to-day of music)--the operation of formative art on religious creed is
essentially twofold; the realisation, to the eyes, of imagined spiritual
persons; and the limitation of their imagined presence to certain
places. We will examine these two functions of it successively.
50. And first, consider accurately what the agency of art is, in
realising, to the sight, our conceptions of spiritual persons.
For instance. Assume that we believe that the Madonna is always present
to hear and answer our prayers. Assume also that this is true. I think
that persons in a perfectly honest, faithful, and humble temper, would
in that case desire only to feel so much of the Divine presence as the
spiritual Power herself chose to make felt; and, above all things, not
to think they saw, or knew, anything except what might be truly
perceived or known.
But a mind imperfectly faithful, and impatient in its distress, or
craving in its dulness for a more distinct and convincing sense of the
Divinity, would endeavour to complete, or perhaps we should rather say
to contract, its conception, into the definite figure of a woman wearing
a blue or crimson dress, and having fair features, dark eyes, and
gracefully arranged hair.
Suppose, after forming such a conception, that we have the power to
realise and preserve it, this image of a beautiful figure with a
pleasant expression cannot but have the tendency of afterwards leading
us to think of the Virgin as present, when she is not actually present;
or as pleased with us, when she is not actually pleased; or if we
resolutely prevent ourselves from such imagination, nevertheless the
existence of the image beside us will often turn our thoughts towards
subjects of religion, when otherwise they would have been differently
occupied; and, in the midst of other occupations, will familiarise more
or less, and even mechanically associate with common or faultful states
of mind, the appearance of the supposed Divine person.
51. There are thus two distinct operations upon our mind: first, the art
makes us believe what we would not otherwise have believed; and
secondly, it makes us think of subjects we should not otherwise have
thought of, intruding them amidst our ordinary thoughts in a confusing
and familiar manner. We cannot with any certainty affirm the advantage
or the harm of such accidental pieties, for their effect will be very
different on different characters: but, without any question, the art,
which makes us believe what we would not have otherwise believed, is
misapplied, and in most instances very dangerously so. Our duty is to
believe in the existence of Divine, or any other, persons, only upon
rational proofs of their existence; and not because we have seen
pictures of them.[8]
[Footnote 8: I have expunged a sentence insisting farther on this point,
having come to reverence more, as I grew older, every simple means of
stimulating all religious belief and affection. It is the lower and
realistic world which is fullest of false beliefs and vain loves.]
52. But now observe, it is here necessary to draw a distinction, so
subtle that in dealing with facts it is continually impossible to mark
it with precision, yet so vital, that not only your understanding of the
power of art, but the working of your minds in matters of primal moment
to you, depends on the effort you make to affirm this distinction
strongly. The art which realises a creature of the imagination is only
mischievous when that realisation is conceived to imply, or does
practically induce a belief in, the real existence of the imagined
personage, contrary to, or unjustified by the other evidence of its
existence. But if the art only represents the personage on the
understanding that its form is imaginary, then the effort at realisation
is healthful and beneficial.
For instance, the Greek design of Apollo crossing the sea to Delphi,
which is one of the most interesting of Le Normant's series, so far as
it is only an expression, under the symbol of a human form, of what may
be rightly imagined respecting the solar power, is right and ennobling;
but so far as it conveyed to the Greek the idea of there being a real
Apollo, it was mischievous, whether there be, or be not, a real Apollo.
If there is no real Apollo, then the art was mischievous because it
deceived; but if there is a real Apollo, then it was still more
mischievous,[9] for it not only began the degradation of the image of
that true god into a decoration for niches, and a device for seals; but
prevented any true witness being borne to his existence. For if the
Greeks, instead of multiplying representations of what they imagined to
be the figure of the god, had given us accurate drawings of the heroes
and battles of Marathon and Salamis, and had simply told us in plain
Greek what evidence they had of the power of Apollo, either through his
oracles, his help or chastisement, or by immediate vision, they would
have served their religion more truly than by all the vase-paintings and
fine statues that ever were buried or adored.
53. Now in this particular instance, and in many other examples of fine
Greek art, the two conditions of thought, symbolic and realistic, are
mingled; and the art is helpful, as I will hereafter show you, in one
function, and in the other so deadly, that I think no degradation of
conception of Deity has ever been quite so base as that implied by the
designs of Greek vases in the period of decline, say about 250 B. C.
[Footnote 9: I am again doubtful, here. The most important part of the
chapter is from § 60 to end.]
But though among the Greeks it is thus nearly always difficult to say
what is symbolic and what realistic, in the range of Christian art the
distinction is clear. In that, a vast division of imaginative work is
occupied in the symbolism of virtues, vices, or natural powers or
passions; and in the representation of personages who, though nominally
real, become in conception symbolic. In the greater part of this work
there is no intention of implying the existence of the represented
creature; Dürer's Melencolia and Giotto's Justice are accurately
characteristic examples. Now all such art is wholly good and useful when
it is the work of good men.
54. Again, there is another division of Christian work in which the
persons represented, though nominally real, are treated as
dramatis-personæ of a poem, and so presented confessedly as subjects of
imagination. All this poetic art is also good when it is the work of
good men.
55. There remains only therefore to be considered, as truly religious,
the work which definitely implies and modifies the conception of the
existence of a real person. There is hardly any great art which entirely
belongs to this class; but Raphael's Madonna della Seggiola is as
accurate a type of it as I can give you; Holbein's Madonna at Dresden,
the Madonna di San Sisto, and the Madonna of Titian's Assumption, all
belong mainly to this class, but are removed somewhat from it (as, I
repeat, nearly all great art is) into the poetical one. It is only the
bloody crucifixes and gilded virgins and other such lower forms of
imagery (by which, to the honour of the English Church, it has been
truly claimed for her, that "she has never appealed to the madness or
dulness of her people,") which belong to the realistic class in strict
limitation, and which properly constitute the type of it.
There is indeed an important school of sculpture in Spain, directed to
the same objects, but not demanding at present any special attention.
And finally, there is the vigorous and most interesting realistic school
of our own, in modern times, mainly known to the public by Holman Hunt's
picture of the Light of the World, though, I believe, deriving its first
origin from the genius of the painter to whom you owe also the revival
of interest, first here in Oxford, and then universally, in the cycle of
early English legend,--Dante Rossetti.
56. The effect of this realistic art on the religious mind of Europe
varies in scope more than any other art power; for in its higher
branches it touches the most sincere religious minds, affecting an
earnest class of persons who cannot be reached by merely poetical
design; while, in its lowest, it addresses itself not only to the most
vulgar desires for religious excitement, but to the mere thirst for
sensation of horror which characterises the uneducated orders of
partially civilised countries; nor merely to the thirst for horror, but
to the strange love of death, as such, which has sometimes in Catholic
countries showed itself peculiarly by the endeavour to paint the images
in the chapels of the Sepulchre so as to look deceptively like corpses.
The same morbid instinct has also affected the minds of many among the
more imaginative and powerful artists with a feverish gloom which
distorts their finest work; and lastly--and this is the worst of all its
effects--it has occupied the sensibility of Christian women,
universally, in lamenting the sufferings of Christ, instead of
preventing those of His people.
57. When any of you next go abroad, observe, and consider the meaning
of, the sculptures and paintings, which of every rank in art, and in
every chapel and cathedral, and by every mountain path, recall the
hours, and represent the agonies, of the Passion of Christ: and try to
form some estimate of the efforts that have been made by the four arts
of eloquence, music, painting, and sculpture, since the twelfth century,
to wring out of the hearts of women the last drops of pity that could be
excited for this merely physical agony: for the art nearly always dwells
on the physical wounds or exhaustion chiefly, and degrades, far more
than it animates, the conception of pain.
Then try to conceive the quantity of time, and of excited and thrilling
emotion, which have been wasted by the tender and delicate women of
Christendom during these last six hundred years, in thus picturing to
themselves, under the influence of such imagery, the bodily pain, long
since passed, of One Person:--which, so far as they indeed conceived it
to be sustained by a Divine Nature, could not for that reason have been
less endurable than the agonies of any simple human death by torture:
and then try to estimate what might have been the better result, for the
righteousness and felicity of mankind, if these same women had been
taught the deep meaning of the last words that were ever spoken by their
Master to those who had ministered to Him of their substance: "Daughters
of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your
children." If they had but been taught to measure with their pitiful
thoughts the tortures of battle-fields--the slowly consuming plagues of
death in the starving children, and wasted age, of the innumerable
desolate those battles left;--nay, in our own life of peace, the agony
of unnurtured, untaught, unhelped creatures, awaking at the grave's edge
to know how they should have lived; and the worse pain of those whose
existence, not the ceasing of it, is death; those to whom the cradle was
a curse, and for whom the words they cannot hear, "ashes to ashes," are
all that they have ever received of benediction. These,--you who would
fain have wept at His feet, or stood by His cross,--these you have
always with you! Him, you have not always.
58. The wretched in death you have always with you. Yes, and the brave
and good in life you have always;--these also needing help, though you
supposed they had only to help others; these also claiming to be thought
for, and remembered. And you will find, if you look into history with
this clue, that one of quite the chief reasons for the continual misery
of mankind is that they are always divided in their worship between
angels or saints, who are out of their sight, and need no help, and
proud and evil-minded men, who are too definitely in their sight, and
ought not to have their help. And consider how the arts have thus
followed the worship of the crowd. You have paintings of saints and
angels, innumerable;--of petty courtiers, and contemptible or cruel
kings, innumerable. Few, how few you have, (but these, observe, almost
always by great painters) of the best men, or of their actions. But
think for yourselves,--I have no time now to enter upon the mighty
field, nor imagination enough to guide me beyond the threshold of
it,--think, what history might have been to us now;--nay, what a
different history that of all Europe might have become, if it had but
been the object both of the people to discern, and of their arts to
honour and bear record of, the great deeds of their worthiest men. And
if, instead of living, as they have always hitherto done, in a hellish
cloud of contention and revenge, lighted by fantastic dreams of cloudy
sanctities, they had sought to reward and punish justly, wherever reward
and punishment were due, but chiefly to reward; and at least rather to
bear testimony to the human acts which deserved God's anger or His
blessing, than only, in presumptuous imagination, to display the secrets
of Judgment, or the beatitudes of Eternity.
59. Such I conceive generally, though indeed with good arising out of
it, for every great evil brings some good in its backward eddies--such I
conceive to have been the deadly function of art in its ministry to
what, whether in heathen or Christian lands, and whether in the
pageantry of words, or colours, or fair forms, is truly, and in the deep
sense, to be called (idolatry)--the serving with the best of our hearts
and minds, some dear or sad fantasy which we have made for ourselves,
while we disobey the present call of the Master, who is not dead, and
who is not now fainting under His cross, but requiring us to take up
ours.
60. I pass to the second great function of religious art, the limitation
of the idea of Divine presence to particular localities. It is of course
impossible within my present limits to touch upon this power of art, as
employed on the temples of the gods of various religions; we will
examine that on future occasions. To-day, I want only to map out main
ideas, and I can do this best by speaking exclusively of this localising
influence as it affects our own faith.
Observe first, that the localisation is almost entirely dependent upon
human art. You must at least take a stone and set it up for a pillar, if
you are to mark the place, so as to know it again, where a vision
appeared. A persecuted people, needing to conceal their places of
worship, may perform every religious ceremony first under one crag of
the hill-side, and then under another, without invalidating the
sacredness of the rites or sacraments thus administered. It is,
therefore, we all acknowledge, inessential, that a particular spot
should be surrounded with a ring of stones, or enclosed within walls of
a certain style of architecture, and so set apart as the only place
where such ceremonies may be properly performed; and it is thus less by
any direct appeal to experience or to reason, but in consequence of the
effect upon our senses produced by the architecture, that we receive the
first strong impressions of what we afterwards contend for as absolute
truth. I particularly wish you to notice how it is always by help of
human art that such a result is attained, because, remember always, I am
neither disputing nor asserting the truth of any theological
doctrine;--that is not my province;--I am only questioning the
expediency of enforcing that doctrine by the help of architecture. Put a
rough stone for an altar under the hawthorn on a village
green;--separate a portion of the green itself with an ordinary paling
from the rest;--then consecrate, with whatever form you choose, the
space of grass you have enclosed, and meet within the wooden fence as
often as you desire to pray or preach; yet you will not easily fasten an
impression in the minds of the villagers, that God inhabits the space of
grass inside the fence, and does not extend His presence to the common
beyond it: and that the daisies and violets on one side of the railing
are holy,--on the other, profane. But, instead of a wooden fence, build
a wall, pave the interior space; roof it over, so as to make it
comparatively dark;--and you may persuade the villagers with ease that
you have built a house which Deity inhabits, or that you have become, in
the old French phrase, a "logeur du Bon Dieu."
61. And farther, though I have no desire to introduce any question as to
the truth of what we thus architecturally teach, I would desire you most
strictly to determine what is intended to be taught.
Do not think I underrate--I am among the last men living who would
underrate,--the importance of the sentiments connected with their church
to the population of a pastoral village. I admit, in its fullest extent,
the moral value of the scene, which is almost always one of perfect
purity and peace; and of the sense of supernatural love and protection,
which fills and surrounds the low aisles and homely porch. But the
question I desire earnestly to leave with you is, whether all the earth
ought not to be peaceful and pure, and the acknowledgment of the Divine
protection, as universal as its reality? That in a mysterious way the
presence of Deity is vouchsafed where it is sought, and withdrawn where
it is forgotten, must of course be granted as the first postulate in the
enquiry: but the point for our decision is just this, whether it ought
always to be sought in one place only, and forgotten in every other.
It may be replied, that since it is impossible to consecrate the entire
space of the earth, it is better thus to secure a portion of it than
none: but surely, if so, we ought to make some effort to enlarge the
favoured ground, and even look forward to a time when in English
villages there may be a God's acre tenanted by the living, not the
dead; and when we shall rather look with aversion and fear to the
remnant of ground that is set apart as profane, than with reverence to a
narrow portion of it enclosed as holy.
62. But now, farther. Suppose it be admitted that by enclosing ground
with walls, and performing certain ceremonies there habitually, some
kind of sanctity is indeed secured within that space,--still the
question remains open whether it be advisable for religious purposes to
decorate the enclosure. For separation the mere walls would be enough.
What is the purpose of your decoration?
Let us take an instance--the most noble with which I am acquainted, the
Cathedral of Chartres. You have there the most splendid coloured glass,
and the richest sculpture, and the grandest proportions of building,
united to produce a sensation of pleasure and awe. We profess that this
is to honour the Deity; or, in other words, that it is pleasing to Him
that we should delight our eyes with blue and golden colours, and
solemnise our spirits by the sight of large stones laid one on another,
and ingeniously carved.
63. I do not think it can be doubted that it _is_ pleasing to Him when
we do this; for He has Himself prepared for us, nearly every morning and
evening, windows painted with Divine art, in blue and gold and
vermilion: windows lighted from within by the lustre of that heaven
which we may assume, at least with more certainty than any consecrated
ground, to be one of His dwelling-places. Again, in every mountain side,
and cliff of rude sea shore, He has heaped stones one upon another of
greater magnitude than those of Chartres Cathedral, and sculptured them
with floral ornament,--surely not less sacred because living?
64. Must it not then be only because we love our own work better than
His, that we respect the lucent glass, but not the lucent clouds; that
we weave embroidered robes with ingenious fingers, and make bright the
gilded vaults we have beautifully ordained--while yet we have not
considered the heavens, the work of His fingers, nor the stars of the
strange vault which He has ordained? And do we dream that by carving
fonts and lifting pillars in His honour, who cuts the way of the rivers
among the rocks, and at whose reproof the pillars of the earth are
astonished, we shall obtain pardon for the dishonour done to the hills
and streams by which He has appointed our dwelling-place;--for the
infection of their sweet air with poison;--for the burning up of their
tender grass and flowers with fire, and for spreading such a shame of
mixed luxury and misery over our native land, as if we laboured only
that, at least here in England, we might be able to give the lie to the
song, whether of the Cherubim above, or Church beneath--"Holy, holy,
Lord God of all creatures; Heaven--_and Earth_--are full of Thy glory"?
65. And how much more there is that I long to say to you; and how much,
I hope, that you would like to answer to me, or to question me of! But I
can say no more to-day. We are not, I trust, at the end of our talks or
thoughts together; but, if it were so, and I never spoke to you more,
this that I have said to you I should have been glad to have been
permitted to say; and this, farther, which is the sum of it,--That we
may have splendour of art again, and with that, we may truly praise and
honour our Maker, and with that set forth the beauty and holiness of all
that He has made: but only after we have striven with our whole hearts
first to sanctify the temple of the body and spirit of every child that
has no roof to cover its head from the cold, and no walls to guard its
soul from corruption, in this our English land.
One word more.
What I have suggested hitherto, respecting the relations of Art to
Religion, you must receive throughout as merely motive of thought;
though you must have well seen that my own convictions were established
finally on some of the points in question. But I must, in conclusion,
tell you something that I _know_;--which, if you truly labour, you will
one day know also; and which I trust some of you will believe, now.
During the minutes in which you have been listening to me, I suppose
that almost at every other sentence those whose habit of mind has been
one of veneration for established forms and faiths, must have been in
dread that I was about to say, or in pang of regret at my having said,
what seemed to them an irreverent or reckless word touching vitally
important things.
So far from this being the fact, it is just because the feelings that I
most desire to cultivate in your minds are those of reverence and
admiration, that I am so earnest to prevent you from being moved to
either by trivial or false semblances. _This_ is the thing which I
KNOW--and which, if you labour faithfully, you shall know also,--that in
Reverence is the chief joy and power of life;--Reverence, for what is
pure and bright in your own youth; for what is true and tried in the age
of others; for all that is gracious among the living,--great among the
dead,--and marvellous, in the Powers that cannot die.
LECTURE III
THE RELATION OF ART TO MORALS
66. You probably recollect that, in the beginning of my last lecture, it
was stated that fine art had, and could have, but three functions: the
enforcing of the religious sentiments of men, the perfecting their
ethical state, and the doing them material service. We have to-day to
examine, the mode of its action in the second power--that of perfecting
the morality, or ethical state, of men.
Perfecting, observe--not producing.
You must have the right moral state first, or you cannot have the art.
But when the art is once obtained, its reflected action enhances and
completes the moral state out of which it arose, and, above all,
communicates the exultation to other minds which are already morally
capable of the like.
67. For instance, take the art of singing, and the simplest perfect
master of it (up to the limits of his nature) whom you can find;--a
skylark. From him you may learn what it is to "sing for joy." You must
get the moral state first, the pure gladness, then give it finished
expression; and it is perfected in itself, and made communicable to
other creatures capable of such joy. But it is incommunicable to those
who are not prepared to receive it.