The Queen of the Air Part 5

97. It will take me many a day yet--if days, many or few, are given me-- to disentangle in anywise the proud and practised disguises of religious creeds from the instinctive arts which, grotesquely and indecorously, yet with sincerity, strove to embody them, or to relate. But I think the reader, by help even of the imperfect indications already given to him, will be able to follow, with a continually increasing security, the vestiges of the Myth of Athena; and to reanimate its almost evanescent shade, by connecting it with the now recognized facts of existent nature which it, more or less dimly, reflected and foretold. I gather these facts together in brief.

98. The deep of air that surrounds the earth enters into union with the earth at its surface, and with its waters, so as to be the apparent cause of their ascending into life. First, it warms them, and shades, at once, staying the heat of the sun's rays in its own body, but warding their force with its clouds. It warms and cools at once, with traffic of balm and frost; so that the white wreaths are withdrawn from the field of the Swiss peasant by the glow of Libyan rock. It gives its own strength to the sea; forms and fills every cell of its foam; sustains the precipices, and designs the valleys of its waves; gives the gleam to their moving under the night, and the white fire to their plains under sunrise; lifts their voices along the rocks, bears above them the spray of birds, pencils through them the dimpling of unfooted sands. It gathers out of them a portion in the hollow of its hand: dyes, with that, the hills into dark blue, and their glaciers with dying rose; inlays with that, for sapphire, the dome in which it has to set the cloud; shapes out of that the heavenly flocks: divides them, numbers, cherishes, bears them on its bosom, calls them to their journeys, waits by their rest; feeds from them the brooks that cease not, and strews with them the dews that cease. It spins and weaves their fleece into wild tapestry, rends it, and renews; and flits and flames, and whispers, among the golden threads, thrilling them with a plectrum of strange fire that traverses them to and fro, and is enclosed in them like life.

It enters into the surface of the earth, subdues it, and falls together with it into fruitful dust, from which can be moulded flesh; it joins itself, in dew, to the substance of adamant, and becomes the green leaf out of the dry ground; it enters into the separated shapes of the earth it has tempered, commands the ebb and flow of the current of their life, fills their limbs with its own lightness, measures their existence by its indwelling pulse, moulds upon their lips the words by which one soul can be known to another; is to them the hearing of the ear, and the beating of the heart; and, pa.s.sing away, leaves them to the peace that hears and moves no more.

99. This was the Athena of the greatest people of the days of old. And opposite to the temple of this Spirit of the breath, and life-blood, of man and beast, stood, on the Mount of Justice, and near the chasm which was haunted by the G.o.ddess-Avengers, an altar to a G.o.d unknown,-- proclaimed at last to them, as one who, indeed, gave to all men, life, and breath, and all things; and rain from heaven, filling their hearts with rain from heaven, filling their hearts with food and gladness; a G.o.d who had made of one blood all nations of men who dwell on the face of all the earth, and had determined the times of their fate, and the bounds of their habitation.

100. We ourselves, fretted here in our narrow days, know less, perhaps, in very deed, than they, what manner of spirit we are of, or what manner of spirit we ignorantly wors.h.i.+p. Have we, indeed, desired the Desire of all nations? and will the Master whom we meant to seem, and the Messenger in whom we thought we delighted, confirm, when He comes to His temple,-- or not find in its midst,--the tables heavy with gold for bread, and the seats that are bought with the price of the dove? Or is our own land also to be left by its angered Spirit,--left among those, where suns.h.i.+ne vainly sweet, and pa.s.sionate folly of storm, waste themselves in the silent places of knowledge that has pa.s.sed away, and of tongues that have ceased?

This only we may discern a.s.suredly; this, every true light of science, every mercifully-granted power, every wisely-restricted thought, teach us more clearly day by day, that in the heavens above, and the earth beneath, there is one continual and omnipotent presence of help, and of peace, for all men who know that they live, and remember that they die.

III.

ATHENA ERGANE.*

(Athena in the Heart.)

* "Athena the worker, or having rule over work." The name was first give to her by the Athenians.

VARIOUS NOTES RELATING TO THE CONCEPTION OF ATHENA AS THE DIRECTRESS OF THE IMAGINATION AND WILL.

101. I have now only a few words to say, bearing on what seems to me present need, respecting the third function of Athena, conceived as the directress of human pa.s.sion, resolution, and labor.

Few words, for I am not yet prepared to give accurate distinction between the intellectual rule of Athena and that of the Muses; but, broadly, the Muses, with their king, preside over meditative, historical, and poetic arts, whose end is the discovery of light or truth, and the creation of beauty; but Athena rules over moral pa.s.sion, and practically useful art.

She does not make men learned, but prudent and subtle; she does not teach them to make their work beautiful, but to make it right.

In different places of my writings, and though many years of endeavor to define the laws of art, I have insisted on this rightness in work, and on its connection with virtue of character, in so many partial ways, that the impression left on the reader's mind--if, indeed, it was ever impressed at all--has been confused and uncertain. In beginning the series of my corrected works, I wish this principle (in my own mind the foundation of every other) to be made plain, if nothing else is; and will try, therefore, to make it so, as far as, by any effort, I can put it into unmistakable words. And, at first, here is a very simple statement of it, given lately in a lecture on the Architecture of the Valley of the Somme, which will be better read in this place than in its incidental connection with my account of the porches of Abbeville.

102. I had used, in a preceding part of the lecture, the expression, "by what faults" this Gothic architecture fell. We continually speak thus of works of art. We talk of their faults and merits, as of virtues and vices. What do we mean by talking of the faults of a picture, or the merits of a piece of stone?

The faults of a work of art are the faults of its workman, and its virtues his virtues.

Great art is the expression of the mind of a great man, and mean art, that of the want of mind of a weak man. A foolish person builds foolishly, and a wise one, sensibly; a virtuous one, beautifully; and a vicious one, basely. If stone work is well put together, it means that a thoughtful man planned it, and a careful man cut it, and an honest man cemented it. If it has too much ornament, it means that its carver was too greedy of pleasure; if too little, that he was rude, or insensitive, or stupid, and the like. So that when once you have learned how to spell these most precious of all legends,--pictures and buildings,--you may read the characters of men, and of nations, in their art, as in a mirror; nay, as in a microscope, and magnified a hundredfold; for the character becomes pa.s.sionate in the art, and intensifies itself in all its n.o.blest or meanest delights. Nay, not only as in a microscope, but as under a scalpel, and in dissection; for a man may hide himself from you, or misrepresent himself to you every other way; but he cannot in his work: there, be sure, you have him to the inmost. All that he likes, all that he sees,--all that he can do,--his imagination, his affections, his perseverance, his impatience, his clumsiness, cleverness, everything is there. If the work is a cobweb, you know it was made by a spider; if a honey-comb, by a bee; a wormcast is thrown up by a worm, and a nest wreathed by a bird; and a house built by a man, worthily, if he is worthy, and ign.o.bly if he is ign.o.ble.

And always, from the least to the greatest, as the made thing is good or bad, so is the maker of it.

103. You will use this faculty of judgment more or less, whether you theoretically admit the principle or not. Take that floral gable;* you don't suppose the man who built Stonehenge could have built that, or that the man who built that, would have built Stonehenge? Do you think an old Roman would have liked such a piece of filigree work? or that Michael Angelo would have spent his time in twisting these stems of roses in and out? Or, of modern handicraftsmen, do you think a burglar, or a brute, or a pickpocket could have carved it? Could Bill Sykes have done it? or the Dodger, dexterous with finger and tool? You will find in the end, that no man could have done it but exactly the man who did it; and by looking close at it, you may, if you know your letters, read precisely the manner of man he was.

* The elaborate pendiment above the central porch at the west end of Rouen Cathedral, pierced into a transparent web of tracery, and enriched with a border of "twisted eglantine."

104. Now I must insist on this matter, for a grave reason. Of all facts concerning art, this is the one most necessary to be known, that, while manufacture is the work of hands only, art is the work of the whole spirit of man; and as that spirit is, so is the deed of it; and by whatever power of vice or virtue any art is produced, the same vice or virtue it reproduces and teaches. That which is born of evil begets evil; and that which is born of valor and honor, teaches valor and honor.

All art is either infection or education. It must be one or other of these.

105. This, I repeat, of all truths respecting art, is the one of which understanding is the most precious, and denial the most deadly. And I a.s.sert it the more, because it has of late been repeatedly, expressly, and with contumely, denied, and that by high authority; and I hold it one of the most sorrowful facts connected with the decline of the arts among us, that English gentlemen, of high standing as scholars and artists, should have been blinded into the acceptance, and betrayed into the a.s.sertion of a fallacy which only authority such as theirs could have rendered for an instant credible. For the contrary of it is written in the history of all great nations; it is the one sentence always inscribed on the steps of their thrones; the one concordant voice in which they speak to us out of their dust.

All such nations first manifest themselves as a pure and beautiful animal race, with intense energy and imagination. They live lives of hards.h.i.+p by choice, and by grand instinct of manly discipline; they become fierce and irresistible soldiers; the nation is always its own army, and their king, or chief head of government, is always their first soldier.

Pharaoh, or David, or Leonidas, or Valerius, or Barbarossa, or Coeur de Lion, or St. Louis, or Dandalo, or Frederick the Great,--Egyptian, Jew, Greek, Roman, German, English, French, Venetian,--that is inviolable law for them all; their king must be their first soldier, or they cannot be in progressive power. Then, after their great military period, comes the domestic period; in which, without betraying the discipline of war, they add to their great soldiers.h.i.+p the delights and possessions of a delicate and tender home-life; and then, for all nations, is the time of their perfect art, which is the fruit, the evidence, the reward of their national idea of character, developed by the finished care of the occupations of peace. That is the history of all true art that ever was, or can be; palpably the history of it,--unmistakably,--written on the forehead of it in letters of light,--in tongues of fire, by which the seal of virtue is branded as deep as ever iron burnt into a convict's flesh the seal of crime. But always, hitherto, after the great period, has followed the day of luxury, and pursuit of the arts for pleasure only. And all has so ended.

106. Thus far of Abbeville building. Now I have here a.s.serted two things,--first, the foundation of art in moral character; next, the foundation of moral character in war. I must make both these a.s.sertions clearer, and prove them.

First, of the foundation of art in moral character. Of course art-gift and amiability of disposition are two different things; for a good man is not necessarily a painter, nor does an eye for color necessarily imply an honest mind. But great art implies the union of both powers; it is the expression, by an art-gift, of a pure soul. If the gift is not there, we can have no art at all; and if the soul--and a right soul too-- is not there, the art is bad, however dexterous.

107. But also, remember, that the art-gift itself is only the result of the moral character of generations. A bad woman may have a sweet voice; but that sweetness of voice comes of the past morality of her race. That she can sing with it at all, she owes to the determination of laws of music by the morality of the past. Every act, every impulse, of virtue and vice, affects in any creature, face, voice, nervous power, and vigor and harmony of invention, at once. Perseverance in rightness of human conduct renders, after a certain number of generations, human art possible; every sin that clouds it, be it ever so little a one; and persistent vicious living and following of pleasure render, after a certain number of generations, all art impossible. Men are deceived by the long-suffering of the laws of nature, and mistake, in a nation, the reward of the virtue of its sires, for the issue of its own sins. The time of their visitation will come, and that inevitably; for, it is always true, that if the fathers have eaten sour grapes, the children's teeth are set on edge. And for the individual, as soon as you have learned to read, you may, as I said, know him to the heart's core, through his art. Let his art-gift be never so great, and cultivated to the height by the schools of a great race of men, and it is still but a tapestry thrown over his own being and inner soul; and the bearing of it will show, infallibly, whether it hangs on a man or on a skeleton. If you are dim-eyed, you may not see the difference in the fall of the folds at first, but learn how to look, and the folds themselves will become transparent, and you shall see through them the death's shape, or the divine one, making the tissue above it as a cloud of right, or as a winding-sheet.

108. Then further, observe, I have said (and you will find it true, and that to the uttermost) that, as all lovely art is rooted in virtue, so it bares fruit of virtue, and is didactic in its own nature. It is often didactic also in actually expressed thought, as Giotto's, Michael Angelo's, Durer's, and hundreds more; but that is not its special function; it is didactic chiefly by being beautiful; but beautiful with haunting thought, no less than with form, and full of myths that can be read only with the heart.

For instance, at this moment there is open beside me as I write, a page of Persian ma.n.u.script, wrought with wreathed azure and gold, and soft green, and violet, and ruby and scarlet, into one field of pure resplendence. It is wrought to delight the eyes only; and does delight them; and the man who did it a.s.suredly had eyes in his head; but not much more. It is not didactic art, but its author was happy; and it will do the good, and the harm, that mere pleasure can do. But, opposite me, is an early Turner drawing of the lake of Geneva, taken about two miles from Geneva, on the Lausanne road, with Mont Blanc in the distance. The old city is seen lying beyond the waveless waters, veiled with a sweet misty veil of Athena's weaving; a faint light of morning, peaceful exceedingly, and almost colorless, shed from behind the Voirons, increases into soft amber along the slope of the Saleve, and is just seen, and no more, on the fair warm fields of its summit, between the folds of a white cloud that rests upon the gra.s.s, but rises, high and tower-like, into the zenith of dawn above.

109. There is not as much color in that low amber light upon the hillside as there is in the palest dead leaf. The lake is not blue, but gray in mist, pa.s.sing into deep shadow beneath the Voirons' pines; a few dark cl.u.s.ters of leaves, a single white flower--scarcely seen--are all the gladness given to the rocks of the sh.o.r.e. One of the ruby spots of the eastern ma.n.u.script would give color enough for all the red that is in Turner's entire drawing. For the mere pleasure of the eye, there is not so much in all those lines of his, throughout the entire landscape, as in half an inch square of the Persian's page. What made him take pleasure in the low color that is only like the brown of a dead leaf? in the cold gray of dawn--in the one white flower among the rocks--in these--and no more than these?

110. He took pleasure in them because he had been bred among English fields and hills; because the gentleness of a great race was in his heart, and its powers of thought in his brain; because he knew the stories of the Alps, and of the cities at their feet; because he had read the Homeric legends of the clouds, and beheld the G.o.ds of dawn, and the givers of dew to the fields; because he knew the faces of the crags, and the imagery of the pa.s.sionate mountains, as a man knows the face of his friend; because he had in him the wonder and sorrow concerning life and death, which are the inheritance of the Gothic soul from the days of its first sea kings; and also the compa.s.sion and the joy that are woven into the innermost fabric of every great imaginative spirit, born now in countries that have lived by the Christian faith with any courage or truth. And the picture contains also, for us, just this which its maker had in him to give; and can convey it to us, just so far as we are of the temper in which it must be received. It is didactic if we are worthy to be taught, not otherwise. The pure heart, it will make more pure; the thoughtful, more thoughtful. It has in it no words for the reckless or the base.

111. As I myself look at it, there is no fault nor folly of my life--and both have been many and great--that does not rise up against me, and take away my joy, and shorten my power of possession of sight, of understanding. And every past effort of my life, every gleam of rightness or good in it, is with me now, to help me in my grasp of this art, and its vision. So far as I can rejoice in, or interpret either, my power is owing to what of right there is in me. I dare to say it, that, because through all my life I have desired good, and not evil; because I have been kind to many; have wished to be kind to all; have wilfully injured none; and because I have loved much, and not selfishly; therefore, the morning light is yet visible to me on those hills, and you, who read, may trust my thought and word in such work as I have to do for you; and you will be glad afterwards that you have trusted them.

112. Yet, remember,--I repeat it again and yet again,--that I may for once, if possible, make this thing a.s.suredly clear: the inherited art-gift must be there, as well as the life in some poor measure, or rescued fragment, right. This art-gift of mine could not have been won by any work or by any conduct: it belongs to me by birthright, and came by Athena's will, from the air of English country villages, and Scottish hills. I will risk whatever charge of folly may come on me, for printing one of my many childish rhymes, written on a frosty day in Glen Farg, just north of Loch Leven. It bears date 1st January, 1828. I was born on the 8th of February, 1819; and al that I ever could be, and all that I cannot be, the weak little rhyme already shows.

"Papa, how pretty those icicles are, That are seen so near,--that are seen so far; --Those dropping waters that come from the rocks And many a hole, like the haunt of a fox.

That silvery stream that runs babbling along, Making a murmuring, dancing song.

Those trees that stand waving upon the rock's side, And men, that, like specters, among them glide.

And waterfalls that are heard from far, And come in sight when very near.

And the water-wheel that turns slowly round, Grinding the corn that--requires to be ground,--

(Political Economy of the future!)

----And mountains at a distance seen, And rivers winding through the plain, And quarries with their craggy stones, And the wind among them moans."

So foretelling Stones of Venice, and this essay on Athena.

Enough now concerning myself.

113. Of Turner's life, and of its good and evil, both great, but the good immeasurably the greater, his work is in all things a perfect and transparent evidence. His biography is simply, "He did this, nor will ever another do its like again." Yet read what I have said of him, as compared with the great Italians, in the pa.s.sages taken from the "Cestus of Aglaia," farther on, --158, pp. 164, 165.

114. This, then, is the nature of the connection between morals and art.

Now, secondly, I have a.s.serted the foundation of both these, at least hitherto, in war. The reason of this too manifest fact is, that, until now it has been impossible for any nation, except a warrior one, to fix its mind wholly on its men, instead of their possessions. Every great soldier nation thinks, necessarily, first of multiplying its bodies and souls of men, in good temper and strict discipline. As long as this is its political aim, it does not matter what it temporarily suffers, or loses, either in numbers or in wealth; its morality and its arts (if it have national art-gift) advance together; but so soon as it ceases to be a warrior nation, it thinks of its possessions instead of its men; and then the moral and poetic powers vanish together.

115. It is thus, however, absolutely necessary to the virtue of war that it should be waged by personal strength, not by money or machinery. A nation that fights with a mercenary force, or with torpedoes instead of its own arms, is dying. Not but that there is more true courage in modern than even in ancient war; but this is, first, because all the remaining life of European nations is with a morbid intensity thrown into their soldiers; and, secondly, because their present heroism is the culmination of centuries of inbred and traditional valor, which Athena taught them by forcing them to govern the foam of the sea-wave and of the horse,--not the steam of kettles.

116. And further, note this, which is vital to us in the present crisis: If war is to be made by money and machinery, the nation which is the largest and most covetous mult.i.tude will win. You may be as scientific as you choose; the mob that can pay more for sulphuric acid and gunpowder will at last poison its bullets, throw acid in your faces, and make an end of you; of itself, also, in good time, but of you first. And to the English people the choice of its fate is very near now. It may spasmodically defend its property with iron walls a fathom thick, a few years longer--a very few. No walls will defend either it, or its havings, against the mult.i.tude that is breeding and spreading faster than the clouds, over the habitable earth. We shall be allowed to live by small pedler's business, and iron-mongery--since we have chosen those for our line of life--as long as we are found useful black servants to the Americans, and are content to dig coals and sit in the cinders; and have still coals to dig,--they once exhausted, or got cheaper elsewhere, we shall be abolished. But if we think more wisely, while there is yet time, and set our minds again on multiplying Englishmen, and not on cheapening English wares, if we resolve to submit to wholesome laws of labor and economy, and setting our political squabbles aside, try how many strong creatures, friendly and faithful to each other, we can crowd into every spot of English dominion, neither poison nor iron will prevail against us; nor traffic, nor hatred; the n.o.ble nation will yet, by the grace of heaven, rule over the ign.o.ble, and force of heart hold its own against fireb.a.l.l.s.

117. But there is yet a further reason for the dependence of the arts on war. The vice and injustice of the world are constantly springing anew, and are only to be subdued by battle; the keepers of order and law must always be soldiers. And now, going back to the myth of Athena, we see that though she is first a warrior maid, she detests war for its own sake; she arms Achilles and Ulysses in just quarrels, but she disarms Ares. She contends, herself, continually against disorder and convulsion, in the earth giants; she stands by Hercules' side in victory over all monstrous evil; in justice only she judges and makes war. But in this war of hers she is wholly implacable. She has little notion of converting criminals. There is no faculty of mercy in her when she has been resisted. Her word is only, "I will mock when your fear cometh."

Note the words that follow: "when your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction as a whirlwind;" for her wrath is of irresistible tempest: once roused, it is blind and deaf,--rabies--madness of anger-- darkness of the Dies Irae.