The Crown of Wild Olive
nothing, in the Greek fable, compared to the bestowing of apparent life.
The figures of monstrous gods on Indian temples have their legs separate
enough; but they are infinitely more dead than the rude figures at
Branchidae sitting with their hands on their knees. And, briefly, the
work of Daedalus is the giving of deceptive life, as that of Prometheus
the giving of real life; and I can put the relation of Greek to all
other art, in this function, before you in easily compared and
remembered examples.
203. Here, on the right, in Plate XX., is an Indian bull, colossal, and
elaborately carved, which you may take as a sufficient type of the bad
art of all the earth. False in form, dead in heart, and loaded with
wealth, externally. We will not ask the date of this; it may rest in the
eternal obscurity of evil art, everywhere and for ever. Now, besides
this colossal bull, here is a bit of Daedalus work, enlarged from a coin
not bigger than a shilling: look at the two together, and you ought to
know, henceforward, what Greek art means, to the end of your days.
204. In this aspect of it then, I say, it is the simplest and nakedest
of lovely veracities. But it has another aspect, or rather another pole,
for the opposition is diametric. As the simplest, so also it is the most
complex of human art. I told you in my fifth Lecture, showing you the
spotty picture of Velasquez, that an essential Greek character is a
liking for things that are dappled. And you cannot but have noticed how
often and how prevalently the idea which gave its name to the Porch of
Polygnotus, "[Greek: stoa poikile]," occurs to the Greeks as connected
with the finest art. Thus, when the luxurious city is opposed to the
simple and healthful one, in the second book of Plato's Polity, you find
that, next to perfumes, pretty ladies, and dice, you must have in it
"[Greek: poikilia]," which observe, both in that place and again in the
third book, is the separate art of joiners' work, or inlaying; but the
idea of exquisitely divided variegation or division, both in sight and
sound--the "ravishing division to the lute," as in Pindar's "[Greek:
poikiloi hymnoi]"--runs through the compass of all Greek
art-description; and if, instead of studying that art among marbles you
were to look at it only on vases of a fine time, (look back, for
instance, to Plate IV. here), your impression of it would be, instead of
breadth and simplicity, one of universal spottiness and chequeredness,
"[Greek: en angeon Herkesin pampoikilois];" and of the artist's
delighting in nothing so much as in crossed or starred or spotted
things; which, in right places, he and his public both do unlimitedly.
Indeed they hold it complimentary even to a trout, to call him a
"spotty." Do you recollect the trout in the tributaries of the Ladon,
which Pausanias says were spotted, so that they were like thrushes and
which, the Arcadians told him, could speak? In this last [Greek:
poikilia], however, they disappointed him. "I, indeed, saw some of them
caught," he says, "but I did not hear any of them speak, though I waited
beside the river till sunset."
205. I must sum roughly now, for I have detained you too long.
The Greeks have been thus the origin not only of all broad, mighty, and
calm conception, but of all that is divided, delicate, and tremulous;
"variable as the shade, by the light quivering aspen made." To them, as
first leaders of ornamental design, belongs, of right, the praise of
glistenings in gold, piercings in ivory, stainings in purple,
burnishings in dark blue steel; of the fantasy of the Arabian
roof--quartering of the Christian shield,--rubric and arabesque of
Christian scripture; in fine, all enlargement, and all diminution of
adorning thought, from the temple to the toy, and from the mountainous
pillars of Agrigentum to the last fineness of fretwork in the Pisan
Chapel of the Thorn.
And in their doing all this, they stand as masters of human order and
justice, subduing the animal nature guided by the spiritual one, as you
see the Sicilian Charioteer stands, holding his horse-reins, with the
wild lion racing beneath him, and the flying angel above, on the
beautiful coin of early Syracuse; (lowest in Plate XXI).
And the beginnings of Christian chivalary were in that Greek bridling of
the dark and the white horses.
206. Not that a Greek never made mistakes. He made as many as we do
ourselves, nearly;--he died of his mistakes at last--as we shall die of
them; but so far he was separated from the herd of more mistaken and
more wretched nations--so far as he was Greek--it was by his rightness.
He lived, and worked, and was satisfied with the fatness of his land,
and the fame of his deeds, by his justice, and reason, and modesty. He
became _Graeculus esuriens_, little, and hungry, and every man's
errand-boy, by his iniquity, and his competition, and his love of talk.
But his Graecism was in having done, at least at one period of his
dominion, more than anybody else, what was modest, useful, and eternally
true; and as a workman, he verily did, or first suggested the doing of,
everything possible to man.
Take Daedalus, his great type of the practically executive craftsman, and
the inventor of expedients in craftsmanship, (as distinguished from
Prometheus, the institutor of moral order in art). Daedalus invents,--he,
or his nephew,--
The potter's wheel, and all work in clay;
The saw, and all work in wood;
The masts and sails of ships, and all modes of motion; (wings only
proving too dangerous!)
The entire art of minute ornament;
And the deceptive life of statues.
By his personal toil, he involves the fatal labyrinth for Minos; builds
an impregnable fortress for the Agrigentines; adorns healing baths among
the wild parsley fields of Selinus; buttresses the precipices of Eryx,
under the temple of Aphrodite; and for her temple itself--finishes in
exquisiteness the golden honeycomb.
207. Take note of that last piece of his art: it is connected with many
things which I must bring before you when we enter on the study of
architecture. That study we shall begin at the foot of the Baptistery of
Florence, which, of all buildings known to me, unites the most perfect
symmetry with the quaintest [Greek: poikilia]. Then, from the tomb of
your own Edward the Confessor, to the farthest shrine of the opposite
Arabian and Indian world, I must show you how the glittering and
iridescent dominion of Daedalus prevails; and his ingenuity in division,
interposition, and labyrinthine sequence, more widely still. Only this
last summer I found the dark red masses of the rough sandstone of
Furness Abbey had been fitted by him, with no less pleasure than he had
in carving them, into wedged hexagons--reminiscences of the honeycomb of
Venus Erycina. His ingenuity plays around the framework of all the
noblest things; and yet the brightness of it has a lurid shadow. The
spot of the fawn, of the bird, and the moth, may be harmless. But
Daedalus reigns no less over the spot of the leopard and snake. That
cruel and venomous power of his art is marked, in the legends of him,
by his invention of the saw from the serpent's tooth; and his seeking
refuge, under blood-guiltiness, with Minos, who can judge evil, and
measure, or remit, the penalty of it, but not reward good: Rhadamanthus
only can measure _that_; but Minos is essentially the recognizer of evil
deeds "conoscitor delle peccata," whom, therefore, you find in Dante
under the form of the [Greek: erpeton]. "Cignesi con la coda tante
volte, quantunque gradi vuol che giu sia messa."
And this peril of the influence of Daedalus is twofold; first in leading
us to delight in glitterings and semblances of things, more than in
their form, or truth;--admire the harlequin's jacket more than the
hero's strength; and love the gilding of the missal more than its
words;--but farther, and worse, the ingenuity of Daedalus may even become
bestial, an instinct for mechanical labour only, strangely involved with
a feverish and ghastly cruelty:--(you will find this distinct in the
intensely Daedal work of the Japanese); rebellious, finally, against the
laws of nature and honour, and building labyrinths for monsters,--not
combs for bees.
208. Gentlemen, we of the rough northern race may never, perhaps, be
able to learn from the Greek his reverence for beauty: but we may at
least learn his disdain of mechanism:--of all work which he felt to be
monstrous and inhuman in its imprudent dexterities.
We hold ourselves, we English, to be good workmen. I do not think I
speak with light reference to recent calamity, (for I myself lost a
young relation, full of hope and good purpose, in the foundered ship
_London_,) when I say that either an AEginetan or Ionian shipwright built
ships that could be fought from, though they were under water; and
neither of them would have been proud of having built one that would
fill and sink helplessly if the sea washed over her deck, or turn upside
down if a squall struck her topsail.
Believe me, gentlemen, good workmanship consists in continence and
common sense, more than in frantic expatiation of mechanical ingenuity;
and if you would be continent and rational, you had better learn more of
Art than you do now, and less of Engineering. What is taking place at
this very hour,[138] among the streets, once so bright, and avenues
once so pleasant, of the fairest city in Europe, may surely lead us all
to feel that the skill of Daedalus, set to build impregnable fortresses,
is not so wisely applied as in framing the [Greek: treton ponou]--the
golden honeycomb.
FOOTNOTES:
[135] The closing Lecture, on the religious temper of the Florentine,
though necessary for the complete explanation of the subject to my
class, at the time, introduced new points of inquiry which I do not
choose to lay before the general reader until they can be examined in
fuller sequence. The present volume, therefore, closes with the Sixth
Lecture, and that on Christian art will be given as the first of the
published course on Florentine Sculpture.
[136] These plates of coins are given for future reference and
examination, not merely for the use made of them in this place. The
Lacinian Hera, if a coin could be found unworn in surface, would be very
noble; her hair is thrown free because she is the goddess of the cape of
storms though in her temple, there, the wind never moved the ashes on
its altar. (Livy, xxiv. 3.)
[137] Ancient Cities and Kings, Plate IV. No. 20.
[138] The siege of Paris, at the time of the delivery of this Lecture,
was in one of its most destructive phases.
_THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND._
(_Delivered at the R. A. Institution, Woolwich, December 14, 1869._)
I would fain have left to the frank expression of the moment, but fear I
could not have found clear words--I cannot easily find them, even
deliberately,--to tell you how glad I am, and yet how ashamed, to accept
your permission to speak to you. Ashamed of appearing to think that I
can tell you any truth which you have not more deeply felt than I; but
glad in the thought that my less experience, and way of life sheltered
from the trials, and free from the responsibilities of yours, may have
left me with something of a child's power of help to you; a sureness of
hope, which may perhaps be the one thing that can be helpful to men who
have done too much not to have often failed in doing all that they
desired. And indeed, even the most hopeful of us, cannot but now be in
many things apprehensive. For this at least we all know too well, that
we are on the eve of a great political crisis, if not of political
change. That a struggle is approaching between the newly-risen power of