have to refer afterwards in illustration of the childishness of the
Greek mind at the time when its art-symbols were first fixed; but it is
of peculiar value, because the physical character of Vulcan, as fire, is
indicated by his wearing the [Greek: endromides] of Hermes, while the
antagonism of Zeus, as the adverse chaos, either of cloud or of fate, is
shown by his striking at Hephaestus with his thunderbolt. But Plate IV.
gives you (as far as the light on the rounded vase will allow it to be
deciphered) a characteristic representation of the scene, as conceived
in later art.
75. I told you in a former Lecture of this course[19] that the entire
Greek intellect was in a childish phase as compared to that of modern
times. Observe, however, childishness does not necessarily imply
universal inferiority: there may be a vigorous, acute, pure, and solemn
childhood, and there may be a weak, foul, and ridiculous condition of
advanced life; but the one is still essentially the childish, and the
other the adult phase of existence.
76. You will find, then, that the Greeks were the first people that were
born into complete humanity. All nations before them had been, and all
around them still were, partly savage, bestial, clay-incumbered,
inhuman; still semi-goat, or semi-ant, or semi-stone, or semi-cloud. But
the power of a new spirit came upon the Greeks, and the stones were
filled with breath, and the clouds clothed with flesh; and then came the
great spiritual battle between the Centaurs and Lapithae; and the living
creatures became "Children of Men." Taught, yet by the Centaur--sown, as
they knew, in the fang--from the dappled skin of the brute, from the
leprous scale of the serpent, their flesh came again as the flesh of a
little child, and they were clean.
Fix your mind on this as the very central character of the Greek
race--the being born pure and human out of the brutal misery of the
past, and looking abroad, for the first time, with their children's
eyes, wonderingly open, on the strange and divine world.
[Illustration: IV.
THE NATIVITY OF ATHENA.]
77. Make some effort to remember, so far as may be possible to you,
either what you felt in yourselves when you were young, or what you have
observed in other children, of the action of thought and fancy. Children
are continually represented as living in an ideal world of their own. So
far as I have myself observed, the distinctive character of a child is
to live always in the tangible present, having little pleasure in
memory, and being utterly impatient and tormented by anticipation: weak
alike in reflection and forethought, but having an intense possession of
the actual present, down to the shortest moments and least objects of
it; possessing it, indeed, so intensely that the sweet childish days are
as long as twenty days will be; and setting all the faculties of heart
and imagination on little things, so as to be able to make anything out
of them he chooses. Confined to a little garden, he does not imagine
himself somewhere else, but makes a great garden out of that; possessed
of an acorn-cup, he will not despise it and throw it away, and covet a
golden one in its stead: it is the adult who does so. The child keeps
his acorn-cup as a treasure, and makes a golden one out of it in his
mind; so that the wondering grown-up person standing beside him is
always tempted to ask concerning his treasures, not, "What would you
have more than these?" but "What possibly can you see _in_ these?" for,
to the bystander, there is a ludicrous and incomprehensible
inconsistency between the child's words and the reality. The little
thing tells him gravely, holding up the acorn-cup, that "this is a
queen's crown," or "a fairy's boat," and, with beautiful effrontery,
expects him to believe the same. But observe--the acorn-cup must be
_there_, and in his own hand. "Give it me; then I will make more of it
for myself." That is the child's one word, always.
78. It is also the one word of the Greek--"Give it me." Give me _any_
thing definite here in my sight, then I will make more of it.
I cannot easily express to you how strange it seems to me that I am
obliged, here in Oxford, to take the position of an apologist for Greek
art; that I find, in spite of all the devotion of the admirable scholars
who have so long maintained in our public schools the authority of Greek
literature, our younger students take no interest in the manual work of
the people upon whose thoughts the tone of their early intellectual life
has exclusively depended. But I am not surprised that the interest, if
awakened, should not at first take the form of admiration. The
inconsistency between an Homeric description of a piece of furniture or
armor, and the actual rudeness of any piece of art approximating, within
even three or four centuries, to the Homeric period, is so great, that
we at first cannot recognize the art as elucidatory of, or in any way
related to, the poetic language.
[Illustration: FIG. 5.]
[Illustration: V.
TOMB OF THE DOGES JACOPO AND LORENZO TIEPOLO.]
79. You will find, however, exactly the same kind of discrepancy between
early sculpture, and the languages of deed and thought, in the second
birth, and childhood, of the world, under Christianity. The same fair
thoughts and bright imaginations arise again; and, similarly, the fancy
is content with the rudest symbols by which they can be formalized to
the eyes. You cannot understand that the rigid figure (2) with checkers
or spots on its breast, and sharp lines of drapery to its feet, could
represent, to the Greek, the healing majesty of heaven: but can you any
better understand how a symbol so haggard as this (Fig. 5) could
represent to the noblest hearts of the Christian ages the power and
ministration of angels? Yet it not only did so, but retained in the rude
undulatory and linear ornamentation of its dress, record of the thoughts
intended to be conveyed by the spotted aegis and falling chiton of
Athena, eighteen hundred years before. Greek and Venetian alike, in
their noble childhood, knew with the same terror the coiling wind and
congealed hail in heaven--saw with the same thankfulness the dew shed
softly on the earth, and on its flowers; and both recognized, ruling
these, and symbolized by them, the great helpful spirit of Wisdom, which
leads the children of men to all knowledge, all courage, and all art.
80. Read the inscription written on the sarcophagus (Plate V.), at the
extremity of which this angel is sculptured. It stands in an open recess
in the rude brick wall of the west front of the church of St. John and
Paul at Venice, being the tomb of the two doges, father and son, Jacopo
and Lorenzo Tiepolo. This is the inscription:--
"Quos natura pares studiis, virtutibus, arte
Edidit, illustres genitor natusque, sepulti
Hac sub rupe Duces. Venetum charissima proles
Theupula collatis dedit hos celebranda triumphis.
Omnia presentis donavit predia templi
Dux Jacobus: valido fixit moderamine leges
Urbis, et ingratam redimens certamine Jadram
Dalmatiosque dedit patrie post, Marte subactas
Graiorum pelago maculavit sanguine classes.
Suscipit oblatos princeps Laurentius Istros,
Et domuit rigidos, ingenti strage cadentes,
Bononie populos. Hinc subdita Cervia cessit.
Fundavere vias pacis; fortique relicta
Re, superos sacris petierunt mentibus ambo.
Dominus Jachobus hobiit[20] M. CCLI. Dominus Laurentius hobiit
M. CCLXXVIII."
You see, therefore, this tomb is an invaluable example of
thirteenth-century sculpture in Venice. In Plate VI., you have an
example of the (coin) sculpture of the date accurately corresponding in
Greece to the thirteenth century in Venice, when the meaning of symbols
was everything, and the workmanship comparatively nothing. The upper
head is an Athena, of Athenian work in the seventh or sixth
century--(the coin itself may have been struck later, but the archaic
type was retained). The two smaller impressions below are the front and
obverse of a coin of the same age from Corinth, the head of Athena on
one side, and Pegasus, with the archaic Koppa, on the other. The smaller
head is bare, the hair being looped up at the back and closely bound
with an olive branch. You are to note this general outline of the head,
already given in a more finished type in Plate II., as a most important
elementary form in the finest sculpture, not of Greece only, but of all
Christendom. In the upper head the hair is restrained still more closely
by a round helmet, for the most part smooth, but embossed with a single
flower tendril, having one bud, one flower, and, above it, two olive
leaves. You have thus the most absolutely restricted symbol possible to
human thought of the power of Athena over the flowers and trees of the
earth. An olive leaf by itself could not have stood for the sign of a
tree, but the two can, when set in position of growth.
I would not give you the reverse of the coin on the same plate, because
you would have looked at it only, laughed at it, and not examined the
rest; but here it is, wonderfully engraved for you (Fig. 6): of it we
shall have more to say afterwards.
[Illustration: VI.
ARCHAIC ATHENA OF ATHENS AND CORINTH.]
81. And now as you look at these rude vestiges of the religion of
Greece, and at the vestiges still ruder, on the Ducal tomb, of the
religion of Christendom, take warning against two opposite errors.
There is a school of teachers who will tell you that nothing but Greek
art is deserving of study, and that all our work at this day should be
an imitation of it.
Whenever you feel tempted to believe them, think of these portraits of
Athena and her owl, and be assured that Greek art is not in all respects
perfect, nor exclusively deserving of imitation.
[Illustration: FIG. 6.]
There is another school of teachers who will tell you that Greek art is
good for nothing; that the soul of the Greek was outcast, and that
Christianity entirely superseded its faith, and excelled its works.
Whenever you feel tempted to believe _them_, think of this angel on the
tomb of Jacopo Tiepolo; and remember that Christianity, after it had
been twelve hundred years existent as an imaginative power on the earth,
could do no better work than this, though with all the former power of
Greece to help it; nor was able to engrave its triumph in having stained
its fleets in the seas of Greece with the blood of her people, but
between barbarous imitations of the pillars which that people had
invented.
82. Receiving these two warnings, receive also this lesson. In both
examples, childish though it be, this Heathen and Christian art is alike
sincere, and alike vividly imaginative: the actual work is that of
infancy; the thoughts, in their visionary simplicity, are also the
thoughts of infancy, but in their solemn virtue they are the thoughts of
men.
We, on the contrary, are now, in all that we do, absolutely without
sincerity;--absolutely, therefore, without imagination, and without
virtue. Our hands are dexterous with the vile and deadly dexterity of
machines; our minds filled with incoherent fragments of faith, which we
cling to in cowardice, without believing, and make pictures of in
vanity, without loving. False and base alike, whether we admire or
imitate, we cannot learn from the Heathen's art, but only pilfer it; we
cannot revive the Christian's art, but only galvanize it; we are, in the
sum of us, not human artists at all, but mechanisms of conceited clay,
masked in the furs and feathers of living creatures, and convulsed with
voltaic spasms, in mockery of animation.
83. You think, perhaps, that I am using terms unjustifiable in violence.
They would, indeed, be unjustifiable, if, spoken from this chair, they
were violent at all. They are, unhappily, temperate and
accurate,--except in shortcoming of blame. For we are not only impotent
to restore, but strong to defile, the work of past ages. Of the
impotence, take but this one, utterly humiliatory, and, in the full
meaning of it, ghastly, example. We have lately been busy embanking, in
the capital of the country, the river which, of all its waters, the
imagination of our ancestors had made most sacred, and the bounty of
nature most useful. Of all architectural features of the metropolis,
that embankment will be, in future, the most conspicuous; and in its
position and purpose it was the most capable of noble adornment.
For that adornment, nevertheless, the utmost which our modern poetical
imagination has been able to invent, is a row of gas-lamps. It has,
indeed, farther suggested itself to our minds as appropriate to
gas-lamps set beside a river, that the gas should come out of fishes'
tails; but we have not ingenuity enough to cast so much as a smelt or a
sprat for ourselves; so we borrow the shape of a Neapolitan marble,
which has been the refuse of the plate and candlestick shops in every
capital in Europe for the last fifty years. We cast _that_ badly, and
give luster to the ill-cast fish with lacquer in imitation of bronze. On
the base of their pedestals, towards the road, we put, for
advertisement's sake, the initials of the casting firm; and, for farther
originality and Christianity's sake, the caduceus of Mercury: and to
adorn the front of the pedestals, towards the river, being now wholly at
our wits' end, we can think of nothing better than to borrow the
door-knocker which--again for the last fifty years--has disturbed and
decorated two or three millions of London street-doors; and magnifying
the marvelous device of it, a lion's head with a ring in its mouth,
(still borrowed from the Greek,) we complete the embankment with a row
of heads and rings, on a scale which enables them to produce, at the
distance at which only they can be seen, the exact effect of a row of
sentry-boxes.
84. Farther. In the very center of the City, and at the point where the
Embankment commands a view of Westminster Abbey on one side, and of St.
Paul's on the other,--that is to say, at precisely the most important
and stately moment of its whole course,--it has to pass under one of the
arches of Waterloo Bridge, which, in the sweep of its curve, is as
vast--it alone--as the Rialto at Venice, and scarcely less seemly in
proportions. But over the Rialto, though of late and debased Venetian
work, there still reigns some power of human imagination: on the two
flanks of it are carved the Virgin and the Angel of the Annunciation; on
the keystone, the descending Dove. It is not, indeed, the fault of
living designers that the Waterloo arch is nothing more than a gloomy
and hollow heap of wedged blocks of blind granite. But just beyond the
damp shadow of it, the new Embankment is reached by a flight of stairs,
which are, in point of fact, the principal approach to it, afoot, from
central London; the descent from the very midst of the metropolis of
England to the banks of the chief river of England; and for this
approach, living designers _are_ answerable.
85. The principal decoration of the descent is again a gas-lamp, but a
shattered one, with a brass crown on the top of it, or, rather,
half-crown, and that turned the wrong way, the back of it to the river
and causeway, its flame supplied by a visible pipe far wandering along
the wall; the whole apparatus being supported by a rough cross-beam.
Fastened to the center of the arch above is a large placard, stating
that the Royal Humane Society's drags are in constant readiness, and
that their office is at 4, Trafalgar Square. On each side of the arch
are temporary, but dismally old and battered boardings, across two
angles capable of unseemly use by the British public. Above one of these
is another placard, stating that this is the Victoria Embankment. The
steps themselves--some forty of them--descend under a tunnel, which the
shattered gas-lamp lights by night, and nothing by day. They are covered
with filthy dust, shaken off from infinitude of filthy feet; mixed up
with shreds of paper, orange-peel, foul straw, rags, and cigar-ends, and
ashes; the whole agglutinated, more or less, by dry saliva into slippery
blotches and patches; or, when not so fastened, blown dismally by the
sooty wind hither and thither, or into the faces of those who ascend and
descend. The place is worth your visit, for you are not likely to find
elsewhere a spot which, either in costly and ponderous brutality of
building, or in the squalid and indecent accompaniment of it, is so far
separated from the peace and grace of nature, and so accurately
indicative of the methods of our national resistance to the Grace,
Mercy, and Peace of Heaven.
86. I am obliged always to use the English word 'Grace' in two senses,
but remember that the Greek [Greek: charis] includes them both (the
bestowing, that is to say, of Beauty and Mercy); and especially it
includes these in the passage of Pindar's first ode, which gives us the
key to the right interpretation of the power of sculpture in Greece. You
remember that I told you, in my Sixth Introductory Lecture (Sec. 151), that
the mythic accounts of Greek sculpture begin in the legends of the
family of Tantalus; and especially in the most grotesque legend of them
all, the inlaying of the ivory shoulder of Pelops. At that story Pindar
pauses,--not, indeed, without admiration, nor alleging any impossibility
in the circumstances themselves, but doubting the careless hunger of
Demeter,--and gives his own reading of the event, instead of the ancient
one. He justifies this to himself, and to his hearers, by the plea that
myths have, in some sort, or degree, ([Greek: pou ti],) led the mind of
mortals beyond the truth; and then he goes on:--
"Grace, which creates everything that is kindly and soothing for
mortals, adding honor, has often made things, at first untrustworthy,
become trustworthy through Love."
87. I cannot, except in these lengthened terms, give you the complete
force of the passage; especially of the [Greek: apiston emesato
piston]--"made it trustworthy by passionate desire that it should be
so"--which exactly describes the temper of religious persons at the
present day, who are kindly and sincere, in clinging to the forms of
faith which either have long been precious to themselves, or which they
feel to have been without question instrumental in advancing the dignity
of mankind. And it is part of the constitution of humanity--a part
which, above others, you are in danger of unwisely contemning under the
existing conditions of our knowledge, that the things thus sought for
belief with eager passion, do, indeed, become trustworthy to us; that,
to each of us, they verily become what we would have them; the force of
the [Greek: menis] and [Greek: mneme] with which we seek after them,
does, indeed, make them powerful to us for actual good or evil; and it
is thus granted to us to create not only with our hands things that
exalt or degrade our sight, but with our hearts also, things that exalt
or degrade our souls; giving true substance to all that we hoped for;
evidence to things that we have not seen, but have desired to see; and
calling, in the sense of creating, things that are not, as though they
were.
88. You remember that in distinguishing Imagination from Idolatry, I
referred[21] you to the forms of passionate affection with which a
noble people commonly regards the rivers and springs of its native land.
Some conception of personality, or of spiritual power in the stream, is
almost necessarily involved in such emotion; and prolonged [Greek:
charis], in the form of gratitude, the return of Love for benefits
continually bestowed, at last alike in all the highest and the simplest
minds, when they are honorable and pure, makes this untrue thing
trustworthy; [Greek: apiston emesato piston], until it becomes to them
the safe basis of some of the happiest impulses of their moral nature.
Next to the marbles of Verona, given you as a primal type of the
sculpture of Christianity, moved to its best energy in adorning the
entrance of its temples, I have not unwillingly placed, as your
introduction to the best sculpture of the religion of Greece, the forms
under which it represented the personality of the fountain Arethusa. But
without restriction to those days of absolute devotion, let me simply
point out to you how this untrue thing, made true by Love, has intimate
and heavenly authority even over the minds of men of the most practical
sense, the most shrewd wit, and the most severe precision of moral
temper. The fair vision of Sabrina in 'Comus,' the endearing and tender
promise, "Fies nobilium tu quoque fontium," and the joyful and proud
affection of the great Lombard's address to the lakes of his enchanted
land,--
"Te, Lari maxume, teque
Fluctibus et fremitu assurgens, Benace, marino,"
may surely be remembered by you with regretful piety, when you stand by
the blank stones which at once restrain and disgrace your native river,
as the final worship rendered to it by modern philosophy. But a little
incident which I saw last summer on its bridge at Wallingford, may put
the contrast of ancient and modern feeling before you still more
forcibly.
89. Those of you who have read with attention (none of us can read with
too much attention), Moliere's most perfect work, 'The Misanthrope,'
must remember Celimene's description of her lovers, and her excellent
reason for being unable to regard with any favor, "notre grand flandrin
de vicomte,--depuis que je l'ai vu, trois quarts d'heure durant, cracher
dans un puits pour faire des ronds." That sentence is worth noting, both
in contrast to the reverence paid by the ancients to wells and springs,
and as one of the most interesting traces of the extension of the
loathsome habit among the upper classes of Europe and America, which now
renders all external grace, dignity, and decency impossible in the
thoroughfares of their principal cities. In connection with that
sentence of Moliere's you may advisably also remember this fact, which I
chanced to notice on the bridge of Wallingford. I was walking from end
to end of it, and back again, one Sunday afternoon of last May, trying
to conjecture what had made this especial bend and ford of the Thames so
important in all the Anglo-Saxon wars. It was one of the few sunny
afternoons of the bitter spring, and I was very thankful for its light,
and happy in watching beneath it the flow and the glittering of the
classical river, when I noticed a well-dressed boy, apparently just out
of some orderly Sunday-school, leaning far over the parapet; watching,
as I conjectured, some bird or insect on the bridge-buttress. I went up
to him to see what he was looking at; but just as I got close to him, he
started over to the opposite parapet, and put himself there into the
same position, his object being, as I then perceived, to spit from both
sides upon the heads of a pleasure party who were passing in a boat
below.
90. The incident may seem to you too trivial to be noticed in this
place. To me, gentlemen, it was by no means trivial. It meant, in the
depth of it, such absence of all true [Greek: charis], reverence, and
intellect, as it is very dreadful to trace in the mind of any human
creature, much more in that of a child educated with apparently every
advantage of circumstance in a beautiful English country town, within
ten miles of our University. Most of all is it terrific when we regard
it as the exponent (and this, in truth, it is) of the temper which, as
distinguished from former methods, either of discipline or recreation,
the present tenor of our general teaching fosters in the mind of
youth;--teaching which asserts liberty to be a right, and obedience a
degradation; and which, regardless alike of the fairness of nature and
the grace of behavior, leaves the insolent spirit and degraded senses to
find their only occupation in malice, and their only satisfaction in
shame.
91. You will, I hope, proceed with me, not scornfully any more, to
trace, in the early art of a noble heathen nation, the feeling of what
was at least a better childishness than this of ours; and the efforts to
express, though with hands yet failing, and minds oppressed by ignorant
fantasy, the first truth by which they knew that they lived; the birth
of wisdom and of all her powers of help to man, as the reward of his
resolute labor.