know you must partly think I am jesting with you. I feel indeed some
disposition to smile myself; not because I jest, but in the sense of
contrast between what, logically, it seems, ought to be; and what we
must confess, not jestingly, to be the facts. How great also,--how
quaint, the confusion of sentiment in our minds, as to this matter! We
continually talk of honouring God with our buildings; and yet, we dare
not say, boldly, that, in His sight, we in the least expect to honour
ourselves by them! And admitting, though I by no means feel disposed to
admit, that here and there we may, at present, be honouring Him by work
that is worthy of the nature He gave us, in how many places, think you,
are we offending Him by work that is disgraceful to it?
56. Let me return, yet for an instant, to my bird and her nest. If not
actually complacent and exultant in her architecture, we may at least
imagine that she, and her mate, and the choir they join with, cannot but
be complacent and exultant in their song. I gave you, in a former
lecture, the skylark as a type of mastership in music; and
remembering--some of you, I suppose, are not likely soon to forget,--the
saint to whom yesterday was dedicated, let me read to you to-day some of
the prettiest English words in which our natural feeling about such song
is expressed.
"And anone, as I the day espide,
No lenger would I in my bed abide,
But unto a wood that was fast by,
I went forth alone boldely,
And held the way downe by a brook side,
Till I came to a laund of white and green,
So faire one had I never in been,
The ground was green, ypoudred with daisie,
The floures and the greves like hie,
All greene and white, was nothing els seene.
There sat I downe among the faire flours,
And saw the birds trip out of hir hours,
There as they rested hem all the night,
They were so joyfull of the dayes light,
They began of May for to done honours.
They coud that service all by rote,
There was many a lovely note,
Some sang loud, as they had plained,
And some in other manner voice yfained,
And some all out with the full throte.
They proyned hem and made hem right gay,
And daunceden and lepten on the spray,
And evermore two and two in fere,
Right so as they had chosen hem to yere
In Feverere, upon saint Valentines day."
You recollect, perhaps, the dispute that follows between the cuckoo and
the nightingale, and the promise which the sweet singer makes to Chaucer
for rescuing her.
"And then came the Nightingale to me
And said Friend, forsooth I thanke thee
That thou hast liked me to rescue,
And one avow to Love make I now
That all this May, I will thy singer be.
I thanked her, and was right well apaied,
Yea, quoth she, and be not thou dismaied,
Tho' thou have heard the cuckoo erst than me;
For, if I live, it shall amended be,
The next May, if I be not affraied."
"If I be not affraied." Would she not put the "if" more timidly now, in
making the same promise to any of you, or in asking for the judgment
between her and her enemy, which was to be past, do you remember, on
this very day of the year, so many years ago, and within eight miles of
this very spot?
"And this shall be without any Nay
On the morrow after St. Valentine's day,
Under a maple that is faire and green
Before the chamber window of the Queen
At Woodstoke, upon the greene lawn.
She thanked them, and then her leave took
And into an hawthorn by that broke.
And there she sate, and sang upon that tree
'_Terme of life love hath withheld me_'
So loud, that I with that song awoke."
57. "Terme of life love hath withheld me!" Alas, how have we men
reversed this song of the nightingale! so that our words must be "Terme
of life, hatred hath withheld me."
This, then, was the old English science of the song of birds; and
perhaps you are indignant with me for bringing any word of it back to
you? You have, I doubt not, your new science of song, as of
nest-building: and I am happy to think you could all explain to me, or
at least you will be able to do so before you pass your natural science
examination, how, by the accurate connection of a larynx with a bill,
and by the action of heat, originally derived from the sun, upon the
muscular fibre, an undulatory motion is produced in the larynx, and an
opening and shutting one in the bill, which is accompanied, necessarily,
by a piping sound.
58. I will not dispute your statement; still less do I wish to answer
for the absolute truth of Chaucer's. You will find that the complete
truth embraces great part of both; and that you may study, at your
choice, in any singing bird, the action of universal heat on a
marvellous mechanism, or of individual life, on a frame capable of
exquisite passion. But the point I wish you to consider is the relation
to this lower creature's power, of your own human agencies in the
production of sound, where you can best unite in its harmony.
59. I had occasion only the other day to wait for half an hour at the
bottom of Ludgate Hill. Standing as much out of the way as I could,
under the shadow of the railroad bridge, I watched the faces, all eager,
many anxious, and some intensely gloomy, of the hurried passers by; and
listened to the ceaseless crashing, whistling, and thundering sounds
which mingled with the murmur of their steps and voices. And in the
midst of the continuous roar, which differed only from that of the
wildest sea in storm by its complexity and its discordance, I was
wondering, if the sum of what all these people were doing, or trying to
do, in the course of the day, could be made manifest, what it would come
to.
60. The sum of it would be, I suppose, that they had all contrived to
live through the day in that exceedingly unpleasant manner, and that
nothing serious had occurred to prevent them from passing the following
day likewise. Nay, I knew also that what appeared in their way of life
painful to me, might be agreeable to them; and it chanced, indeed, a
little while afterwards, that an active and prosperous man of business,
speaking to one of my friends of the disappointment he had felt in a
visit to Italy, remarked, especially, that he was not able to endure
more than three days at Venice, because there was no noise there.
61. But, granting the contentment of the inhabitants of London in
consistently producing these sounds, how shall we say this vocal and
instrumental art of theirs may compare, in the scheme of Nature, with
the vocal art of lower animals? We may indeed rank the danger-whistle of
the engines on the bridge as an excruciating human improvement on that
of the marmot; and the trampling of feet and grinding of wheels, as the
human accentuation of the sounds produced by insects, by the friction of
their wings or thighs against their sides: but, even in this comparison,
it may cause us some humiliation to note that the cicada and the
cricket, when pleased to sing in their vibratory manner, have leisure
to rest in their delight; and that the flight of the firefly is silent.
But how will the sounds we produce compare with the song of birds? This
London is the principal nest of men in the world; and I was standing in
the centre of it. In the shops of Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill, on each
side of me, I do not doubt I could have bought any quantity of books for
children, which by way of giving them religious, as opposed to secular,
instruction, informed them that birds praised God in their songs. Now,
though, on the one hand, you may be very certain that birds are not
machines, on the other hand it is just as certain that they have not the
smallest intention of praising God in their songs; and that we cannot
prevent the religious education of our children more utterly than by
beginning it in lies. But it might be expected of _ourselves_ that we
should do so, in the songs we send up from our principal nest! And
although, under the dome at the top of Ludgate Hill, some attempt of the
kind may be made every seventh day, by a limited number of persons, we
may again reflect, with humiliation, that the birds, for better or
worse, sing all, and every day; and I could not but ask myself, with
momentarily increasing curiosity, as I endeavoured to trace the emotions
and occupations of the persons who passed by me, in the expression of
their faces--what would be the effect on them, if any creatures of
higher order were suddenly to appear in the midst of them with any such
message of peace, and invitation to rejoicing, as they had all been
professing to commemorate at Christmas.
62. Perhaps you recollect, in the lectures given on landscape during the
spring of this year, my directing your attention to a picture of
Mantegna's in the loan exhibition, representing a flight of twelve
angels in blue sky, singing that Christmas song. I ought to tell you,
however, that one of our English artists of good position dissented from
my opinion about the picture; and remarked that in England "we wanted
good art, and not funny art." Whereas, to me, it is this vocal and
architectural art of Ludgate Hill which appears funny art; and not
Mantegna's. But I am compelled to admit that could Mantegna's picture
have been realized, the result would, in the eyes of most men, have been
funnier still. For suppose that over Ludgate Hill the sky had indeed
suddenly become blue instead of black; and that a flight of twelve
angels, "covered with silver wings, and their feathers with gold," had
alighted on the cornice of the railroad bridge, as the doves alight on
the cornices of St. Mark's at Venice; and had invited the eager men of
business below, in the centre of a city confessedly the most prosperous
in the world, to join them for five minutes in singing the first five
verses of such a psalm as the 103rd--"Bless the Lord, oh my soul, and
_all that is within me_" (the opportunity now being given for the
expression of their most hidden feelings) "all that is within me, bless
His holy name, and forget not all His benefits." Do you not even thus,
in mere suggestion, feel shocked at the thought, and as if my now
reading the words were profane? And cannot you fancy that the sensation
of the crowd at so violent and strange an interruption of traffic, might
be somewhat akin to that which I had occasion in my first lecture on
sculpture to remind you of,--the feeling attributed by Goethe to
Mephistopheles at the song of the angels: "Discord I hear, and
intolerable jingling"?
63. Nay, farther, if indeed none of the benefits bestowed on, or
accomplished by, the great city, were to be forgotten, and if search
were made, throughout its confines, into the results of its wealth,
might not the literal discord in the words themselves be greater than
the felt discord in the sound of them?
I have here in my hand a cutting from a newspaper, which I took with me
three years ago, to a meeting in the interest of social science, held in
the rooms of the Society of Arts, and under the presidency of the Prime
Minister of England. Under the (so called) 'classical' paintings of
Barry, representing the philosophy and poetry of the ancients, Mr.
Gladstone was in the chair; and in his presence a member of the Society
for the Promotion of Social Science propounded and supported the
statement, not irrelevant to our present inquiry, that the essential
nature of man was that of a beast of prey. Though, at the time,
(suddenly called upon by the author of "Tom Brown at Oxford,") I feebly
endeavoured to contradict that Socially Scientific person, I do not at
present desire to do so. I have given you a creature of prey for
comparison of knowledge. "Doth the eagle know what is in the pit?"--and
in this great nest of ours in London, it would be well if to all our
children the virtue of the creature of prey were fulfilled, and that,
indeed, the stir and tumult of the city were "as the eagle stirreth up
her nest and fluttereth over her young." But the slip of paper I had
then, and have now, in my hand,[D] contains information about the state
of the nest, inconsistent with such similitude. I am not answerable for
the juxtaposition of paragraphs in it. The first is a proposal for the
building of a new church in Oxford, at the cost of twenty thousand
pounds; the second is the account of the inquest on a woman and her
child who were starved to death in the Isle of Dogs. The bodies were
found lying, without covering, on a bed made of heaped rags; and there
was no furniture in the room but a wooden stool, on which lay a tract
entitled "_The Goodness of God._" The husband, who had been out of work
for six months, went mad two days afterwards; and being refused entrance
at the workhouse because it was "full of mad people," was carried off,
the "Pall Mall Gazette" says not where.
[D] "Pall Mall Gazette," January 29th, 1869.
64. Now, gentlemen, the question I wish to leave with you to-day is
whether the Wisdom which rejoices in the habitable parts of the earth,
and whose delights are with the sons of men, can be supposed, under
circumstances such as these, to delight herself in that most closely and
increasingly inhabited portion of the globe which we ourselves now dwell
on; and whether, if she cannot grant us to surpass the art of the
swallow or the eagle, she may not require of us at least, to reach the
level of their happiness. Or do you seriously think that, either in the
life of Ludgate Hill, or death of the Isle of Dogs; in the art of
Ludgate Hill, or idleness of the Isle of Dogs; and in the science and
sanity of Ludgate Hill, or nescience and insanity of the Isle of Dogs,
we have, as matters stand now, any clear encouragement to repeat, in
that 103rd psalm, the three verses following the five I named; and to
believe in our hearts, as we say with our lips, that we have yet,
dwelling among us, unoffended, a God "who forgiveth all our iniquities,
who healeth all our diseases; who redeemeth our life from destruction,
who crowneth us with loving-kindness and tender mercies, and _who
satisfieth our mouth with good things, so that our youth is_ RENEWED
LIKE THE EAGLE'S"?
LECTURE IV.
THE POWER OF MODESTY IN SCIENCE AND ART.
_17th February, 1872._
65. I believe, gentlemen, that some of you must have been
surprised,--and, if I succeeded in making my last lecture clearly
intelligible, many ought to have been surprised,--at the limitations I
asked you to admit with respect to the idea of science, and the position
which I asked you to assign to it. We are so much, by the chances of our
time, accustomed to think of science as a process of discovery, that I
am sure some of you must have been gravely disconcerted by my
requesting, and will to-day be more disconcerted by my firmly
recommending, you to use the word, and reserve the thought, of science,
for the acquaintance with things long since discovered, and established
as true. We have the misfortune to live in an epoch of transition from
irrational dulness to irrational excitement; and while once it was the
highest courage of science to question anything, it is now an agony to
her to leave anything unquestioned. So that, unawares, we come to
measure the dignity of a scientific person by the newness of his
assertions, and the dexterity of his methods in debate; entirely
forgetting that science cannot become perfect, as an occupation of
intellect, while anything remains to be discovered; nor wholesome as an
instrument of education, while anything is permitted to be debated.
66. It appears, doubtless, a vain idea to you that an end should ever be
put to discovery; but remember, such impossibility merely signifies that
mortal science must remain imperfect. Nevertheless, in many directions,
the limit to practically useful discovery is rapidly being approached;
and you, as students, would do well to suppose that it has been already
attained. To take the science of ornithology, for instance: I suppose
you would have very little hope of shooting a bird in England, which
should be strange to any master of the science, or of shooting one
anywhere, which would not fall under some species already described. And
although at the risk of life, and by the devotion of many years to
observation, some of you might hope to bring home to our museum a
titmouse with a spot on its tail which had never before been seen, I
strongly advise you not to allow your studies to be disturbed by so
dazzling a hope, nor your life exclusively devoted even to so important
an object. In astronomy, the fields of the sky have not yet, indeed,
been ransacked by the most costly instruments; and it may be in store
for some of you to announce the existence, or even to analyse the
materials, of some luminous point which may be seen two or three times
in the course of a century, by any one who will journey to India for the
purpose; and, when there, is favoured by the weather. But, for all
practical purposes, the stars already named and numbered are as many as
we require to hear of; and if you thoroughly know the visible motions,
and clearly conceive the known relations, even of those which can be
seen by the naked eye, you will have as much astronomy as is necessary,
either for the occupation of thought or the direction of navigation.
67. But, if you were discontented with the limit I proposed for your
sciences, much more, I imagine, you were doubtful of the ranks I
assigned to them. It is not, I know, in your modern system, the general
practice to put chemistry, the science of atoms, lowest, and theology,
the science of Deity, highest: nay, many of us have ceased to think of
theology as a science at all, but rather as a speculative pursuit, in
subject, separate from science; and in temper, opposed to her.
Yet it can scarcely be necessary for me to point out to you, in so many
terms, that what we call theology, if true, is a science; and if false,
is not theology; or that the distinction even between natural science
and theology is illogical: for you might distinguish indeed between
natural and unnatural science, but not between natural and spiritual,
unless you had determined first that a spirit had no nature. You will
find the facts to be, that entirely true knowledge is both possible and
necessary--first of facts relating to matter, and then of the forces and
passions that act on or in matter;--that, of all these forces, the
noblest we can know is the energy which either imagines, or perceives,
the existence of a living power greater than its own; and that the study
of the relations which exist between this energy, and the resultant
action of men, are as much subjects of pure science as the curve of a
projectile. The effect, for instance, upon your temper, intellect, and
conduct during the day, of your going to chapel with or without belief
in the efficacy of prayer, is just as much a subject of definite
science, as the effect of your breakfast on the coats of your stomach.
Which is the higher knowledge, I have, with confidence, told you; and am
not afraid of any test to which you may submit my assertion.
68. Assuming such limitation, then, and such rank, for our knowledge;
assuming, also, what I have now, perhaps to your weariness, told you,
that graphic art is the shadow, or image, of knowledge,--I wish to point
out to you to-day the function, with respect to both, of the virtue
called by the Greeks 'σωφροσύνη' 'safeness of mind,' corresponding to
the 'salus' or 'sanitas' mentis, of the Latins; 'health of heart' is,
perhaps, the best English; if we receive the words 'mens,' 'μῆνις,' or
'φρήν,' as expressing the passionate soul of the human being,
distinguished from the intellectual; the 'mens sana' being possible to
all of us, though the contemplative range of height her wisdom may be
above our capacities; so that to each of us Heaven only permits the
ambition of being σοφός, but commands the resolution to be σώφρων.
69. And, without discussing the use of the word by different writers, I
will tell you that the dearest and safest idea of the mental state
itself is to be gained from the representations of it by the words of
ancient Christian religion, and even from what you may think its
superstitions. Without any discussion also as to the personal existence
or traditional character of evil spirits, you will find it a practical
fact, that external temptations and inevitable trials of temper, have
power against you which your health and virtue depend on your resisting;
that, if not resisted, the evil energy of them will pass into your own
heart, φρήν, or μῆνις; and that the ordinary and vulgarized phrase "the
Devil, or betraying Spirit, is _in him_" is the most scientifically
accurate which you can apply to any person so influenced. You will find
also that, in the compass of literature, the casting out of, or
cleansing from, such a state is best symbolized for you by the image of
one who had been wandering wild and naked _among tombs_, sitting still,
clothed, and in his right mind, and that in whatever literal or
figurative sense you receive the Biblical statement of what followed,
this is absolutely certain, that the herd of swine hastening to their
destruction, in perfect sympathy with each other's fury, is the most
accurate symbol ever given, in literature, of consummate human ἀφροσύνη.
* * * * *
(The conditions of insanity,[E] delighting in scenes of death, which
affect at the present time the arts of revolutionary Europe, were
illustrated in the sequel of this lecture: but I neither choose to take
any permanent notice of the examples I referred to, nor to publish any
part of what I said, until I can enter more perfectly into the analysis
of the elements of evil passion which always distorted and polluted even
the highest arts of Greek and Christian loyal religion; and now occupy
in deadly entireness, the chambers of imagination, devastated, and left
desolate of joy, by impiety, and disobedience.
In relation to the gloom of gray colour characteristic especially of the
modern French revolutionary school, I entered into some examination of
the conditions of real temperance and reserve in colour, showing that it
consisted not in refusing colour, but in governing it; and that the most
pure and bright colours might be thus perfectly governed, while the most
dull were probably also the most violent and intemperate. But it would
be useless to print this part of the lecture without the
colour-illustrations used.
Passing to the consideration of intemperance and immodesty in the choice
even of landscape subjects, I referred thus for contrast, to the
quietude of Turner's "Greta and Tees.")
[E] I use this word always meaning it to be understood literally,
and in its full force.
70. If you wish to feel the reserve of this drawing, look, first, into
the shops at their display of common chromo-lithotints; see how they are
made up of Matterhorns, Monte Rosas, blue glaciers, green lakes, white
towers, magnificent banditti, romantic peasantry, or always-successful
sportsmen or fishermen in Highland costume; and then see what Turner is
content with. No Matterhorns are needful, or even particularly pleasing
to him. A bank, some eight or ten feet high, of Yorkshire shale is
enough. He would not thank you for giving him all the giant forests of
California:--would not be so much interested in them nor half so happy
among them, as he is here with a switch of oak sapling, which the Greta
has pulled down among the stones, and teased awhile, and which, now that
the water is lower, tries to get up again, out of its way.
He does not want any towers or towns. Here you are to be contented with
three square windows of a country gentleman's house. He does not want
resplendent banditti. Behold! here is a brown cow and a white one: what
would you have more? And this scarcely-falling rapid of the Tees--here
pausing to circle round a pool, and there laughing as it trips over a
ledge of rock, six or seven inches high, is more to him--infinitely
more--than would be the whole colossal drainage of Lake Erie into Lake
Ontario, which Carlyle has justly taken for a type of the Niagara of our
national precipitous ἀφροσύνη.
71. I need not point out to you the true temperance of colour in this
drawing--how slightly green the trees are, how softly blue the sky.
Now I put a chromo-lithotint beside it.