rushes differ wholly from the
sedge and grass in their blossom structure. It is not a dual cluster,
but a twice threefold one, so far separate from the grasses, and so
closely connected with a higher order of plants, that I think you will
find it convenient to group the rushes at once with that higher order,
to which, if you will for the present let me give the general name of
Drosidæ, or dew-plants, it will enable me to say what I have to say of
them much more shortly and clearly.
80. These Drosidæ, then, are plants delighting in interrupted moisture--
or at certain seasons--into dry ground. They are not among water-plants,
but the signs of water resting among dry places. Many of the true
water-plants have triple blossoms, with a small triple calyx holding
them; in the Drosidæ the floral spirit passes into the calyx also, and
the entire flower becomes a six-rayed star, bursting out of the stem
laterally, as if it were the first of flowers and had made its way to the
light by force through the unwilling green. They are often required to
retain moisture or nourishment for the future blossom through long times
of drought; and this they do in bulbs under ground, of which some become
a rude and simple, but most wholesome, food for man.
81. So, now, observe, you are to divide the whole family of the herbs of
the field into three great groups,--Drosidæ, Carices,* Gramineæ,--
dew-plants, sedges, and grasses. Then the Drosidæ are divided into five
great orders: lilies, asphodels, amaryllids, irids, and rushes. No
tribes of flowers have had so great, so varied, or so healthy an
influence on man as this great group of Drosidæ, depending, not so much
on the whiteness of some of their blossoms, or the radiance of others, as
on the strength and delicacy of the substance of their petals; enabling
them to take forms of faultless elastic curvature, either in cups, as the
crocus, or expanding bells, as the true lily, or heath-like bells, as the
hyacinth, or bright and perfect stars, like the star of Bethlehem, or,
when they are affected by the strange reflex of the serpent nature which
forms the labiate group of all flowers, closing into forms of exquisitely
fantastic symmetry in the gladiolus. Put by their side their Nereid
sisters, the water-lilies, and you have them in the origin of the
loveliest forms of ornamental design, and the most powerful floral myths
yet recognized among human spirits, born by the streams of Ganges, Nile,
Arno, and Avon.
* I think Carex will be found ultimately better than Cyperus for the
generic name, being the Vergilian word, and representing a larger
sub-species.
82. For consider a little what each of those five tribes* has been to
the spirit of man. First, in their nobleness, the lilies gave the lily
of the Annunciation; the asphodels, the flower of the Elysian fields; the
irids, the fleur-de-lys of chivalry; and the amaryllids, Christ's lily of
the field; while the rush, trodden always under foot, became the emblem
of humility. Then take each of the tribes, and consider the extent of
their lower influence. Perdita's "The crown imperial, lilies of all
kinds," are the first tribe, which, giving the type of perfect purity in
the Madonna's lily, have, by their lovely form, influenced the entire
decorative design of Italian sacred art; while ornament design of war was
continually enriched by the curves of the triple petals of the Florentine
"giglio," and French fleur-de-lys; so that it is impossible to count
their influence for good in the middle ages, partly as a symbol of
womanly character, and partly of the utmost brightness and refinement of
chivalry in the city which was the flower of cities.
* Take this rough distinction of the four tribes: lilies, superior ovary,
white seeds; asphodels, superior ovary, black seeds; irids, inferior
ovary, style (typically) rising into central crest; amaryllids, inferior
ovary, stamens (typically) joined in central cup. Then the rushes are a
dark group, through which they stoop to the grasses.
Afterwards, the group of the turban-lilies, or tulips, did some mischief
(their splendid stains having made them the favorite caprice of
florists); but they may be pardoned all such guilt for the pleasure they
have given in cottage gardens, and are yet to give, when lowly life may
again be possible among us; and the crimson bars of the tulips in their
trim beds, with their likeness in crimson bars of morning above them, and
its dew glittering heavy, globed in their glossy cups, may be loved
better than the gray nettles of the ash heap, under gray sky, unveined by
vermilion or by gold.
83. The next great group, of the asphodels, divides itself also into two
principal families: one, in which the flowers are like stars, and
clustered characteristically in balls, though opening sometimes into
looser heads; and the other, in which the flowers are in long bells,
opening suddenly at the lips, and clustered in spires on a long stem, or
drooping from it, when bent by their weight.
The star-group, of the squills, garlics, and onions, has always caused me
great wonder. I cannot understand why its beauty, and serviceableness,
should have been associated with the rank scent which has been really
among the most powerful means of degrading peasant life, and separating
it from that of the higher classes.
The belled group, of the hyacinth and convallaria, is as delicate as the
other is coarse; the unspeakable azure light along the ground of the wood
hyacinth in English spring; the grape hyacinth, which is in south France,
as if a cluster of grapes and a hive of honey had been distilled and
compressed together into one small boss of celled and beaded blue; the
lilies of the valley everywhere, in each sweet and wild recess of rocky
lands,--count the influences of these on childish and innocent life; then
measure the mythic power of the hyacinth and asphodel as connected with
Greek thoughts of immortality; finally take their useful and nourishing
power in ancient and modern peasant life, and it will be strange if you
do not feel what fixed relation exists between the agency of the creating
spirit in these, and in us who live by them.
84. It is impossible to bring into any tenable compass for our present
purpose, even hints of the human influence of the two remaining orders of
Amaryllids and Irids; only note this generally, that while these in
northern countries share with the Primulas the fields of spring, it seems
that in Greece, the primulaceæ are not an extended tribe, while the
crocus, narcissus, and Amaryllis lutea, the "lily of the field" (I
suspect also that the flower whose name we translate "violet" was in
truth an iris) represented to the Greek the first coming of the breath of
life on the renewed herbage; and became in his thoughts the true
embroidery of the saffron robe of Athena. Later in the year, the
dianthus (which, though belonging to an entirely different race of
plants, has yet a strange look of being made out of the grasses by
turning the sheath-membrane at the root of their leaves into a flower)
seems to scatter, in multitudinous families, its crimson stars far and
wide. But the golden lily and crocus, together with the asphodel, retain
always the old Greek's fondest thoughts,--they are only "golden" flowers
that are to burn on the trees, and float on the streams of paradise.
85. I have but one tribe of plants more to note at our country feast--
the savory herbs; but must go a little out of my way to come at them
rightly. All flowers whose petals are fastened together, and most of
those whose petals are loose, are best thought of first as a kind of cup
or tube opening at the mouth. Sometimes the opening is gradual, as in
the convolvulus or campanula; oftener there is a distinct change of
direction between the tube and expanding lip, as in the primrose; or even
a contraction under the lip, making the tube into a narrow-necked phial
or vase, as in the heaths; but the general idea of a tube expanding into
a quatrefoil, cinquefoil, or sixfoil, will embrace most of the forms.
86. Now, it is easy to conceive that flowers of this kind, growing in
close clusters, may, in process of time, have extended their outside
petals rather than the interior ones (as the outer flowers of the
clusters of many umbellifers actually do), and thus elongated and
variously distorted forms have established themselves; then if the stalk
is attached to the side instead of the base of the tube, its base becomes
a spur, and thus all the grotesque forms of the mints, violets, and
larkspurs, gradually might be composed. But, however this may be, there
is one great tribe of plants separate from the rest, and of which the
influence seems shed upon the rest, in different degrees; and these would
give the impression, not so much of having been developed by change, as
of being stamped with a character of their own, more or less serpentine
or dragon-like. And I think you will find it convenient to call these
generally Draconidæ; disregarding their present ugly botanical name which
I do not care even to write once--you may take for their principal types
the foxglove, snapdragon, and calceolaria; and you will find they all
agree in a tendency to decorate themselves by spots, and with bosses or
swollen places in their leaves, as if they had been touched by poison.
The spot of the foxglove is especially strange, because it draws the
color out of the tissue all around it, as if it had been stung, and as if
the central color was really an inflamed spot, with paleness round. Then
also they carry to its extreme the decoration by bulging or pouting out
the petal,--often beautifully used by other flowers in a minor degree,
like the beating out of bosses in hollow silver, as in the kalmia, beaten
out apparently in each petal by the stamens instead of a hammer; or the
borage, pouting towards; but the snapdragons and calceolarias carry it to
its extreme.
87. Then the spirit of these Draconidæ seems to pass more or less into
other flowers, whose forms are properly pure vases; but it affects some
of them slightly, others not at all. It never strongly affects the
heaths; never once the roses; but it enters like an evil spirit into the
buttercup, and turns it into a larkspur, with a black, spotted, grotesque
centre, and a strange, broken blue, gorgeous and intense, yet impure,
glittering on the surface as if it were strewn with broken glass, and
stained or darkening irregularly into red. And then at last the serpent
charm changes the ranunculus into monkshood, and makes it poisonous. It
enters into the forget-me-not, and the star of heavenly turquoise is
corrupted into the viper's bugloss, darkened with the same strange red as
the larkspur, and fretted into a fringe of thorn; it enters, together
with a strange insect-spirit, into the asphodels, and (though with a
greater interval between the groups) they change to spotted orchideæ; it
touches the poppy, it becomes a fumaria; the iris, and it pouts into a
gladiolus; the lily, and it chequers itself into a snake's-head, and
secretes in the deep of its bell, drops, not of venom indeed, but
honey-dew, as if it were a healing serpent. For there is an Æsculapian
as well as an evil serpentry among the Draconidæ, and the fairest of
them, the "erba della Madonna" of Venice (Linaria Cymbalaria), descends
from the ruins it delights into the herbage at their feet, and touches
it; and behold, instantly, a vast group of herbs for healing,--all
draconid in form,--spotted and crested, and from their lip-like corollas
named "labiatæ;" full of various balm, and warm strength for healing, yet
all of them without splendid honor or perfect beauty, "ground ives,"
richest when crushed under the foot; the best sweetness and gentle
brightness of the robes of the field,--thyme, and marjoram, and Euphrasy.
88. And observe, again and again, with respect to all these divisions
and powers of plants: it does not matter in the least by what
concurrences of circumstance or necessity they may gradually have been
developed; the concurrence of circumstance is itself the supreme and
inexplicable fact. We always come at last to a formative cause, which
directs the circumstance, and mode of meeting it. If you ask an ordinary
botanist the reason of the form of the leaf, he will tell you that it is
a "developed tubercle," and that its ultimate form "is owing to the
directions of its vascular threads." But what directs its vascular
threads? "They are seeking for something they want," he will probably
answer. What made them want that? What made them seek for it thus?
Seek for it, in five fibres or in three? Seek for it, in serration, or
in sweeping curves? Seek for it, in servile tendrils, or impetuous
spray? Seek for it, in woolen wrinkles rough with stings, or in glossy
surfaces, green with pure strength, and winterless delight?
89. There is no answer. But the sum of all is, that over the entire
surface of the earth, and its waters, as influenced by the power of the
air under solar light, there is developed a series of changing forms, in
clouds, plants, and animals, all of which have reference in their action,
or nature, to the human intelligence that perceives them; and on which,
in their aspects of horror and beauty, and their qualities of good and
evil, there is engraved a series of myths, or words of the forming power,
which, according to the true passion and energy of the human race, they
have been enabled to read into religion. And this forming power has been
by all nations partly confused with the breath or air through which it
acts, and partly understood as a creative wisdom, proceeding from the
Supreme Deity; but entering into and inspiring all intelligences that
work in harmony with Him. And whatever intellectual results may be in
modern days obtained by regarding this effluence only as a motion of
vibration, every formative human art hitherto, and the best states of
human happiness and order, may have depended on the apprehension of its
mystery (which is certain,) and of its personality, which is probable.
90. Of its influence on the formative arts, I have a few words to say
separately: my present business is only to interpret, as we are now
sufficiently enabled to do, the external symbols of the myth under which
it was represented by the Greeks as a goddess of counsel, taken first
into that breast of their supreme Deity, then created out of his
thoughts, and abiding closely beside him; always sharing and consummating
his power.
91. And in doing this we have first to note the meaning of the principal
epithet applied to Athena, "Glaukopis," "with eyes full of light," the
first syllable being connected, by its root, with words signifying sight,
not with words signifying color. As far as I can trace the color
perception of the Greeks, I find it all founded primarily on the degree
of connection between color and light; the most important fact to them in
the color of red being its connection with fire and sunshine; so that
"purple" is, in its original sense, "fire-color," and the scarlet or
orange, of dawn, more than any other fire-color. I was long puzzled by
Homer's calling the sea purple; and misled into thinking he meant the
color of cloud shadows on green sea; whereas he really means the gleaming
blaze of the waves under wide light. Aristotle's idea (partly true) is
that light, subdued by blackness, becomes red; and blackness, heated or
lighted, also becomes red. Thus, a color may be called purple because it
is light subdued (and so death is called "purple" or "shadowy" death); or
else it may be called purple as being shade kindled with fire, and thus
said of the lighted sea; or even of the sun itself, when it is thought of
as a red luminary opposed to the whiteness of the moon: "purpureos inter
soles, et candida lunæ sidera;" or of golden hair: "pro purpureo pœnam
solvens scelerata capillo;" while both ideas are modified by the
influence of an earlier form of the word, which has nothing to do with
fire at all, but only with mixing or staining; and then, to make the
whole group of thoughts inextricably complex, yet rich and subtle in
proportion to their intricacy, the various rose and crimson colors of the
murex dye,--the crimson and purple of the poppy, and fruit of the palm,--
and the association of all these with the hue of blood,--partly direct,
partly through a confusion between the word signifying "slaughter" and
"palm-fruit color," mingle themselves in, and renew the whole nature of
the old word; so that, in later literature, it means a different color,
or emotion of color, in almost every place where it occurs; and cast
forever around the reflection of all that has been dipped in its dyes.
92. So that the world is really a liquid prism, and stream of opal. And
then, last of all, to keep the whole history of it in the fantastic
course of a dream, warped here and there into wild grotesque, we moderns,
who have preferred to rule over coal-mines instead of the sea (and so
have turned the everlasting lamp of Athena into a Davy's safety-lamp in
the hand of Britannia, and Athenian heavenly lightning into British
subterranean "damp"), have actually got our purple out of coal instead of
the sea! And thus, grotesquely, we have had enforced on us the doubt
that held the old word between blackness and fire, and have completed the
shadow, and the fear of it, by giving it a name from battle, "Magenta."
93. There is precisely a similar confusion between light and color in
the word used for the blue of the eyes of Athena--a noble confusion,
however, brought about by the intensity of the Greek sense that the
heaven is light, more than it is blue. I was not thinking of this when I
wrote in speaking of pictorial chiaroscuro, "The sky is not blue color
merely: it is blue fire and cannot be painted" (Mod. P. iv. p. 36); but
it was this that the Greeks chiefly felt of it, and so "Glaukopis"
chiefly means gray-eyed: gray standing for a pale or luminous blue; but
it only means "owl-eyed" in thought of the roundness and expansion, not
from the color; this breath and brightness being, again, in their moral
sense typical of the breadth, intensity, and singleness of the sight in
prudence ("if thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of
light"). Then the actual power of the bird to see in twilight enters
into the type, and perhaps its general fineness of sense. "Before the
human form was adopted, her (Athena's) proper symbol was the owl, a bird
which seems to surpass all other creatures in acuteness of organic
perception, its eye being calculated to observe objects which to all
others are enveloped in darkness, its ear to hear sounds distinctly, and
its nostrils to discriminate effluvia with such nicety that it has been
deemed prophetic, from discovering the putridity of death even in the
first stages of disease."*
* Payne Knight in his "Inquiry into the Symbolical Language of Ancient
Art," not trustworthy, being little more than a mass of conjectural
memoranda, but the heap is suggestive, if well sifted.
I cannot find anywhere an account of the first known occurrence of the
type; but, in the early ones on Attic coins, the wide round eyes are
clearly the principal things to be made manifest.
94. There is yet, however, another color of great importance in the
conception of Athena--the dark blue of her ægis. Just as the blue or
gray of her eyes was conceived more as light than color, so her aegis was
dark blue, because the Greeks thought of this tint more as shade than
color, and, while they used various materials in ornamentation,
lapislazuli, carbonate of copper, or, perhaps, smalt, with real enjoyment
of the blue tint, it was yet in their minds as distinctly representative
of darkness as scarlet was of light, and, therefore, anything dark,* but
especially the color of heavy thunder-cloud, was described by the same
term. The physical power of this darkness of the ægis, fringed with
lightning, is given quite simply when Jupiter himself uses it to
overshadow Ida and the Plain of Troy, and withdraws it at the prayer of
Ajax for light; and again when he grants it to be worn for a time by
Apollo, who is hidden by its cloud when he strikes down Patroclus; but
its spiritual power is chiefly expressed by a word signifying deeper
shadow,--the gloom of Erebus, or of our evening, which, when spoken of
the ægis, signifies, not merely the indignation of Athena, but the entire
hiding or withdrawal of her help, and beyond even this, her deadliest of
all hostility,--the darkness by which she herself deceives and beguiles
to final ruin those to whom she is wholly adverse; this contradiction of
her own glory being the uttermost judgment upon human falsehood. Thus it
is she who provokes Pandarus to the treachery which purposed to fulfil
the rape of Helen by the murder of her husband in time of truce; and then
the Greek king, holding his wounded brother's hand, prophesies against
Troy the darkness of the ægis which shall be over all, and for ever.**
* In the breastplate and shield of Atrides the serpents and bosses are
all of this dark color, yet the serpents are said to be like rainbows;
but through all this splendor and opposition of hue, I feel distinctly
that the literal "splendor," with its relative shade, are prevalent in
the conception; and that there is always a tendency to look through the
hue to its cause. And in this feeling about color the Greeks are
separated from the eastern nations, and from the best designers of
Christian times. I cannot find that they take pleasure in color for its
own sake; it may be in something more than color, or better; but it is
not in the hue itself. When Homer describes cloud breaking from a
mountain summit, the crags become visible in light, not color; he feels
only their flashing out in bright edges and trenchant shadows; above, the
"infinite," "unspeakable" æther is torn open--but not the blue of it. He
has scarcely any abstract pleasure in blue, or green, or gold; but only
in their shade or flame.
I have yet to trace the causes of this (which will be a long task,
belonging to art questions, not to mythological ones); but it is, I
believe, much connected with the brooding of the shadow of death over
the Greeks without any clear hope of immortality. The restriction of
the color on their vases to dim red (or yellow) with black and white,
is greatly connected with their sepulchral use, and with all the
melancholy of Greek tragic thought; and in this gloom the failure of
color-perception is partly noble, partly base: noble, in its earnestness,
which raises the design of Greek vases as far above the designing of mere
colorist nations like the Chinese, as men's thoughts are above
children's; and yet it is partly base and earthly, and inherently
defective in one human faculty; and I believe it was one cause of the
perishing of their art so swiftly, for indeed there is no decline so
sudden, or down to such utter loss and ludicrous depravity, as the fall
of Greek design on its vases from the fifth to the third century B.C. On
the other hand, the pure colored-gift, when employed for pleasure only,
degrades in another direction; so that among the Indians, Chinese, and
Japanese, all intellectual progress in art has been for ages rendered
impossible by the prevalence of that faculty; and yet it is, as I have
said again and again, the spiritual power of art; and its true brightness
is the essential characteristic of all healthy schools.
** 'eremnen Aigida pasi'.--Il. iv. 166.
95. This, then, finally, was the perfect color-conception of Athena: the
flesh, snow-white (the hands, feet, and face of marble, even when the
statue was hewn roughly in wood); the eyes of keen pale blue, often in
statues represented by jewels; the long robe to the feet, crocus-colored;
and the ægis thrown over it of thunderous purple; the helmet golden (Il.
v. 744.), and I suppose its crest also, as that of Achilles.
If you think carefully of the meaning and character which is now enough
illustrated for you in each of these colors, and remember that the
crocus-color and the purple were both of them developments, in opposite
directions, of the great central idea of fire-color, or scarlet, you will
see that this form of the creative spirit of the earth is conceived as
robed in the blue, and purple, and scarlet, the white, and the gold,
which have been recognized for the sacred chords of colors, from the day
when the cloud descended on a Rock more mighty than Ida.
96. I have spoken throughout, hitherto, of the conception of Athena, as
it is traceable in the Greek mind; not as it was rendered by Greek art.
It is matter of extreme difficulty, requiring a sympathy at once
affectionate and cautious, and a knowledge reaching the earliest springs
of the religion of many lands, to discern through the imperfection, and,
alas! more dimly yet, through the triumphs of formative art, what kind
of thoughts they were that appointed for it the tasks of its childhood,
and watched by the awakening of its strength.
The religions passion is nearly always vividest when the art is weakest;
and the technical skill only reaches its deliberate splendor when the
ecstacy which gave it birth has passed away forever. It is as vain an
attempt to reason out the visionary power or guiding influence of Athena
in the Greek heart, from anything we now read, or possess, of the work of
Phidias, as it would be for the disciples of some new religion to infer
the spirit of Christianity from Titian's "Assumption." The effective
vitality of the religious conception can be traced only through the
efforts of trembling hands, and strange pleasures of untaught eyes; and
the beauty of the dream can no more be found in the first symbols by
which it is expressed, than a child's idea of fairy-land can be gathered
from its pencil scrawl, or a girl's love for her broken doll explained by
the defaced features. On the other hand, the Athena of Phidias was, in
very fact, not so much the deity, as the darling of the Athenian people.
Her magnificence represented their pride and fondness, more than their
piety; and the great artist, in lavishing upon her dignities which might
be ended abruptly by the pillage they provoked, resigned, apparently
without regret, the awe of her ancient memory; and (with only the
careless remonstrance of a workman too strong to be proud) even the
perfectness of his own art. Rejoicing in the protection of their
goddess, and in their own hour of glory, the people of Athena robed her,
at their will, with the preciousness of ivory and gems; forgot or denied
the darkness of the breastplate of judgment, and vainly bade its
unappeasable serpents relax their coils in gold.
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, passing 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 goddess-Avengers, an altar to a God 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 God
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 worship. 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 sunshine
vainly sweet, and passionate folly of storm, waste themselves in the
silent places of knowledge that has passed away, and of tongues that have
ceased?
This only we may discern assuredly; 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.