The Crown of Wild Olive
centrally the best for himself, not for others. And all this has come of
the spreading of that thrice accursed, thrice impious doctrine of the
modern economist, that 'To do the best for yourself, is finally to do
the best for others.' Friends, our great Master said not so; and most
absolutely we shall find this world is not made so. Indeed, to do the
best for others, is finally to do the best for ourselves; but it will
not do to have our eyes fixed on that issue. The Pagans had got beyond
that. Hear what a Pagan says of this matter; hear what were, perhaps,
the last written words of Plato,--if not the last actually written (for
this we cannot know), yet assuredly in fact and power his parting
words--in which, endeavouring to give full crowning and harmonious close
to all his thoughts, and to speak the sum of them by the imagined
sentence of the Great Spirit, his strength and his heart fail him, and
the words cease, broken off for ever. It is the close of the dialogue
called 'Critias,' in which he describes, partly from real tradition,
partly in ideal dream, the early state of Athens; and the genesis, and
order, and religion, of the fabled isle of Atlantis; in which genesis he
conceives the same first perfection and final degeneracy of man, which
in our own Scriptural tradition is expressed by saying that the Sons of
God intermarried with the daughters of men, for he supposes the earliest
race to have been indeed the children of God; and to have corrupted
themselves, until 'their spot was not the spot of his children.' And
this, he says, was the end; that indeed 'through many generations, so
long as the God's nature in them yet was full, they were submissive to
the sacred laws, and carried themselves lovingly to all that had kindred
with them in divineness; for their uttermost spirit was faithful and
true, and in every wise great; so that, in all meekness of wisdom, they
dealt with each other, and took all the chances of life; and despising
all things except virtue, they cared little what happened day by day,
and _bore lightly the burden_ of gold and of possessions; for they saw
that, if only their common love and virtue increased, all these things
would be increased together with them; but to set their esteem and
ardent pursuit upon material possession would be to lose that first, and
their virtue and affection together with it. And by such reasoning, and
what of the divine nature remained in them, they gained all this
greatness of which we have already told, but when the God's part of them
faded and became extinct, being mixed again and again, and effaced by
the prevalent mortality; and the human nature at last exceeded, they
then became unable to endure the courses of fortune; and fell into
shapelessness of life, and baseness in the sight of him who could see,
having lost everything that was fairest of their honour; while to the
blind hearts which could not discern the true life, tending to
happiness, it seemed that they were then chiefly noble and happy, being
filled with all iniquity of inordinate possession and power. Whereupon,
the God of God's, whose Kinghood is in laws, beholding a once just
nation thus cast into misery, and desiring to lay such punishment upon
them as might make them repent into restraining, gathered together all
the gods into his dwelling-place, which from heaven's centre overlooks
whatever has part in creation; and having assembled them, he said'----
The rest is silence. So ended are the last words of the chief wisdom of
the heathen, spoken of this idol of riches; this idol of yours; this
golden image high by measureless cubits, set up where your green fields
of England are furnace-burnt into the likeness of the plain of Dura:
this idol, forbidden to us, first of all idols, by our own Master and
faith; forbidden to us also by every human lip that has ever, in any age
or people, been accounted of as able to speak according to the purposes
of God. Continue to make that forbidden deity your principal one, and
soon no more art, no more science, no more pleasure will be possible.
Catastrophe will come; or worse than catastrophe, slow mouldering and
withering into Hades. But if you can fix some conception of a true human
state of life to be striven for--life for all men as for yourselves--if
you can determine some honest and simple order of existence; following
those trodden ways of wisdom, which are pleasantness, and seeking her
quiet and withdrawn paths, which are peace;--then, and so sanctifying
wealth into 'commonwealth,' all your art, your literature, your daily
labours, your domestic affection, and citizen's duty, will join and
increase into one magnificent harmony. You will know then how to build,
well enough; you will build with stone well, but with flesh better;
temples not made with hands, but riveted of hearts; and that kind of
marble, crimson-veined, is indeed eternal.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] It is an error to suppose that the Greek worship, or seeking, was
chiefly of Beauty. It was essentially of Rightness and Strength, founded
on Forethought: the principal character of Greek art is not Beauty, but
Design: and the Dorian Apollo-worship and Athenian Virgin-worship are
both expressions of adoration of divine Wisdom and Purity. Next to these
great deities rank, in power over the national mind, Dionysus and Ceres,
the givers of human strength and life: then, for heroic example,
Hercules. There is no Venus-worship among the Greek in the great times:
and the Muses are essentially teachers of Truth, and of its harmonies.
[4] Jerem. xvii. 11 (best in Septuagint and Vulgate). 'As the partridge,
fostering what she brought not forth, so he that getteth riches, not by
right shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at his end shall be
a fool.'
[5] Two Paths, p. 98.
LECTURE III.
_WAR._
(_Delivered at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich._)
Young soldiers, I do not doubt but that many of you came unwillingly
to-night, and many in merely contemptuous curiosity, to hear what a
writer on painting could possibly say, or would venture to say,
respecting your great art of war. You may well think within yourselves,
that a painter might, perhaps without immodesty, lecture younger
painters upon painting, but not young lawyers upon law, nor young
physicians upon medicine--least of all, it may seem to you, young
warriors upon war. And, indeed, when I was asked to address you, I
declined at first, and declined long; for I felt that you would not be
interested in my special business, and would certainly think there was
small need for me to come to teach you yours. Nay, I knew that there
ought to be _no_ such need, for the great veteran soldiers of England
are now men every way so thoughtful, so noble, and so good, that no
other teaching than their knightly example, and their few words of grave
and tried counsel should be either necessary for you, or even, without
assurance of due modesty in the offerer, endured by you.
But being asked, not once nor twice, I have not ventured persistently to
refuse; and I will try, in very few words, to lay before you some reason
why you should accept my excuse, and hear me patiently. You may imagine
that your work is wholly foreign to, and separate from mine. So far from
that, all the pure and noble arts of peace are founded on war; no great
art ever yet rose on earth, but among a nation of soldiers. There is no
art among a shepherd people, if it remains at peace. There is no art
among an agricultural people, if it remains at peace. Commerce is barely
consistent with fine art; but cannot produce it. Manufacture not only is
unable to produce it, but invariably destroys whatever seeds of it
exist. There is no great art possible to a nation but that which is
based on battle.
Now, though I hope you love fighting for its own sake, you must, I
imagine, be surprised at my assertion that there is any such good fruit
of fighting. You supposed, probably, that your office was to defend the
works of peace, but certainly not to found them: nay, the common course
of war, you may have thought, was only to destroy them. And truly, I who
tell you this of the use of war, should have been the last of men to
tell you so, had I trusted my own experience only. Hear why: I have
given a considerable part of my life to the investigation of Venetian
painting and the result of that enquiry was my fixing upon one man as
the greatest of all Venetians, and therefore, as I believed, of all
painters whatsoever. I formed this faith, (whether right or wrong
matters at present nothing,) in the supremacy of the painter Tintoret,
under a roof covered with his pictures; and of those pictures, three of
the noblest were then in the form of shreds of ragged canvas, mixed up
with the laths of the roof, rent through by three Austrian shells. Now
it is not every lecturer who _could_ tell you that he had seen three of
his favourite pictures torn to rags by bombshells. And after such a
sight, it is not every lecturer who _would_ tell you that, nevertheless,
war was the foundation of all great art.
Yet the conclusion is inevitable, from any careful comparison of the
states of great historic races at different periods. Merely to show you
what I mean, I will sketch for you, very briefly, the broad steps of the
advance of the best art of the world. The first dawn of it is in Egypt;
and the power of it is founded on the perpetual contemplation of death,
and of future judgment, by the mind of a nation of which the ruling
caste were priests, and the second, soldiers. The greatest works
produced by them are sculptures of their kings going out to battle, or
receiving the homage of conquered armies. And you must remember also,
as one of the great keys to the splendour of the Egyptian nation, that
the priests were not occupied in theology only. Their theology was the
basis of practical government and law, so that they were not so much
priests as religious judges, the office of Samuel, among the Jews, being
as nearly as possible correspondent to theirs.
All the rudiments of art then, and much more than the rudiments of all
science, are laid first by this great warrior-nation, which held in
contempt all mechanical trades, and in absolute hatred the peaceful life
of shepherds. From Egypt art passes directly into Greece, where all
poetry, and all painting, are nothing else than the description, praise,
or dramatic representation of war, or of the exercises which prepare for
it, in their connection with offices of religion. All Greek institutions
had first respect to war; and their conception of it, as one necessary
office of all human and divine life, is expressed simply by the images
of their guiding gods. Apollo is the god of all wisdom of the intellect;
he bears the arrow and the bow, before he bears the lyre. Again, Athena
is the goddess of all wisdom in conduct. It is by the helmet and the
shield, oftener than by the shuttle, that she is distinguished from
other deities.
There were, however, two great differences in principle between the
Greek and the Egyptian theories of policy. In Greece there was no
soldier caste; every citizen was necessarily a soldier. And, again,
while the Greeks rightly despised mechanical arts as much as the
Egyptians, they did not make the fatal mistake of despising agricultural
and pastoral life; but perfectly honoured both. These two conditions of
truer thought raise them quite into the highest rank of wise manhood
that has yet been reached; for all our great arts, and nearly all our
great thoughts, have been borrowed or derived from them. Take away from
us what they have given; and I hardly can imagine how low the modern
European would stand.
Now, you are to remember, in passing to the next phase of history, that