The Crown of Wild Olive
Paul's on the other--that is to say, at precisely the most important and
stately moment of its whole course--it has to pass under one of the
arches of Waterloo Bridge, which, in the sweep of its curve, is as
vast--it alone--as the Rialto at Venice, and scarcely less seemly in
proportions. But over the Rialto, though of late and debased Venetian
work, there still reigns some power of human imagination: on the two
flanks of it are carved the Virgin and the Angel of the Annunciation; on
the keystone the descending Dove. It is not, indeed, the fault of living
designers that the Waterloo arch is nothing more than a gloomy and
hollow heap of wedged blocks of blind granite. But just beyond the damp
shadow of it, the new Embankment is reached by a flight of stairs, which
are, in point of fact, the principal approach to it, a-foot, from
central London; the descent from the very midst of the metropolis of
England to the banks of the chief river of England; and for this
approach, living designers _are_ answerable.
85. The principal decoration of the descent is again a gas-lamp, but a
shattered one, with a brass crown on the top of it or, rather,
half-crown, and that turned the wrong way, the back of it to the river
and causeway, its flame supplied by a visible pipe far wandering along
the wall; the whole apparatus being supported by a rough cross-beam.
Fastened to the centre of the arch above is a large placard, stating
that the Royal Humane Society's drags are in constant readiness, and
that their office is at 4, Trafalgar Square. On each side of the arch
are temporary, but dismally old and battered boardings, across two
angles capable of unseemly use by the British public. Above one of these
is another placard, stating that this is the Victoria Embankment. The
steps themselves--some forty of them--descend under a tunnel, which the
shattered gas-lamp lights by night, and nothing by day. They are covered
with filthy dust, shaken off from infinitude of filthy feet; mixed up
with shreds of paper, orange-peel, foul straw, rags, and cigar ends, and
ashes; the whole agglutinated, more or less, by dry saliva into slippery
blotches and patches; or, when not so fastened, blown dismally by the
sooty wind hither and thither, or into the faces of those who ascend and
descend. The place is worth your visit, for you are not likely to find
elsewhere a spot which, either in costly and ponderous brutality of
building, or in the squalid and indecent accompaniment of it, is so far
separated from the peace and grace of nature, and so accurately
indicative of the methods of our national resistance to the Grace,
Mercy, and Peace of Heaven.
86. I am obliged always to use the English word "Grace" in two senses,
but remember that the Greek [Greek: charis] includes them both (the
bestowing, that is to say of Beauty and Mercy); and especially it
includes these in the passage of Pindar's first ode, which gives us the
key to the right interpretation of the power of sculpture in Greece. You
remember that I told you, in my Sixth Introductory Lecture (Sec. 151), that
the mythic accounts of Greek sculpture begin in the legends of the
family of Tantalus; and especially in the most grotesque legend of them
all, the inlaying of the ivory shoulder of Pelops. At that story Pindar
pauses--not, indeed, without admiration, nor alleging any impossibility
in the circumstances themselves, but doubting the careless hunger of
Demeter--and gives his own reading of the event, instead of the ancient
one. He justifies this to himself, and to his hearers, by the plea that
myths have, in some sort, or degree, ([Greek: pou ti]), led the mind of
mortals beyond the truth: and then he goes on:--
"Grace, which creates everything that is kindly and soothing for
mortals, adding honour, has often made things at first untrustworthy,
become trustworthy through Love."
87. I cannot, except in these lengthened terms, give you the complete
force of the passage; especially of the [Greek: apiston emesato
pioton]--"made it trustworthy by passionate desire that it should be
so"--which exactly describes the temper of religious persons at the
present day, who are kindly and sincere, in clinging to the forms of
faith which either have long been precious to themselves, or which they
feel to have been without question instrumental in advancing the dignity
of mankind. And it is part of the constitution of humanity--a part
which, above others, you are in danger of unwisely contemning under the
existing conditions of our knowledge, that the things thus sought for
belief with eager passion, do, indeed, become trustworthy to us; that,
to each of us, they verily become what we would have them; the force of
the [Greek: menis] and [Greek: mneme] with which we seek after them,
does, indeed, make them powerful to us for actual good or evil; and it
is thus granted to us to create not only with our hands things that
exalt or degrade our sight, but with our hearts also, things that exalt
or degrade our souls; giving true substance to all that we hoped for;
evidence to things that we have not seen, but have desired to see; and
calling, in the sense of creating, things that are not, as though they
were.
88. You remember that in distinguishing Imagination from Idolatry, I
referred you to the forms of passionate affection with which a noble
people commonly regards the rivers and springs of its native land. Some
conception of personality or of spiritual power in the stream, is almost
necessarily involved in such emotion; and prolonged [Greek: charis] in
the form of gratitude, the return of Love for benefits continually
bestowed, at last alike in all the highest and the simplest minds, when
they are honourable and pure, makes this untrue thing trustworthy;
[Greek: apiston emesato piston], until it becomes to them the safe basis
of some of the happiest impulses of their moral nature. Next to the
marbles of Verona, given you as a primal type of the sculpture of
Christianity, moved to its best energy in adorning the entrance of its
temples, I have not unwillingly placed, as your introduction to the best
sculpture of the religion of Greece, the forms under which it
represented the personality of the fountain Arethusa. But, without
restriction to those days of absolute devotion, let me simply point out
to you how this untrue thing, made true by Love, has intimate and
heavenly authority even over the minds of men of the most practical
sense, the most shrewd wit, and the most severe precision of moral
temper. The fair vision of Sabrina in _Comus_, the endearing and tender
promise, "Fies nobilium tu quoque fontium," and the joyful and proud
affection of the great Lombard's address to the lakes of his enchanted
land,--
Te, Lari maxume, teque
Fluctibus et fremitu assurgens, Benace, marino,
may surely be remembered by you with regretful piety, when you stand by
the blank stones which at once restrain and disgrace your native river,
as the final worship rendered to it by modern philosophy. But a little
incident which I saw last summer on its bridge at Wallingford, may put
the contrast of ancient and modern feeling before you still more
forcibly.
89. Those of you who have read with attention (none of us can read with
too much attention), Moliere's most perfect work, the _Misanthrope_,
must remember Celimene's description of her lovers, and her excellent
reason for being unable to regard with any favour, "notre grand flandrin
de vicomte,--depuis que je l'ai vu, trois quarts d'heure durant, cracher
dans un puits pour faire des ronds." That sentence is worth noting, both
in contrast to the reverence paid by the ancients to wells and springs,
and as one of the most interesting traces of the extension of the
loathsome habit among the upper classes of Europe and America, which now
renders all external grace, dignity, and decency, impossible in the
thoroughfares of their principal cities. In connection with that
sentence of Moliere's you may advisably also remember this fact, which I
chanced to notice on the bridge of Wallingford. I was walking from end
to end of it, and back again, one Sunday afternoon of last May, trying
to conjecture what had made this especial bend and ford of the Thames so
important in all the Anglo-Saxon wars. It was one of the few sunny
afternoons of the bitter spring, and I was very thankful for its light,
and happy in watching beneath it the flow and the glittering of the
classical river, when I noticed a well-dressed boy, apparently just out
of some orderly Sunday-school, leaning far over the parapet; watching,
as I conjectured, some bird or insect on the bridge-buttress. I went up
to him to see what he was looking at; but just as I got close to him, he
started over to the opposite parapet, and put himself there into the
same position, his object being, as I then perceived, to spit from both
sides upon the heads of a pleasure party who were passing in a boat
below.
90. The incident may seem to you too trivial to be noticed in this
place. To me, gentlemen, it was by no means trivial. It meant, in the
depth of it, such absence of all true [Greek: charis], reverence, and
intellect, as it is very dreadful to trace in the mind of any human
creature, much more in that of a child educated with apparently every
advantage of circumstance in a beautiful English country town, within
ten miles of our University. Most of all, is it terrific when we regard
it as the exponent (and this, in truth, it is), of the temper which, as
distinguished from former methods, either of discipline or recreation,
the present tenor of our general teaching fosters in the mind of
youth;--teaching which asserts liberty to be a right, and obedience a
degradation; and which, regardless alike of the fairness of nature and
the grace of behaviour, leaves the insolent spirit and degraded senses
to find their only occupation in malice, and their only satisfaction in
shame.
91. You will, I hope, proceed with me, not scornfully any more, to
trace, in the early art of a noble heathen nation, the feeling of what
was at least a better childishness than this of ours; and the efforts to
express, though with hands yet failing, and minds oppressed by ignorant
phantasy, the first truth by which they knew that they lived; the birth
of wisdom and of all her powers of help to man, as the reward of his
resolute labour.
92. "[Greek: Aphaistou technaisi]." Note that word of Pindar in the
Seventh Olympic. This axe-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 labour, the
clearing-axe 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?