Seventh Olympic. This ax-blow of Vulcan's was to the Greek mind truly
what Clytemnestra falsely asserts hers to have been, "[Greek: tes de
dexias cheros, ergon, dikaias tektonos]"; physically, it meant the
opening of the blue through the rent clouds of heaven, by the action of
local terrestrial heat (of Hephaestus as opposed to Apollo, who shines on
the surface of the upper clouds, but cannot pierce them); and,
spiritually, it meant the first birth of prudent thought out of rude
labor, the clearing-ax in the hand of the woodman being the practical
elementary sign of his difference from the wild animals of the wood.
Then he goes on, "From the high head of her Father, Athenaia rushing
forth, cried with her great and exceeding cry; and the Heaven trembled
at her, and the Earth Mother." The cry of Athena, I have before pointed
out, physically distinguishes her, as the spirit of the air, from silent
elemental powers; but in this grand passage of Pindar it is again the
mythic cry of which he thinks; that is to say, the giving articulate
words, by intelligence, to the silence of Fate. "Wisdom crieth aloud,
she uttereth her voice in the streets," and Heaven and Earth tremble at
her reproof.
93. Uttereth her voice in the "streets." For all men, that is to say;
but to what work did the Greeks think that her voice was to call them?
What was to be the impulse communicated by her prevailing presence; what
the sign of the people's obedience to her?
This was to be the sign--"But she, the goddess herself, gave to them to
prevail over the dwellers upon earth, _with best-laboring hands in every
art. And by their paths there were the likenesses of living and of
creeping things_; and the glory was deep. For to the cunning workman,
greater knowledge comes, undeceitful."
94. An infinitely pregnant passage, this, of which to-day you are to
note mainly these three things: First, that Athena is the goddess of
Doing, not at all of sentimental inaction. She is begotten, as it were,
of the woodman's ax; her purpose is never in a word only, but in a word
and a blow. She guides the hands that labor best, in every art.
95. Secondly. The victory given by Wisdom, the worker, to the hands that
labor best, is that the streets and ways, [Greek: keleuthoi], shall be
filled by likenesses of living and creeping things.
Things living, and creeping! Are the Reptile things not alive then? You
think Pindar wrote that carelessly? or that, if he had only known a
little modern anatomy, instead of 'reptile' things, he would have said
'monochondylous' things? Be patient, and let us attend to the main
points first.
Sculpture, it thus appears, is the only work of wisdom that the Greeks
care to speak of; they think it involves and crowns every other.
Image-making art; _this_ is Athena's, as queenliest of the arts.
Literature, the order and the strength of word, of course belongs to
Apollo and the Muses; under Athena are the Substances and the Forms of
things.
96. Thirdly. By this forming of Images there is to be gained a
'deep'--that is to say, a weighty, and prevailing, glory; not a floating
nor fugitive one. For to the cunning workman, greater knowledge comes,
'undeceitful.'
"[Greek: Daenti;]" I am forced to use two English words to translate
that single Greek one. The 'cunning' workman, thoughtful in experience,
touch, and vision of the thing to be done; no machine, witless, and of
necessary motion; yet not cunning only, but having perfect habitual
skill of hand also; the confirmed reward of truthful doing. Recollect,
in connection with this passage of Pindar, Homer's three verses about
getting the lines of ship-timber true, (Il. XV. 410):
"[Greek: 'All' hoste stathme dory neion exithynei
tektonos en palam si daemonos, hoo rha te pases
eu eide sophies, hypothemosynesin 'Athenes],"
and the beautiful epithet of Persephone,--"[Greek: daeira]," as the
Tryer and Knower of good work; and remembering these, trust Pindar for
the truth of his saying, that to the cunning workman--(and let me
solemnly enforce the words by adding--that to him _only_,) knowledge
comes undeceitful.
97. You may have noticed, perhaps, and with a smile, as one of the
paradoxes you often hear me blamed for too fondly stating, what I told
you in the close of my Third Introductory Lecture,[22] that "so far from
art's being immoral, little else except art is moral." I have now
farther to tell you, that little else, except art, is wise; that all
knowledge, unaccompanied by a habit of useful action, is too likely to
become deceitful, and that every habit of useful action must resolve
itself into some elementary practice of manual labor. And I would, in
all sober and direct earnestness, advise you, whatever may be the aim,
predilection, or necessity of your lives, to resolve upon this one thing
at least, that you will enable yourselves daily to do actually with your
hands, something that is useful to mankind. To do anything well with
your hands, useful or not; to be, even in trifling, [Greek: palamesi
daemon], is already much. When we come to examine the art of the Middle
Ages, I shall be able to show you that the strongest of all influences
of right then brought to bear upon character was the necessity for
exquisite manual dexterity in the management of the spear and bridle;
and in your own experience most of you will be able to recognize the
wholesome effect, alike on body and mind, of striving, within proper
limits of time, to become either good batsmen or good oarsmen. But the
bat and the racer's oar are children's toys. Resolve that you will be
men in usefulness, as well as in strength; and you will find that then
also, but not till then, you can become men in understanding; and that
every fine vision and subtle theorem will present itself to you
thence-forward undeceitfully, [Greek: hypothemosynesin Athenes].
98. But there is more to be gathered yet from the words of Pindar. He is
thinking, in his brief intense way, at once of Athena's work on the
soul, and of her literal power on the dust of the Earth. His "[Greek:
keleuthoi]" is a wide word, meaning all the paths of sea and land.
Consider, therefore, what Athena's own work _actually is_--in the
literal fact of it. The blue, clear air _is_ the sculpturing power upon
the earth and sea. Where the surface of the earth is reached by that,
and its matter and substance inspired with and filled by that, organic
form becomes possible. You must indeed have the sun, also, and moisture;
the kingdom of Apollo risen out of the sea: but the sculpturing of
living things, shape by shape, is Athena's, so that under the brooding
spirit of the air, what was without form, and void, brings forth the
moving creature that hath life.
99. That is her work then--the giving of Form; then the separately
Apolline work is the giving of Light; or, more strictly, Sight: giving
that faculty to the retina to which we owe not merely the idea of light,
but the existence of it; for light is to be defined only as the
sensation produced in the eye of an animal, under given conditions;
those same conditions being, to a stone, only warmth or chemical
influence, but not light. And that power of seeing, and the other
various personalities and authorities of the animal body, in pleasure
and pain, have never, hitherto, been, I do not say, explained, but in
anywise touched or approached by scientific discovery. Some of the
conditions of mere external animal form and of muscular vitality have
been shown; but for the most part that is true, even of external form,
which I wrote six years ago. "You may always stand by Form against
Force. To a painter, the essential character of anything is the form of
it, and the philosophers cannot touch that. They come and tell you, for
instance, that there is as much heat, or motion, or calorific energy (or
whatever else they like to call it), in a tea-kettle, as in a
gier-eagle. Very good: that is so, and it is very interesting. It
requires just as much heat as will boil the kettle, to take the
gier-eagle up to his nest, and as much more to bring him down again on a
hare or a partridge. But we painters, acknowledging the equality and
similarity of the kettle and the bird in all scientific respects,
attach, for our part, our principal interest to the difference in their
forms. For us, the primarily cognizable facts, in the two things, are,
that the kettle has a spout, and the eagle a beak; the one a lid on its
back, the other a pair of wings; not to speak of the distinction also of
volition, which the philosophers may properly call merely a form or mode
of force--but then, to an artist, the form or mode is the gist of the
business."[23]
100. As you will find that it is, not to the artist only, but to all of
us. The laws under which matter is collected and constructed are the
same throughout the universe: the substance so collected, whether for
the making of the eagle, or the worm, may be analyzed into gaseous
identity; a diffusive vital force, apparently so closely related to
mechanically measurable heat as to admit the conception of its being
itself mechanically measurable, and unchanging in total quantity, ebbs
and flows alike through the limbs of men and the fibers of insects. But,
above all this, and ruling every grotesque or degraded accident of this,
are two laws of beauty in form, and of nobility in character, which
stand in the chaos of creation between the Living and the Dead, to
separate the things that have in them a sacred and helpful, from those
that have in them an accursed and destroying, nature; and the power of
Athena, first physically put forth in the sculpturing of these [Greek:
zoa] and [Greek: herpeta], these living and reptile things, is put
forth, finally, in enabling the hearts of men to discern the one from
the other; to know the unquenchable fires of the Spirit from the
unquenchable fires of Death; and to choose, not unaided, between
submission to the Love that cannot end, or to the Worm that cannot die.
101. The unconsciousness of their antagonism is the most notable
characteristic of the modern scientific mind; and I believe no credulity
or fallacy admitted by the weakness (or it may sometimes rather have
been the strength) of early imagination, indicates so strange a
depression beneath the due scale of human intellect, as the failure of
the sense of beauty in form, and loss of faith in heroism of conduct,
which have become the curses of recent science,[24] art, and policy.
102. That depression of intellect has been alike exhibited in the mean
consternation confessedly felt on one side, and the mean triumph
apparently felt on the other, during the course of the dispute now
pending as to the origin of man. Dispute for the present not to be
decided, and of which the decision is, to persons in the modern temper
of mind, wholly without significance: and I earnestly desire that you,
my pupils, may have firmness enough to disengage your energies from
investigation so premature and so fruitless, and sense enough to
perceive that it does not matter how you have been made, so long as you
are satisfied with being what you are. If you are dissatisfied with
yourselves, it ought not to console, but humiliate you, to imagine that
you were once seraphs; and if you are pleased with yourselves, it is not
any ground of reasonable shame to you if, by no fault of your own, you
have passed through the elementary condition of apes.
103. Remember, therefore, that it is of the very highest importance that
you should know what you _are_, and determine to be the best that you
may be; but it is of no importance whatever, except as it may contribute
to that end, to know what you have been. Whether your Creator shaped
you with fingers, or tools, as a sculptor would a lump of clay, or
gradually raised you to manhood through a series of inferior forms, is
only of moment to you in this respect--that in the one case you cannot
expect your children to be nobler creatures than you are yourselves--in
the other, every act and thought of your present life may be hastening
the advent of a race which will look back to you, their fathers (and you
ought at least to have attained the dignity of desiring that it may be
so,) with incredulous disdain.
104. But that you _are_ yourselves capable of that disdain and dismay;
that you are ashamed of having been apes, if you ever were so; that you
acknowledge, instinctively, a relation of better and worse, and a law
respecting what is noble and base, which makes it no question to you
that the man is worthier than the baboon,--_this_ is a fact of infinite
significance. This law of preference in your hearts is the true essence
of your being, and the consciousness of that law is a more positive
existence than any dependent on the coherence or forms of matter.
105. Now, but a few words more of mythology, and I have done. Remember
that Athena holds the weaver's shuttle, not merely as an instrument of
_texture_, but as an instrument of _picture_; the ideas of clothing, and
of the warmth of life, being thus inseparably connected with those of
graphic beauty, and the brightness of life. I have told you that no art
could be recovered among us without perfectness in dress, nor without
the elementary graphic art of women, in divers colors of needlework.
There has been no nation of any art-energy, but has strenuously occupied
and interested itself in this household picturing, from the web of
Penelope to the tapestry of Queen Matilda, and the meshes of Arras and
Gobelins.
106. We should then naturally ask what kind of embroidery Athena put on
her own robe; "[Greek: peplon heanon, poikilon, hon r' aute poiesato kai
kame chersin]."
The subject of that [Greek: poikilia] of hers, as you know, was the war
of the giants and gods. Now the real name of these giants, remember, is
that used by Hesiod, '[Greek: pelogonoi],' 'mud-begotten,' and the
meaning of the contest between these and Zeus, [Greek: pelogonon
elater], is, again, the inspiration of life into the clay, by the
goddess of breath; and the actual confusion going on visibly before you,
daily, of the earth, heaping itself into cumbrous war with the powers
above it.
107. Thus, briefly, the entire material of Art, under Athena's hand, is
the contest of life with clay; and all my task in explaining to you the
early thought of both the Athenian and Tuscan schools will only be the
tracing of this battle of the giants into its full heroic form, when,
not in tapestry only, but in sculpture, and on the portal of the Temple
of Delphi itself, you have the "[Greek: klonos en teichesi lainoisi
giganton]," and their defeat hailed by the passionate cry of delight
from the Athenian maids, beholding Pallas in her full power, "[Greek:
leusso Pallad' eman theon]," my own goddess. All our work, I repeat,
will be nothing but the inquiry into the development of this one
subject, and the pressing fully home the question of Plato about that
embroidery--"And think you that there is verily war with each other
among the Gods? and dreadful enmities and battles, such as the poets
have told, and such as our painters set forth in graven scripture, to
adorn all our sacred rites and holy places; yes, and in the great
Panathenaea themselves, the Peplus, full of such wild picturing, is
carried up into the Acropolis--shall we say that these things are true,
oh Euthuphron, right-minded friend?"
108. Yes, we say, and know, that these things are true; and true
forever: battles of the gods, not among themselves, but against the
earth-giants. Battle prevailing age by age, in nobler life and lovelier
imagery; creation, which no theory of mechanism, no definition of force,
can explain, the adoption and completing of individual form by
individual animation, breathed out of the lips of the Father of Spirits.
And to recognize the presence in every knitted shape of dust, by which
it lives and moves and has its being--to recognize it, revere, and show
it forth, is to be our eternal Idolatry.
"Thou shalt not bow down to them, nor worship them."
"Assuredly no," we answered once, in our pride; and through porch and
aisle, broke down the carved work thereof, with axes and hammers.
Who would have thought the day so near when we should bow down to
worship, not the creatures, but their atoms,--not the forces that form,
but those that dissolve them? Trust me, gentlemen, the command which is
stringent against adoration of brutality, is stringent no less against
adoration of chaos, nor is faith in an image fallen from heaven to be
reformed by a faith only in the phenomenon of decadence. We have ceased
from the making of monsters to be appeased by sacrifice;--it is
well,--if indeed we have also ceased from making them in our thoughts.
We have learned to distrust the adorning of fair fantasms, to which we
once sought for succor;--it is well, if we learn to distrust also the
adorning of those to which we seek, for temptation; but the verity of
gains like these can only be known by our confession of the divine seal
of strength and beauty upon the tempered frame, and honor in the fervent
heart, by which, increasing visibly, may yet be manifested to us the
holy presence, and the approving love, of the Loving God, who visits the
iniquities of the Fathers upon the Children, unto the third and fourth
generation of them that hate Him, and shows mercy unto thousands of them
that love Him, and keep His Commandments.
FOOTNOTES:
[16] I shall be obliged in future Lectures, as hitherto in my other
writings, to use the terms Idolatry and Imagination in a more
comprehensive sense; but here I use them for convenience' sake,
limitedly, to avoid the continual occurrence of the terms noble and
ignoble, or false and true, with reference to modes of conception.
[17] "And in sum, he himself (Prometheus) was the master-maker, and
Athena worked together with him, breathing into the clay, and caused the
molded things to have soul (psyche) in them."--LUCIAN, _Prometheus._
[18] His relations with the two great Titans, Themis and Mnemosyne,
belong to another group of myths. The father of Athena is the lower and
nearer physical Zeus, from whom Metis, the mother of Athena, long
withdraws and disguises herself.
[19] _Ante_, Sec. 30.
[20] The Latin verses are of later date; the contemporary plain prose
retains the Venetian gutturals and aspirates.
[21] _Ante_, Sec. 44.
[22] "Lectures on Art," Sec. 95.
[23] "Ethics of the Dust," Lecture X.
[24] The best modern illustrated scientific works show perfect faculty
of representing monkeys, lizards, and insects; absolute incapability of
representing either a man, a horse, or a lion.
LECTURE IV.
LIKENESS.
_November, 1870._
109. You were probably vexed, and tired, towards the close of my last
Lecture, by the time it took us to arrive at the apparently simple
conclusion that sculpture must only represent organic form, and the
strength of life in its contest with matter. But it is no small thing to
have that "[Greek: leusso Pallada]" fixed in your minds, as the one
necessary sign by which you are to recognize right sculpture; and,
believe me, you will find it the best of all things, if you can take for
yourselves the saying from the lips of the Athenian maids, in its
entirety, and say also--[Greek: leusso Pallad' eman theon]. I proceed
to-day into the practical appliance of this apparently speculative, but
in reality imperative, law.
110. You observe, I have hitherto spoken of the power of Athena, as over
painting no less than sculpture. But her rule over both arts is only so
far as they are zoographic;--representative, that is to say, of animal
life, or of such order and discipline among other elements, as may
invigorate and purify it. Now there is a speciality of the art of
painting beyond this, namely, the representation of phenomena of color
and shadow, as such, without question of the nature of the things that
receive them. I am now accordingly obliged to speak of sculpture and
painting as distinct arts: but the laws which bind sculpture, bind no
less the painting of the higher schools, which has, for its main
purpose, the showing beauty in human or animal form; and which is
therefore placed by the Greeks equally under the rule of Athena, as the
Spirit, first, of Life, and then of Wisdom in conduct.
111. First, I say, you are to 'see Pallas' in all such work, as the
Queen of Life; and the practical law which follows from this, is one of
enormous range and importance, namely, that nothing must be represented
by sculpture, external to any living form, which does not help to
enforce or illustrate the conception of life. Both dress and armor may
be made to do this, by great sculptors, and are continually so used by
the greatest. One of the essential distinctions between the Athenian and
Florentine schools is dependent on their treatment of drapery in this
respect; an Athenian always sets it to exhibit the action of the body,
by flowing with it, or over it, or from it, so as to illustrate both its
form and gesture; a Florentine, on the contrary, always uses his drapery
to conceal or disguise the forms of the body, and exhibit mental
emotion; but both use it to enhance the life, either of the body or
soul; Donatello and Michael Angelo, no less than the sculptors of Gothic
chivalry, ennoble armor in the same way; but base sculptors carve
drapery and armor for the sake of their folds and picturesqueness only,
and forget the body beneath. The rule is so stern, that all delight in
mere incidental beauty, which painting often triumphs in, is wholly
forbidden to sculpture;--for instance, in _painting_ the branch of a
tree, you may rightly represent and enjoy the lichens and moss on it,
but a sculptor must not touch one of them: they are inessential to the
tree's life,--he must give the flow and bending of the branch only, else
he does not enough 'see Pallas' in it.
Or, to take a higher instance, here is an exquisite little painted poem,
by Edward Frere; a cottage interior, one of the thousands which within
the last two months[25] have been laid desolate in unhappy France. Every
accessory in the painting is of value--the fireside, the tiled floor,
the vegetables lying upon it, and the basket hanging from the roof. But
not one of these accessories would have been admissible in sculpture.
You must carve nothing but what has life. "Why?" you probably feel
instantly inclined to ask me.--You see the principle we have got,
instead of being blunt or useless, is such an edged tool that you are
startled the moment I apply it. "Must we refuse every pleasant accessory
and picturesque detail, and petrify nothing but living creatures?" Even
so: I would not assert it on my own authority. It is the Greeks who say
it, but whatever they say of sculpture, be assured, is true.