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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12641 ***
+
+THE QUEEN OF THE AIR
+
+Being a Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm
+
+BY
+
+JOHN RUSKIN, LL.D.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TABLE OF CONTENTS
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+I.  ATHENA CHALINITIS.
+      (Athena in the Heavens.)
+Lecture on the Greek myths of Storm, given (partly) in University
+College, London, March 9, 1869.
+
+II.  ATHENA KERAMITIS.
+      (Athena in the Earth.)
+Study, supplementary to the preceding lecture, of the supposed and actual
+relations of Athena to the vital force in material organism.
+
+III.  ATHENA ERGANE.
+      (Athena in the Heart.)
+Various notes relating to the Conception of Athena as the Directress of
+the Imagination and Will.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+My days and strength have lately been much broken; and I never more felt
+the insufficiency of both than in preparing for the press the following
+desultory memoranda on a most noble subject.  But I leave them now as
+they stand, for no time nor labor would be enough to complete them to my
+contentment; and I believe that they contain suggestions which may be
+followed with safety, by persons who are beginning to take interest in
+the aspects of mythology, which only recent investigation has removed
+from the region of conjecture into that of rational inquiry.  I have
+some advantage, also, from my field work, in the interpretation of myths
+relating to natural phenomena; and I have had always near me, since we
+were at college together, a sure, and unweariedly kind, guide, in my
+friend Charles Newton, to whom we owe the finding of more treasure in
+mines of marble than, were it rightly estimated, all California could
+buy.  I must not, however, permit the chance of his name being in any
+wise associated with my errors.  Much of my work as been done obstinately
+in my own way; and he is never responsible for me, though he has often
+kept me right, or at least enabled me to advance in a new direction.
+Absolutely right no one can be in such matters; nor does a day pass
+without convincing every honest student of antiquity of some partial
+error, and showing him better how to think, and where to look.  But I
+knew that there was no hope of my being able to enter with advantage on
+the fields of history opened by the splendid investigation of recent
+philologists, though I could qualify myself, by attention and sympathy,
+to understand, here and there, a verse of Homer's or Hesiod's, as the
+simple people did for whom they sang.
+
+Even while I correct these sheets for press, a lecture by Professor
+Tyndall has been put into my hands, which I ought to have heard last 16th
+January, but was hindered by mischance; and which, I now find, completes,
+in two important particulars, the evidence of an instinctive truth in
+ancient symbolism; showing, first, that the Greek conception of an
+ætherial element pervading space is justified by the closest reasoning of
+modern physicists; and, secondly, that the blue of the sky, hitherto
+thought to be caused by watery vapour, is, indeed, reflected from the
+divided air itself; so that the bright blue of the eyes of Athena, and
+the deep blue of her ægis, prove to be accurate mythic expressions of
+natural phenomena which it is an uttermost triumph of recent science to
+have revealed.
+
+Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine triumph more complete.  To form,
+"within an experimental tube, a bit of more perfect sky than the sky
+itself!" here is magic of the finest sort! singularly reversed from that
+of old time, which only asserted its competency to enclose in bottles
+elemental forces that were--not of the sky.
+
+Let me, in thanking Professor Tyndall for the true wonder of this piece
+of work, ask his pardon, and that of all masters in physical science, for
+any words of mine, either in the following pages or elsewhere, that may
+ever seem to fail in the respect due to their great powers of thought, or
+in the admiration due to the far scope of their discovery.  But I will be
+judged by themselves, if I have not bitter reason to ask them to teach us
+more than yet they have taught.
+
+This first day of May, 1869, I am writing where my work was begun
+thirty-five years ago, within sight of the snows of the higher Alps.  In
+that half of the permitted life of man, I have seen strange evil brought
+upon every scene that I best loved, or tried to make beloved by others.
+The light which once flushed those pale summits with its rose at dawn,
+and purple at sunset, is now umbered and faint; the air which once inlaid
+the clefts of all their golden crags with azure is now defiled with
+languid coils of smoke, belched from worse than volcanic fires; their
+very glacier waves are ebbing, and their snows fading, as if hell had
+breathed on them; the waters that once sank at their feet into
+crystalline rest are now dimmed and foul, from deep to deep, and shore to
+shore.  These are no careless words--they are accurately, horribly, true.
+I know what the Swiss lakes were; no pool of Alpine fountain at its
+source was clearer.  This morning, on the Lake of Geneva, at half a mile
+from the beach, I could scarcely see my oar-blade a fathom deep.
+
+The light, the air, the waters, all defiled!  How of the earth itself?
+Take this one fact for type of honour done by the modern Swiss to the
+earth of his native land.  There used to be a little rock at the end of
+the avenue by the port of Neuchâtel; there, the last marble of the foot
+of Jura, sloping to the blue water, and (at this time of year) covered
+with bright pink tufts of Saponaria.  I went, three days since, to gather
+a blossom at the place.  The goodly native rock and its flowers were
+covered with the dust and refuse of the town; but, in the middle of the
+avenue, was a newly-constructed artificial rockery, with a fountain
+twisted through a spinning spout, and an inscription on one of its
+loose-tumbled stones,--
+
+      "Aux Botanistes,
+      Le club Jurassique,"
+
+Ah, masters of modern science, give me back my Athena out of your vials,
+and seal, if it may be, once more, Asmodeus therein.  You have divided
+the elements, and united them; enslaved them upon the earth, and
+discerned them in the stars.  Teach us now, but this of them, which is
+all that man need know,--that the Air is given to him for his life; and
+the Rain to his thirst, and for his baptism; and the Fire for warmth; and
+the Sun for sight; and the Earth for his Meat--and his Rest.
+
+VEVAY, May 1, 1869.
+
+
+
+
+THE QUEEN OF THE AIR.
+
+
+
+I.
+
+ATHENA CHALINITIS.*
+(Athena in the Heavens.)
+
+
+* "Athena the Restrainer."  The name is given to her as having helped
+Bellerophon to bridle Pegasus, the flying cloud.
+
+
+LECTURE ON THE GREEK MYTHS OF STORM, GIVEN (PARTLY) IN UNIVERSITY
+      COLLEGE, LONDON, MARCH 9, 1869.
+
+
+1. I will not ask your pardon for endeavoring to interest you in the
+subject of Greek Mythology; but I must ask your permission to approach
+it in a temper differing from that in which it is frequently treated.
+We cannot justly interpret the religion of any people, unless we are
+prepared to admit that we ourselves, as well as they, are liable to
+error in matters of faith; and that the convictions of others, however
+singular, may in some points have been well founded, while our own,
+however reasonable, may be in some particulars mistaken.  You must
+forgive me, therefore, for not always distinctively calling the creeds
+of the past "superstition," and the creeds of the present day "religion;"
+as well as for assuming that a faith now confessed may sometimes be
+superficial, and that a faith long forgotten may once have been sincere.
+It is the task of the Divine to condemn the errors of antiquity, and of
+the philologists to account for them; I will only pray you to read, with
+patience, and human sympathy, the thoughts of men who lived without blame
+in a darkness they could not dispel; and to remember that, whatever
+charge of folly may justly attach to the saying, "There is no God," the
+folly is prouder, deeper, and less pardonable, in saying, "There is no
+God but for me."
+
+2. A myth, in its simplest definition, is a story with a meaning attached
+to it other than it seems to have at first; and the fact that it has such
+a meaning is generally marked by some of its circumstances being
+extraordinary, or, in the common use of the word, unnatural.  Thus if I
+tell you that Hercules killed a water-serpent in the lake of Lerna, and
+if I mean, and you understand, nothing more than that fact, the story,
+whether true or false, is not a myth.  But if by telling you this, I mean
+that Hercules purified the stagnation of many streams from deadly
+miasmata, my story, however simple, is a true myth; only, as, if I leftit
+in that simplicity, you would probably look for nothing beyond, it will
+be wise in me to surprise your attention by adding some singular
+circumstance; for instance, that the water-snake had several heads, which
+revived as fast as they were killed, and which poisoned even the foot
+that trod upon them as they slept.  And in proportion to the fulness of
+intended meaning I shall probably multiply and refine upon these
+improbabilities; as, suppose, if, instead of desiring only to tell you
+that Hercules purified a marsh, I wished you to understand that he
+contended with the venom and vapor of envy and evil ambition, whether in
+other men's souls or in his own, and choked that malaria only by supreme
+toil,--I might tell you that this serpent was formed by the goddess whose
+pride was in the trial of Hercules; and that its place of abode as by a
+palm-tree; and that for every head of it that was cut off, two rose up
+with renewed life; and that the hero found at last that he could not kill
+the creature at all by cutting its heads off or crushing them, but only
+by burning them down; and that the midmost of them could not be killed
+even that way, but had to be buried alive.  Only in proportion as I mean
+more,  I shall certainly appear more absurd in my statement; and at last
+when I get unendurably significant, all practical persons will agree that
+I was talking mere nonsense from the beginning, and never meant anything
+at all.
+
+3.  It is just possible, however, also, that the story-teller may all
+along have meant nothing but what he said; and that, incredible as the
+events may appear, he himself literally believed--and expected you also
+to believe--all this about Hercules, without any latent moral or history
+whatever.  And it is very necessary, in reading traditions of this kind,
+to determine, first of all, whether you are listening to a simple person,
+who is relating what, at all events, he believes to be true, (and may,
+therefore, possibly have been so to some extent), or to a reserved
+philosopher, who is veiling a theory of the universe under the grotesque
+of a fairy tale.  It is, in general, more likely that the first
+supposition should be the right one: simple and credulous persons are,
+perhaps fortunately, more common than philosophers; and it is of the
+highest importance that you should take their innocent testimony as it
+was meant, and not efface, under the graceful explanation which your
+cultivated ingenuity may suggest, either the evidence their story may
+contain (such as it is worth) of an extraordinary event having really
+taken place, or the unquestionable light which it will cast upon the
+character of the person by whom it was frankly believed.  And to deal
+with Greek religion honestly, you must at once understand that this
+literal belief was, in the mind of the general people, as deeply rooted
+as ours in the legends of our own sacred book; and that a basis of
+unmiraculous event was as little suspected, and an explanatory symbolism
+as rarely traced, by them, as by us.
+
+You must, therefore, observe that I deeply degrade the position which
+such a myth as that just referred to occupied in the Greek mind, by
+comparing it (for fear of offending you) to our story of St. George and
+the Dragon.  Still, the analogy is perfect in minor respects; and though
+it fails to give you any notion of the Greek faith, it will exactly
+illustrate the manner in which faith laid hold of its objects.
+
+4.  This story of Hercules and the Hydra, then, was to the general Greek
+mind, in its best days, a tale about a real hero and a real monster.  Not
+one in a thousand knew anything of the way in which the story had arisen,
+any more than the English peasant generally is aware of the plebeian
+original of St. George; or supposes that there were once alive in the
+world, with sharp teeth and claws, real, and very ugly, flying dragons.
+On the other hand, few persons traced any moral or symbolical meaning in
+the story, and the average Greek was as far from imagining any
+interpretation like that I have just given you, as an average Englishman
+is from seeing is St. George the Red Cross Knight of Spenser, or in the
+Dragon the Spirit of Infidelity.  But, for all that, there was a certain
+undercurrent of consciousness in all minds that the figures meant more
+than they at first showed; and, according to each man's own faculties of
+sentiment, he judged and read them; just as a Knight of the Garter reads
+more in the jewel on his collar than the George and Dragon of a
+public-house expresses to the host or to his customers.  Thus, to the
+mean person the myth always meant little; to the noble person, much; and
+the greater their familiarity with it, the more contemptible it became to
+one, and the more sacred to the other; until vulgar commentators
+explained it entirely away, while Virgil made the crowning glory of his
+choral hymn to Hercules.
+
+      "Around thee, powerless to infect thy soul,
+      Rose, in his crested crowd, the Lerna worm."
+
+                          "Non te rationis egentem
+      Lernæus turbâ capitum circumstetit anguis."
+
+And although, in any special toil of the hero's life, the moral
+interpretation was rarely with definiteness attached to the event, yet
+in the whole course of the life, not only for a symbolical meaning, but
+the warrant for the existence of a real spiritual power, was apprehended
+of all men.  Hercules was no dead hero, to be remembered only as a victor
+over monsters of the past--harmless now as slain.  He was the perpetual
+type and mirror of heroism, and its present and living aid against every
+ravenous form of human trial and pain.
+
+5.  But, if we seek to know more than this and to ascertain the manner in
+which the story first crystallized into its shape, we shall find
+ourselves led back generally to one or other of two sources--either to
+actual historical events, represented by the fancy under figures
+personifying them; or else to natural phenomena similarly endowed with
+life by the imaginative power usually more or less under the influence of
+terror.  The historical myths we must leave the masters of history to
+follow; they, and the events they record, being yet involved in great,
+though attractive and penetrable, mystery.  But the stars, and hills, and
+storms are with us now, as they were with others of old; and it only
+needs that we look at them with the earnestness of those childish eyes to
+understand the first words spoken of them by the children of men, and
+then, in all the most beautiful and enduring myths, we shall find, not
+only a literal story of a real person, not only a parallel imagery of
+moral principle, but an underlying worship of natural phenomena, out of
+which both have sprung, and in which both forever remain rooted.  Thus,
+from the real sun, rising and setting,--from the real atmosphere, calm in
+its dominion of unfading blue, and fierce in its descent of tempest,--the
+Greek forms first the idea of two entirely personal and corporal gods,
+whose limbs are clothes in divine flesh, and whose brows are crowned with
+divine beauty; yet so real that the quiver rattles at their shoulder, and
+the chariot bends beneath their weight.  And, on the other hand,
+collaterally with these corporeal images, and never for one instant
+separated from them, he conceives also two omnipresent spiritual
+influences, as the sun, with a constant fire, whatever in humanity is
+skilful and wise; and the other, like the living air, breathes the calm
+of heavenly fortitude, and strength of righteous anger, into every human
+breast that is pure and brave.
+
+6.  Now, therefore, in nearly every myth of importance, and certainly in
+every one of those which I shall speak to-night, you have to discern
+these three structural parts,--the root and the two branches: the root,
+in physical existence, sun, or sky, or cloud, or sea; then the personal
+incarnation of that, becoming a trusted and companionable deity, with
+whom you may walk hand in hand, as a child with its brother or its
+sister; and, lastly, the moral significance of the image, which is in all
+the great myths eternally and beneficently true.
+
+7.  The great myths; that is to say, myths made by great people.  For the
+first plain fact about myth-making is one which has been most strangely
+lost sight of,--that you cannot make a myth unless you have something to
+make it of.  You cannot tell a secret which you don't know.  If the myth
+is about the sky, it must have been made by somebody who has looked at
+the sky.  If the myth is about justice and fortitude, it must have been
+made by someone who knew what it was to be just or patient.  According to
+the quantity of understanding in the person will be the quantity of
+significance in his fable; and the myth of a simple and ignorant race
+must necessarily mean little, because a simple and ignorant race have
+little to mean.  So the great question in reading a story is always, not
+what wild hunter dreamed, or what childish race first dreaded it; but
+what wise man first perfectly told, and what strong people first
+perfectly lived by it.  And the real meaning of any myth is that which it
+has at the noblest age of the nation among whom it is current.  The
+farther back you pierce, the less significance you will find, until you
+come to the first narrow thought, which, indeed, contains the germ of the
+accomplished tradition; but only as the seed contains the flower.  As the
+intelligence and passion of the race develop, they cling to and nourish
+their beloved and sacred legend; leaf by leaf it expands under the touch
+of more pure affections, and more delicate imagination, until at last the
+perfect fable burgeons out into symmetry of milky stem and honied bell.
+
+8.  But through whatever changes it may pass, remember that our right
+reading of it is wholly dependent on the materials we have in our own
+minds for an intelligent answering sympathy.  If it first arose among a
+people who dwelt under stainless skies, and measures their journeys by
+ascending and declining stars, we certainly cannot read their story, if
+we have never seen anything above us in the day but smoke, nor anything
+around us in the night but candles.  If the tale goes on to change clouds
+or planets into living creatures,--to invest them with fair forms and
+inflame them with mighty passions,--we can only understand the story of
+the human-hearted things, in so far as we ourselves take pleasure in the
+perfectness of visible form, or can sympathize, by an effort of
+imagination, with the strange people who had other loves than those of
+wealth, and other interests than those of commerce.  And, lastly, if the
+myth complete itself to the fulfilled thoughts of the nation, by
+attributing to the gods, whom they have carved out of their fantasy,
+continual presence with their own souls; and their every effort for good
+is finally guided by the sense of the companionship, the praise, and the
+pure will of immortals, we shall be able to follow them into this last
+circle of their faith only in the degree in which the better parts of our
+own beings have been also stirred by the aspects of nature, or
+strengthened by her laws.  It may be easy to prove that the ascent of
+Apollo in his chariot signifies nothing but the rising of the sun.  But
+what does the sunrise itself signify to us?  If only languid return to
+frivolous amusement, or fruitless labor, it will, indeed, not be easy for
+us to conceive the power, over a Greek, of the name of Apollo.  But if,
+fir us also, as for the Greek, the sunrise means daily restoration to the
+sense of passionate gladness and of perfect life--if it means the
+thrilling of new strength through every nerve,--the shedding over us of a
+better peace than the peace of night, in the power of the dawn,--and the
+purging of evil vision and fear by the baptism of its dew;--if the sun
+itself is an influence, to us also, of spiritual good--and becomes thus
+in reality, not in imagination, to us also, a spiritual power,--we may
+then soon over-pass the narrow limit of conception which kept that power
+impersonal, and rise with the Greek to the thought of an angel who
+rejoiced as a strong man to run his course, whose voice calling to life
+and to labor rang round the earth, and whose going forth was to the ends
+of heaven.
+
+9.  The time, then, at which I shall take up for you, as well as I can
+decipher it, the traditions of the gods of Greece, shall be near the
+beginning of its central and formed faith,--about 500 B.C.,--a faith of
+which the character is perfectly represented by Pindar and Æschylus, who
+are both of them outspokenly religious, and entirely sincere men; while
+we may always look back to find the less developed thought of the
+preceding epoch given by Homer, in a more occult, subtle,
+half-instinctive, and involuntary way.
+
+10.  Now, at that culminating period of the Greek religion, we find,
+under one governing Lord of all things, four subordinate elemental
+forces, and four spiritual powers living in them and commanding them.
+The elements are of course the well-known four of the ancient world,--
+the earth, the waters, the fire, and the air; and the living powers of
+them are Demeter, the Latin Ceres; Poseidon, the Latin Neptune; Apollo,
+who has retained always his Greek name; and Athena, the Latin Minerva.
+Each of these are descended from, or changed from, more ancient, and
+therefore more mystic, deities of the earth and heaven, and of a finer
+element of æther supposed to be beyond the heavens;* but at this time
+we find the four quite definite, both in their kingdoms and in their
+personalities.  They are the rulers of the earth that we tread upon, and
+the air that we breathe; and are with us closely, in their vivid
+humanity, as the dust that they animate, and the winds that they bridle.
+I shall briefly define for you the range of their separate dominions, and
+then follow, as far as we have time, the most interesting of the legends
+which relate to the queen of the air.
+
+
+* And by modern science now also asserted, and with probability argued,
+to exist.
+
+
+11.  The rule of the first spirit, Demeter, the earth mother, is over the
+earth, first, as the origin of all life,--the dust from whence we were
+taken; secondly, as the receiver of all things back at last into silence
+--"Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."  And, therefore, as
+the most tender image of this appearing and fading life, in the birth and
+fall of flowers, her daughter Proserpine plays in the fields of Sicily,
+and thence is torn away into darkness, and becomes the Queen of Fate--not
+merely of death, but of the gloom which closes over and ends, not beauty
+only, but sin, and chiefly of sins the sin against the life she gave; so
+that she is, in her highest power, Persephone, the avenger and purifier
+of blood--"The voice of thy brother's blood cries to me out of the
+ground."  Then, side by side with this queen of the earth, we find a
+demigod of agriculture by the plough--the lord of grain, or of the thing
+ground by the mill.  And it is a singular proof of the simplicity of
+Greek character at this noble time, that of all representations left to
+us of their deities by their art, few are so frequent, and none perhaps
+so beautiful, as the symbol of this spirit of agriculture.
+
+12.  Then the dominant spirit of the element water is Neptune, but
+subordinate to him are myriads of other water spirits, of whom Nereus is
+the chief, with Palæmon, and Leucothea, the "white lady" of the sea; and
+Thetis, and nymphs innumerable who, like her, could "suffer a sea
+change," while the river deities had each independent power, according
+to the preciousness of their streams to the cities fed by them,--the
+"fountain Arethuse, and thou, honoured flood, smooth sliding Mincius,
+crowned with vocal reeds."  And, spiritually, this king of the waters is
+lord of the strength and daily flow of human life--he gives it material
+force and victory; which as the meaning of the dedication of the hair, as
+the sign of the strength of life, to the river or the native land.
+
+13.  Demeter, then, over the earth, and its giving and receiving of life.
+Neptune over the waters, and the flow and force of life,--always among
+the Greeks typified by the horse, which was to them as a crested
+sea-wave, animated and bridled.  Then the third element, fire, has set
+over it two powers: over earthly fire, the assistant of human labor, is
+set Hephæstus, lord of all labor in which is the flush and the sweat of
+the brow; and over heavenly fire, the source of day, is set Apollo, the
+spirit of all kindling, purifying, and illuminating intellectual wisdom,
+each of these gods having also their subordinate or associated powers,--
+servant, or sister, or companion muse.
+
+14.  Then, lastly, we come to the myth which is to be our subject of
+closer inquiry,--the story of Athena and of the deities subordinate to
+her.  This great goddess, the Neith of the Egyptians, the Athena or
+Athenaia of the Greeks, and, with broken power, half usurped by Mars,
+the Minerva of the Latins, is, physically, the queen of the air; having
+supreme power both over its blessing of calm, and wrath of storm; and,
+spiritually, she is the queen of the breath of man, first of the bodily
+breathing which is life to his blood, and strength to his arm in battle;
+and then of the mental breathing, or inspiration, which is his moral
+health and habitual wisdom; wisdom of conduct and of the heart, as
+opposed to the wisdom of imagination and the brain; moral, as distinct
+from intellectual; inspired, as distinct from illuminated.
+
+15.  By a singular and fortunate, though I believe wholly accidental,
+coincidence, the heart-virtue, of which she is the spirit, was separated
+by the ancients into four divisions, which have since obtained acceptance
+from all men as rightly discerned, and have received, as if from the
+quarters of the four winds of which Athena is the natural queen, the name
+of "Cardinal" virtues: namely, Prudence (the right seeing, and
+foreseeing, of events through darkness); Justice (the righteous bestowal
+of favor and of indignation); Fortitude (patience under trial by pain);
+and Temperance (patience under trial by pleasure).  With respect to these
+four virtues, the attributes of Athena are all distinct.  In her
+prudence, or sight in darkness, she is "Glaukopis," "owl-eyed."*  In her
+justice, which is the dominant virtue, she wears two robes, one of light,
+and one of darkness; the robe of light, saffron color, or the color of
+the daybreak, falls to her feet, covering her wholly with favor and
+love,--the calm of the sky in blessing; it is embroidered along its edge
+with her victory over the giants (the troublous powers of the earth), and
+the likeness of it was woven yearly by the Athenian maidens and carried
+to the temple of their own Athena, not to the Parthenon, that was the
+temple of all the world's Athena,--but this they carried to the temple of
+their own only one who loved them, and stayed with them always.  Then her
+robe of indignation is worn on her breast and left arm only, fringed with
+fatal serpents, and fastened with Gorgonian cold, turning men to stone;
+physically, the lightning and hail of chastisement by storm.  Then in her
+fortitude she wears the crested and unstooping hemlet;** and lastly, in
+her temperance, she is the queen of maidenhood--stainless as the air of
+heaven.
+
+
+* There are many other meanings in the epithet; see farther on, §91, pp.
+133, 134.
+** I am compelled, for clearness' sake, to mark only one meaning at a
+time.  Athena's helmet is sometimes a mask, sometimes a sign of anger,
+sometimes of the highest light of æther; but I cannot speak of all this
+at once.
+
+
+16.  But all these virtues mass themselves in the Greek mind into the two
+main ones,--of Justice, or noble passion, and Fortitude, or noble
+patience; and of these, the chief powers of Athena, the Greeks have
+divinely written for them, and for all men after them, two mighty songs,
+--one, of the Menis,* Mens, passion, or zeal, of Athena, breathed into a
+mortal whose name is "Ache of heart," and whose short life is only the
+incarnate brooding and burst of storm; and the other is of the foresight
+and fortitude of Athena, maintained by her in the heart of a mortal whose
+name is given to him from a longer grief, Odysseus, the full of sorrow,
+the much enduring, and the long-suffering.
+
+
+* This first word of the Iliad, Menis, afterwards passes into the Latin
+Mens; is the root of the Latin name for Athena, "Minerva," and so the
+root of the English "mind."
+
+
+17.  The minor expressions by the Greeks in word, in symbol, and in
+religious service, of this faith, are so many and so beautiful, that I
+hope some day to gather at least a few of them into a separate body of
+evidence respecting the power of Athena, and of its relations to the
+ethical conception of the Homeric poems, or, rather, to their ethical
+nature; for they are not conceived didactically, but are didactic in
+their essence, as all good art is.  There is an increasing insensibility
+to this character, and even an open denial of it, among us now which is
+one of the most curious errors of modernism,--the peculiar and judicial
+blindness of an age which, having long practised art and poetry for the
+sake of pleasure only, has become incapable of reading their language
+when they were both didactic; and also, having been itself accustomed to
+a professedly didactic teaching, which yet, for private interests,
+studiously avoids collision with every prevalent vice of its day (and
+especially with avarice), has become equally dead to the intensely
+ethical conceptions of a race which habitually divided all men into two
+broad classes of worthy or worthless,--good, and good for nothing.  And
+even the celebrated passage of Horace about the Iliad is now misread or
+disbelieved, as if it were impossible that the Iliad could be instructive
+because it is not like a sermon.  Horce does not say that it is like a
+sermon, and would have been still less likely to say so if he ever had
+had the advantage of hearing a sermon.  "I have been reading that story
+of Troy again" (thus he writes to a noble youth of Rome whom he cared
+for), "quietly at Præneste, while you have been busy at Rome; and truly
+I think that what is base and what is noble, and what useful and useless,
+may be better learned from that, than from all Chrysippus' and Crantor's
+talk put together."*  Which is profoundly true, not of the Iliad only,
+but of all other great art whatsoever; for all pieces of such art are
+didactic in the purest way, indirectly and occultly, so that, first, you
+shall only be bettered by them if you are already hard at work in
+bettering yourself; and when you are bettered by them, it shall be partly
+with a general acceptance of their influence, so constant and subtile
+that you shall be no more conscious of it than of the healthy digestion
+of food; and partly by a gift of unexpected truth, which you shall only
+find by slow mining for it,--which is withheld on purpose, and
+close-locked, that you may not get it till you have forged the key of it
+in a furnace of your own heating.  And this withholding of their meaning
+is continual, and confessed, in the great poets.  Thus Pindar says of
+himself: "There is many an arrow in my quiver, full of speech to the
+wise, but, for the many, they need interpreters."  And neither Pindar,
+nor Æschylus, nor Hesiod, nor Homer, nor any of the greater poets or
+teachers of any nation or time, ever spoke but with intentional
+reservation; nay, beyond this, there is often a meaning which they
+themselves cannot interpert [sic],--which it may be for ages long after
+them to intrepert [sic],--in what they said, so far as it recorded true
+imaginative vision.  For all the greatest myths have been seen by the men
+who tell them, involuntarily and passively,--seen by them with as great
+distinctness (and in some respects, though not in all, under conditions
+as far beyond the control of their will) as a dream sent to any of us by
+night when we dream clearest; and it is this veracity of vision that
+could not be refused, and of moral that could not be foreseen, which in
+modern historical inquiry has been left wholly out of account; being
+indeed the thing which no merely historical investigator can understand,
+or even believe; for it belongs exclusively to the creative or artistic
+group of men, and can only be interpreted by those of their race, who
+themselves in some measure also see visions and dream dreams.
+
+
+* Note, once for all, that unless when there is question about some
+particular expression, I never translate literally, but give the real
+force of what is said, as I best can, freely.
+
+
+So that you may obtain a more truthful idea of the nature of Greek
+religion and legend from the poems of Keats, and the nearly as beautiful,
+and, in general grasp of subject, far more powerful, recent work of
+Morris, than from frigid scholarship, however extensive.  Not that the
+poet's impressions or renderings of things are wholly true, but their
+truth is vital, not formal.  They are like sketches from the life by
+Reynolds or Gainsborough, which may be demonstrably inaccurate or
+imaginary in many traits, and indistinct in others, yet will be in the
+deepest sense like, and true; while the work of historical analysis is
+too often weak with loss, through the very labor of its miniature
+touches, or useless in clumsy and vapid veracity of externals, and
+complacent security of having done all that is required for the portrait,
+when it has measured the breadth of the forehead and the length of the
+nose.
+
+18.  The first of requirements, then, for the right reading of myths, is
+the understanding of the nature of all true vision by noble persons;
+namely, that it is founded on constant laws common to all human nature;
+that it perceives, however darkly, things which are for all ages true;
+that we can only understand it so far as we have some perception of the
+same truth; and that its fulness is developed and manifested more and
+more by the reverberation of it from minds of the same mirror-temper, in
+succeeding ages.  You will understand Homer better by seeing his
+reflection in Dante, as you may trace new forms and softer colors in a
+hillside, redoubled by a lake.
+
+I shall be able partly to show you, even to-night, how much, in the
+Homeric vision of Athena, has been made clearer by the advance of time,
+being thus essentially and eternally true; but I must in the outset
+indicate the relation to that central thought of the imagery of the
+inferior deities of storm.
+
+19.  And first I will take the myth of Æolus (the "sage Hippotades" of
+Milton), as it is delivered pure by Homer from the early times.
+
+Why do you suppose Milton calls him "sage"?  One does not usually think
+of the winds as very thoughtful or deliberate powers.  But hear Homer:
+"Then we came to the Æolian island, and there dwelt Æolus Hippotades,
+dear to the deathless gods; there he dwelt in a floating island, and
+round it was a wall of brass that could not be broken; and the smooth
+rock of it ran up sheer.  To whom twelve children were born in the sacred
+chambers,--six daughters and six strong sons; and they dwell foreer with
+their beloved father and their mother, strict in duty; and with them are
+laid up a thousand benefits; and the misty house around them rings with
+fluting all the day long."  Now, you are to note first, in this
+description, the wall of brass and the sheer rock.  You will find,
+throughout the fables of the tempest-group, that the brazen wall and the
+precipice (occurring in another myth as the brazen tower of Danaë) are
+always connected with the idea of the towering cloud lighted by the sun,
+here truly described as a floating island.  Secondly, you hear that all
+treasures were laid up in them; therefore, you know this Æolus is lord of
+the beneficent winds ("he bringeth the wind out of his treasuries"); and
+presently afterwards Homer calls him the "steward" of the winds, the
+master of the store-house of them.  And this idea of gifts and
+preciousness in the winds of heaven is carried out in the well-known
+sequel of the fable: Æolus gives them to Ulysses, all but one, bound in
+leathern bags, with a glittering cord of silver; and so like bags of
+treasure that the sailors think they are so, and open them to see.  And
+when Ulysses is thus driven back to Æolus, and prays him again to help
+him, note the deliberate words of the king's refusal,--"Did I not," says
+he, "send thee on thy way heartily, that thou mightest reach thy country,
+thy home, and whatever is dear to thee?  It is not lawful for me again
+to send forth favorably on his journey a man hated by the happy gods."
+This idea of the beneficence of Æolus remains to the latest times, though
+Virgil, by adopting the vulgar change of the cloud island into Lipari,
+has lost it a little; but even when it is finally explained away by
+Diodorus, Æolus is still a kind-hearted monarch, who lived on the coast
+of Sorrento, invented the use of sails, and established a system of storm
+signals.
+
+20.  Another beneficent storm-power, Boreas, occupies an important place
+in early legend, and a singularly principal one in art; and I wish I
+could read to you a passage of Plato about the legend of Boreas and
+Oreithyia,* and the breeze and shade of the Ilissus--notwithstannding its
+severe reflection upon persons who waste their time on mythological
+studies; but I must go on at once to the fable with which you are all
+generally familiar, that of the Harpies.
+
+
+* Translated by Max Müller in the opening of his essay on "Comparative
+Mythology."--Chips from a German Workshop, vol. ii.
+
+
+This is always connected with that of Boreas or the north wind, because
+the two sons of Boreas are enemies of the Harpies, and drive them away
+into frantic flight.  The myth in its first literal form means only the
+battle between the fair north wind and the foul south one: the two
+Harpies, "Stormswift" and "Swiftfoot," are the sisters of the rainbow;
+that is to say, they are the broken drifts of the showery south wind, and
+the clear north wind drives them back; but they quickly take a deeper and
+more malignant significance.  You know the short, violent, spiral gusts
+that lift the dust before coming rain: the Harpies get identified first
+with these, and then with more violent whirlwinds, and so they are called
+"Harpies," "the Snatchers," and are thought of as entirely destructive;
+their manner of destroying being twofold,--by snatching away, and by
+defiling and polluting.  This is a month in which you may really see a
+small Harpy at her work almost whenever you choose.  The first time that
+there is threatening of rain after two or three days of fine weather,
+leave your window well open to the street, and some books or papers on
+the table; and if you do not, in a little while, know what the Harpies
+mean, and how they snatch, and how they defile, I'll give up my Greek
+myths.
+
+21.  That is the physical meaning.  It is now easy to find the mental
+one.  You must all have felt the expression of ignoble anger in those
+fitful gusts of storm.  There is a sense of provocation in their thin
+and senseless fury, wholly different from the nobler anger of the greater
+tempests.  Also, they seem useless and unnatural, and the Greek thinks of
+them always as vile in malice, and opposed, therefore, to the Sons of
+Boreas, who are kindly winds, that fill sails, and wave harvests,--full
+of bracing health and happy impulses.  From this lower and merely greater
+terror, always associated with their whirling motion, which is indeed
+indicative of the most destructive winds; and they are thus related to
+the nobler tempests, as Charybdis to the sea; they are devouring and
+desolating, making all things disappear that come in their grasp; and so,
+spiritually, they are the gusts of vexatious, fretful, lawless passion,
+vain and overshadowing, discontented and lamenting, meager and insane,--
+spirits of wasted energy, and wandering disease, and unappeased famine,
+and unsatisfied hope.  So you have, on the one side, the winds of
+prosperity and health, on the other, of ruin and sickness.  Understand
+that, once, deeply,--any who have ever known the weariness of vain
+desires, the pitiful, unconquerable, coiling and recoiling famine and
+thirst of heart,--and you will know what was in the sound of the Harpy
+Celæno's shriek from her rock; and why, in the seventh circle of the
+"Inferno," the Harpies make their nests in the warped branches of the
+trees that are the souls of suicides.
+
+22.  Now you must always be prepared to read Greek legends as you trace
+threads through figures on a silken damask: the same thread runs through
+the web, but it makes part of different figures.  Joined with other
+colors you hardly recognize it, and in different lights it is dark or
+light.  Thus the Greek fables blend and cross curiously in different
+directions, till they knit themselves into an arabesque where sometimes
+you cannot tell black from purple, nor blue from emerald--they being all
+the truer for this, because the truths of emotion they represent are
+interwoven in the same way, but all the more difficult to read, and to
+explain in any order.  Thus the Harpies, as they represent vain desire,
+are connected with the Sirens, who are the spirits of constant desire; so
+that it is difficult sometimes in early art to know which are meant, both
+being represented alike as birds with women's heads; only the Sirens are
+the great constant desires--the infinite sicknesses of heart--which,
+rightly placed, give life, and wrongly placed, waste it away; so that
+there are two groups of Sirens, one noble and saving, as the other is
+fatal.  But there are no animating or saving Harpies; their nature is
+always vexing and full of weariness, and thus they are curiously
+connected with the whole group of legends about Tantalus.
+
+33.*  We all know what it is to be tantalized; but we do not often think
+of asking what Tantalus was tantalized for--what he had done, to be
+forever kept hungry in sight of food.  Well; he had not been condemned to
+this merely for being a glutton.  By Dante the same punishment is
+assigned to simple gluttony, to purge it away; but the sins of Tantalus
+were of a much wider and more mysterious kind.  There are four great sins
+attributed to him: one, stealing the food of the gods to give it to men;
+another, sacrificing his son to feed the gods themselves (it may remind
+you for a moment of what I was telling you of the earthly character of
+Demeter, that, while the other gods all refuse, she, dreaming about her
+lost daughter, eats part of the shoulder of Pelops before she knows what
+she is doing); another sin is, telling the secrets of the gods; and only
+the fourth--stealing the golden dog of Pandareos--is connected with
+gluttony.  The special sense of this myth is marked by Pandareos
+receiving the happy privilege of never being troubled with indigestion;
+the dog, in general, however mythically represents all utter senseless
+and carnal desires; mainly that of gluttony; and in the mythic sense of
+Hades--that is to say, so far as it represents spiritual ruin in this
+life, and not a literal hell--the dog Cerberus as its gatekeeper--with
+this special marking of his character of sensual passion, that he fawns
+on all those who descend, but rages against all who would return (the
+Virgilian "facilis descendus" being a later recognition of this mythic
+character of Hades); the last labor of Hercules is the dragging him up
+to the light; and in some sort he represents the voracity or devouring
+of Hades itself; and the mediæval representation of the mouth of hell
+perpetuates the same thought.  Then, also, the power of evil passion
+is partly associated with the red and scorching light of Sirius, as
+opposed to the pure light of the sun: he is the dog-star of ruin; and
+hence the continual Homeric dwelling upon him, and comparison of the
+flame of anger to his swarthy light; only, in his scorching, it is
+thirst, not hunger, over which he rules physically; so that the fable
+of Icarius, his first master, corresponds, among the Greeks, to the
+legend of the drunkenness of Noah.
+
+
+* Printer's error: should be 23.
+
+
+The story of Actæon, the raging death of Hecuba, and the tradition of
+the white dog which ate part of Hercules' first sacrifice, and so gave
+name to the Cynosarges, are all various phases of the same thought,--the
+Greek notion of the dog being throughout confused between its serviceable
+fidelity, its watchfulness, its foul voracity, shamelessness, and deadly
+madness, while with the curious reversal or recoil of the meaning which
+attaches itself to nearly every great myth,--and which we shall presently
+see notably exemplified in the relations of the serpent to Athena,--the
+dog becomes in philosophy a type of severity and abstinence.
+
+24.  It would carry us too far aside were I to tell you the story of
+Pandareos' dog--or rather of Jupiter's dog, for Pandareos was its
+guardian only; all that bears on our present purpose is that the guardian
+of this golden dog had three daughters, one of whom was subject to the
+power of the Sirens, and is turned into a nightingale; and the other two
+were subject to the power of the Harpies, and this was what happened to
+them: They were very beautiful, and they were beloved by the gods in
+their youth, and all the great goddesses were anxious to bring them up
+rightly.  Of all types of young ladies' education, there is nothing so
+splendid as that of the younger daughters of Pandareos.  They have
+literally the four greatest goddesses for their governesses.  Athena
+teaches them domestic accomplishments, how to weave, and sew, and the
+like; Artemis teaches them to hold themselves up straight; Hera, how to
+behave proudly and oppressively to company; and Aphrodite, delightful
+governess, feeds them with cakes and honey all day long.  All goes well,
+until just the time when they are going to be brought out; then there is
+a great dispute whom they are to marry, and in the midst of it they are
+carried off by the Harpies, given by them to be slaves to the Furies, and
+never seen more.  But of course there is nothing in Greek myths; and one
+never heard of such things as vain desires, and empty hopes, and clouded
+passions, defiling and snatching away the souls of maidens, in a London
+season.
+
+I have no time to trace for you any more harpy legends, though they are
+full of the most curious interest; but I may confirm for you my
+interpretation of this one, and prove its importance in the Greek mind,
+by noting that Polygnotus painted these maidens, in his great religious
+series of paintings at Delphi, crowned with flowers, and playing at dice;
+and that Penelope remembers them in her last fit of despair, just before
+the return of Ulysses, and prays bitterly that she may be snatched away
+at once into nothingness by the Harpies, like Pandareos' daughters,
+rather than be tormented longer by her deferred hope, and anguish of
+disappointed love.
+
+25.  I have hitherto spoken only of deities of the winds.  We pass now to
+a far more important group, the deities of cloud.  Both of these are
+subordinate to the ruling power of the air, as the demigods of the
+fountains and minor seas are to the great deep; but, as the
+cloud-firmament detaches itself more from the air, and has a wider range
+of ministry than the minor streams and seas, the highest cloud deity,
+Hermes, has a rank more equal with Athena than Nereus or Proteus with
+Neptune; and there is greater difficulty in tracing his character,
+because his physical dominion over the clouds can, of course, be asserted
+only where clouds are; and, therefore, scarcely at all in Egypt;* so that
+the changes which Hermes undergoes in becoming a Greek from an Egyptian
+and Phœnician god, are greater than in any other case of adopted
+tradition  In Egypt Hermes is a deity of historical record, and a
+conductor of the dead to judgment; the Greeks take away much of this
+historical function, assigning it to the Muses; but, in investing him
+with the physical power over clouds, they give him that which the Muses
+disdain,--the power of concealment and of theft.  The snatching away by
+the Harpies is with brute force; but the snatching away by the clouds
+is connected with the thought of hiding, and of making things seem to
+be what they are not; so that Hermes is the god of lying, as he is of
+mist; and yet with this ignoble function of making things vanish and
+disappear is connected the remnant of his grand Egyptian authority of
+leading away souls in the cloud of death (the actual dimness of sight
+caused by mortal wounds physically suggesting the darkness and descent
+of clouds, and continually being so described in the Iliad); while the
+sense of the need of guidance on the untrodden road follows necessarily.
+You cannot but remember how this thought of cloud guidance, and cloud
+receiving souls at death, has been elsewhere ratified.
+
+
+* I believe that the conclusions of recent scholarship are generally
+opposed to the Herodotean ideas of any direct acceptance by the Greeks
+of Egyptian myths: and very certainly, Greek art is developed by giving
+the veracity and simplicity of real life to Eastern savage grotesque; and
+not by softening the severity of pure Egyptian design.  But it is of no
+consequence whether one conception was, or was not, in this case, derived
+from the other; my object is only to mark the essential difference
+between them.
+
+
+26.  Without following that higher clue, I will pass to the lovely group
+of myths connected with the birth of Hermes on the Greek mountains.  You
+know that the valley of Sparta is one of the noblest mountain ravines in
+the world, and that the western flank of it is formed by an unbroken
+chain of crags, forty miles long, rising, opposite Sparta, to a height of
+8,000 feet, and known as the chain of Taygetus.  Now, the nymph from whom
+that mountain ridge is named was the mother of Lacedæmon; therefore the
+mythic ancestress of the Spartan race.  She is the nymph Taygeta, and one
+of the seven stars of spring; one of those Pleiades of whom is the
+question to Job,--"Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or
+loose the bands of Orion?"  "The sweet influences of Pleiades," of the
+stars of spring,--nowhere sweeter than among the pine-clad slopes of the
+hills of Sparta and Arcadia, when he snows of their higher summits,
+beneath the sunshine of April, fell into fountains, and rose into clouds;
+and in every ravine was a newly awakened voice of waters,--soft increase
+of whisper among its sacred stones; and on every crag its forming and
+fading veil of radiant cloud; temple above temple, of the divine marble
+that no tool can pollute, nor ruin undermine.  And, therefore, beyond
+this central valley, this great Greek vase of Arcadia, on the "hollow"
+mountain, Cyllene, or "pregnant" mountain, called also "cold," because
+there the vapors rest,* and born of the eldest of those stars of spring,
+that Maia, from whom your own month of May has its name, bringing to you,
+in the green of her garlands, and the white of her hawthorn, the
+unrecognized symbols of the pastures and the wreathed snows of Arcadia,
+where long ago she was queen of stars: there, first cradled and wrapt in
+swaddling-clothes; then raised, in a moment of surprise, into his
+wandering power,--is born the shepherd of the clouds, winged-footed and
+deceiving,--blinding the eyes of Argus,--escaping from the grasp of
+Apollo--restless messenger between the highest sky and topmost earth--
+"the herald Mercury, new lighted on a heaven-kissing hill."
+
+
+* On the altar of Hermes on its summit, as on that of the Lacinian Hera,
+no wind ever stirred the ashes.  By those altars, the Gods of Heaven were
+appeased, and all their storms at rest.
+
+
+27.  Now, it will be wholly impossible, at present, to trace for you any
+of the minor Greek expressions of this thought, except only that Mercury,
+as the cloud shepherd, is especially called Eriophoros, the wool-bearer.
+You will recollect the name from the common woolly rush "eriophorum"
+which has a cloud of silky seed; and note also that he wears
+distinctively the flap cap, petasos, named from a word meaning "to
+expand;" which shaded from the sun, and is worn on journeys.  You have
+the epithet of mountains "cloud-capped" as an established form with every
+poet, and the Mont Pilate of Lucerne is named from a Latin word
+signifying specially a woollen cap; but Mercury has, besides, a general
+Homeric epithet, curiously and intensely concentrated in meaning, "the
+profitable or serviceable by wool,"* that is to say, by shepherd wealth;
+hence, "pecuniarily," rich or serviceable, and so he passes at last into
+a general mercantile deity; while yet the cloud sense of the wool is
+retained by Homer always, so that he gives him this epithet when it would
+otherwise have been quite meaningless (in Iliad, xxiv. 440), when he
+drives Priam's chariot, and breathes force into his horses, precisely as
+we shall find Athena drive Diomed; and yet the serviceable and profitable
+sense--and something also of gentle and soothing character in the mere
+wool-softness, as used for dress, and religious rites--is retained also
+in the epithet, and thus the gentle and serviceable Hermes is opposed to
+the deceitful one.
+
+
+* I am convinced that the 'eri' in 'eriounios' is not intensitive, but
+retained from 'erion'; but even if I am wrong in thinking this, the
+mistake is of no consequence with respect to the general force of the
+term as meaning the profitableness of Hermes.  Athena's epithet of
+'ageleia' has a parallel significance. [Transcriber's note: words inside
+single apostrophes are Greek, and use the Greek alphabet.]
+
+
+28.  In connection with this driving of Priam's chariot, remember that
+as Autolycus is the son of Hermes the Deceiver, Myrtilus (the Auriga
+of the  Stars) is the son of Hermes the Guide.  The name Hermes itself
+means impulse; and he is especially the shepherd of the flocks of the
+sky, in driving, or guiding, or stealing them; and yet his great
+name, Argeiphontes, not only--as in different passages of the olden
+poets--means "Shining White," which is said of him as being himself the
+silver cloud lighted by the sun; but "Argus-killer," the killer of
+rightness, which is said of him as he veils the sky, and especially the
+stars, which are the eyes of Argus; or, literally, eyes of brightness,
+which Juno, who is, with Jupiter, part of the type of highest heaven,
+keeps in her peacock's train.  We know that this interpretation is
+right, from a passage in which Euripides describes the shield of
+Hippomedon, which bore for his sign, "Argus the all-seeing, covered
+with eyes; open towards the rising of the stars and closed towards
+their setting."
+
+And thus Hermes becomes the spirit of the movement of the sky or
+firmament; not merely the fast flying of the transitory cloud, but the
+great motion of the heavens and stars themselves.  Thus, in his highest
+power, he corresponds to the "primo mobile" of the later Italian
+philosophy, and, in his simplest, is the guide of all mysterious and
+cloudy movement, and of all successful subtleties.  Perhaps the prettiest
+minor recognition of his character is when, on the night foray of Ulysses
+and Diomed, Ulysses wear the helmet stolen by Autolycus, the son of
+Hermes.
+
+29.  The position in the Greek mind of Hermes as the lord of cloud is,
+however, more mystic and ideal than that of any other deity, just on
+account of the constant and real presence of the cloud itself under
+different forms, giving rise to all kinds of minor fables.  The play of
+the Greek imagination in this direction is so wide and complex, that I
+cannot give you an outline of its range in my present limits.  There is
+first a great series of storm-legends connected with the family of the
+historic Æolus centralized by the story of Athamas, with his two wives,
+"the Cloud," and the "White Goddess," ending in that of Phrixus and
+Helle, and of the golden fleece (which is only the cloud-burden of Hermes
+Eriophoros).  With this, there is the fate of Salmoneus, and the
+destruction of the Glaucus by his own horses; all these minor myths of
+storm concentrating themselves darkly into the legend of Bellerophon and
+the Chimæra, in which there is an under story about the vain subduing of
+passion and treachery, and the end of life in fading melancholy,--which,
+I hope, not many of you could understand even were I to show it you (the
+merely physical meaning of the Chimæra is the cloud of volcanic lightning
+connected wholly with earth-fire, but resembling the heavenly cloud in
+its height and its thunder).  Finally, in the Æolic group, there is the
+legend of Sisypus, which I mean to work out thoroughly by itself; its
+root is in the position of Corinth as ruling the isthmus and the two seas
+--the Corinthean Acropolis, two thousand feet high, being the centre of
+the crossing currents of the winds, and of the commerce of Greece.
+Therefore, Athena, and the fountain-cloud Pegasus, are more closely
+connected with Corinth than even with Athens in their material, though
+not in their moral, power; and Sisyphus founds the Isthmian games in
+connection with a melancholy story about the sea gods; but he himself is
+'kerdotos andron', the most "gaining" and subtle of men; who having the
+key of the Isthmus, becomes the type of transit, transfer, or trade, as
+such; and of the apparent gain from it, which is not gain; and this is
+the real meaning of his punishment in hell--eternal toil and recoil (the
+modern idol of capital being, indeed, the stone of Sisyphus with a
+vengeance, crushing in its recoil).  But, throughout, the old ideas of
+the cloud power and cloud feebleness,--the deceit of its hiding,--and the
+emptiness of its banishing,--the Autolycus enchantment of making black
+seem white,--and the disappointed fury of Ixion (taking shadow for
+power), mingle in the moral meaning of this and its collateral legends;
+and give an aspect, at last, not only of foolish cunning, but of impiety
+or literal "idolatry," "imagination worship," to the dreams of avarice
+and injustice, until this notion of atheism and insolent blindness
+becomes principal; and the "Clouds" of Aristophanes, with the personified
+"just" and "unjust" sayings in the latter part of the play, foreshadow,
+almost feature by feature, in all that they were written to mock and to
+chastise, the worst elements of the impious "'dinos'" and tumult in men's
+thoughts, which have followed on their avarice in the present day, making
+them alike forsake the laws of their ancient gods, and misapprehended or
+reject the true words of their existing teachers.
+
+30.  All this we have from the legends of the historic Æolus only; but,
+besides these, there is the beautiful story of Semele, the mother of
+Bacchus.  She is the cloud with the strength of the vine in its bosom,
+consumed by the light which matures the fruit; the melting away of the
+cloud into the clean air at the fringe of its edges being exquisitely
+rendered by Pindar's epithet for her, Semele, "with the stretched-out
+hair" ('tauuetheira'.)  Then there is the entire tradition of the
+Danaides, and of the tower of Danaë and golden shower; the birth of
+Perseus connecting this legend with that of the Gorgons and Graiæ, who
+are the true clouds of thunderous ruin and tempest.  I must, in passing,
+mark for you that the form of the sword or sickle of Perseus, with which
+he kills Medusa, is another image of the whirling harpy vortex, and
+belongs especially to the sword of destruction or annihilation; whence it
+is given to the two angels who gather for destruction the evil harvest
+and evil vintage of the earth (Rev. xiv. 15).  I will collect afterwards
+and complete what I have already written respecting the Pegasean and
+Gorgonian legends, noting here only what is necessary to explain the
+central myth of Athena herself, who represents the ambient air, which
+included all cloud, and rain, and dew, and darkness, and peace, and wrath
+of heaven.  Let me now try to give you, however briefly, some distinct
+idea of the several agencies of this great goddess.
+
+31.  I.  She is the air giving life and health to all animals.
+     II.  She is the air giving vegetative power to the earth.
+     III.  She is the air giving motion to the sea, and rendering
+           navigation possible.
+     IV.  She is the air nourishing artificial light, torch or lamplight;
+          as opposed to that of the sun, on one hand, and of consuming*
+          fire on the other.
+     V.  She is the air conveying vibration of sound.
+
+
+* Not a scientific, but a very practical and expressive distinction.
+
+
+I will give you instances of her agency in all these functions.
+
+32.  First, and chiefly, she is air as the spirit of life, giving
+vitality to the blood.  Her psychic relation to the vital force in matter
+lies deeper, and we will examine it afterwards; but a great number of the
+most interesting passages in Homer regard her as flying over the earth in
+local and transitory strength, simply and merely the goddess of fresh
+air.
+
+It is curious that the British city which has somewhat saucily styled
+itself the Modern Athens is indeed more under her especial tutelage and
+favor in this respect than perhaps any other town in the island.  Athena
+is first simply what in the Modern Athens you practically find her, the
+breeze of the mountain and the sea; and wherever she comes, there is
+purification, and health, and power.  The sea-beach round this isle of
+ours is the frieze of our Parthenon; every wave that breaks on it
+thunders with Athena's voice; nay, wherever you throw your window wide
+open in the morning, you let in Athena, as wisdom and fresh air at the
+same instant; and whenever you draw a pure, long, full breath of right
+heaven, you take Athena into your heart, through your blood; and, with
+the blood, into the thoughts of your brain.
+
+Now, this giving of strength by the air, observe, is mechanical as well
+as chemical.  You cannot strike a good blow but with your chest full;
+and, in hand to hand fighting, it is not the muscle that fails first, it
+is the breath; the longest-breathed will, on the average, be the victor,
+--not the strongest.  Note how Shakespeare always leans on this.  Of
+Mortimer, in "changing hardiment with great Glendower":
+
+"Three times they breathed, and three times did they drink,
+Upon agreement, of swift Severn's flood."
+
+And again, Hotspur, sending challenge to Prince Harry:
+
+      "That none might draw short breath to-day
+      But I and Harry Monmouth."
+
+Again, of Hamlet, before he receives his wound:
+
+      "He's fat, and scant of breath."
+
+Again, Orlando in the wrestling:
+
+      "Yes; I beseech your grace
+      I am not yet well breathed."
+
+Now, of all the people that ever lived, the Greeks knew best what breath
+meant, both in exercise and in battle, and therefore the queen of the air
+becomes to them at once the queen of bodily strength in war; not mere
+brutal muscular strength,--that belongs to Ares,--but the strength of
+young lives passed in pure air and swift exercise,--Camilla's virginal
+force, that "flies o'er the unbending corn, and skims along the main."
+
+33.  Now I will rapidly give you two or three instances of her direct
+agency in this function.  First, when she wants to make Penelope bright
+and beautiful; and to do away with the signs of her waiting and her
+grief.  "Then Athena thought of another thing; she laid her into a deep
+sleep, and loosed all her limbs, and made her taller, and made her
+smoother, and fatter, and whiter than sawn ivory; and breathed ambrosial
+brightness over her face; and so she left her and went up to heaven."
+Fresh air and sound sleep at night, young ladies!  You see you may have
+Athena for lady's maid whenever you choose.  Next, hark how she gives
+strength to Achilles when he is broken with fasting and grief.  Jupiter
+pities him and says to her, "'Daughter mine, are you forsaking your own
+soldier, and don't you care for Achilles any more?  See how hungry and
+weak he is,--go and feed him with ambrosia.'  So he urged the eager
+Athena; and she leaped down out of heaven like a harpy falcon,
+shrill-voiced; and she poured nectar and ambrosia, full of delight, into
+the breast of Achilles, that his limbs might not fail with famine; then
+she returned to the solid dome of her strong father."  And then comes the
+great passage about Achilles arming--for which we have no time.  But here
+is again Athena giving strength to the whole Greek army.  She came as a
+falcon to Achilles, straight at him, a sudden drift of breeze; but to the
+army she must come widely, she sweeps around them all.  "As when Jupiter
+spreads the purple rainbow over heaven, portending battle or cold storm,
+so Athena, wrapping herself round with a purple cloud, stooped to the
+Greek soldiers, and raised up each of them."  Note that purple, in
+Homer's use of it, nearly always means "fiery," "full of light."  It is
+the light of the rainbow, not the color of it, which Homer means you to
+think of.
+
+34.  But the most curious passage of all, and fullest of meaning, is when
+she gives strength to Menelaus, that he may stand unwearied against
+Hector.  He prays to her: "And blue-eyed Athena was glad that he prayed
+to her, first; and she gave him strength in his shoulders, and in his
+limbs, an she gave him the courage"--of what animal, do you suppose?  Had
+it been Neptune or Mars, they would have given him the courage of a bull,
+or a lion; but Athena gives him the courage of the most fearless in
+attack of all creatures, small or great, and very small it is, but wholly
+incapable of terror,--she gives him the courage of a fly.
+
+35.  Now this simile of Homer's is one of the best instances I can give
+you of the way in which great writers seize truths unconsciously which
+are for all time.  It is only recent science which has completely shown
+the perfectness of this minute symbol of the power of Athena; proving
+that the insect's flight and breath are co-ordinated; that its wings are
+actually forcing-pumps, of which the stroke compels the thoracic
+respiration; and that it thus breathes and flies simultaneously by the
+action of the same muscles, so that respiration is carried on most
+vigorously during flight, "while the air-vessels, supplied by many pairs
+of lungs instead of one, traverse the organs of flight in far greater
+numbers than the capillary blood-vessels of our own system, and give
+enormous and untiring muscular power, a rapidity of action measured by
+thousands of strokes in the minute, and an endurance, by miles and hours
+of flight."*
+
+
+* Ormerod: "Natural History of Wasps."
+
+
+Homer could not have known this; neither that the buzzing of the fly
+was produced, as in a wind instrument, by a constant current of air
+through the trachea.  But he had seen, and, doubtless, meant us to
+remember, the marvellous strength and swiftness of the insect's flight
+(the glance of the swallow itself is clumsy and slow compared to the
+darting of common house-flies at play); he probably attributed its
+murmur to the wings, but in this also there was a type of what we shall
+presently find recognized in the name of Pallas,--the vibratory power
+of the air to convey sound, while, as a purifying creature, the fly holds
+its place beside the old symbol of Athena in Egypt, the vulture; and as
+a venomous and tormenting creature has more than the strength of the
+serpent in proportion to its size, being thus entirely representative
+of the influence of the air both in purification and pestilence; and its
+courage is so notable that, strangely enough, forgetting Homer's simile,
+I happened to take the fly for an expression of the audacity of freedom
+in speaking of quite another subject.*  Whether it should be called
+courage, or mere mechanical instinct, may be questioned, but assuredly
+no other animal, exposed to continual danger, is so absolutely without
+sign of fear.
+
+
+* See farther on, §148, pp. 154-156.
+
+
+36.  You will, perhaps, have still patience to hear two instances, not of
+the communication as strength, but of the personal agency of Athena as
+the air.  When she comes down to help Diomed against Ares, she does not
+come to fight instead of him, but she takes his charioteer's place.
+
+"She snatched the reins, she lashed with all her force,
+And full on Mars impelled the foaming horse."
+
+Ares is the first to cast his spear; then--note this--Pope says:
+
+      "Pallas opposed her hand, and caused to glance,
+      Far from the car, the strong immortal lance."
+
+She does not oppose her hand in the Greek--the wind could not meet the
+lance straight--she catches it in her hand, and throws it off.  There is
+no instance in which a lance is so parried by a mortal hand in all the
+Iliad, and it is exactly the way the wind would parry it, catching it,
+and turning it aside.  If there are any good rifleshots here, they know
+something about Athena's parrying; and in old times the English masters
+of feathered artillery knew more yet.  Compare also the turning of
+Hector's lance from Achilles: Iliad, xx. 439.
+
+37.  The last instance I will give you is as lovely as it is subtile.
+Throughout the Iliad, Athena is herself the will or Menis of Achilles.
+If he is to be calmed, it is she who calms him; if angered, it is she
+who inflames him.  In the first quarrel with Atreides, when he stands at
+pause, with the great sword half drawn, "Athena came from heaven, and
+stood behind him and caught him by the yellow hair."  Another god would
+have stayed his hand upon the hilt, but Athena only lifts his hair.  "And
+he turned and knew her, and her dreadful eyes shone upon him."  There is
+an exquisite tenderness in this laying her hand upon his hair, for it is
+the talisman of his life, vowed to his own Thessalian river if he ever
+returned to its shore, and cast upon Patroclus' pile, so ordaining that
+there should be no return.
+
+38.  Secondly, Athena is the air giving vegetative impulse to the earth.
+She is the wind and the rain, and yet more the pure air itself, getting
+at the earth fresh turned by spade or plough, and, above all, feeding the
+fresh leaves; for though the Greeks knew nothing about carbonic acid,
+they did know that trees fed on the air.
+
+Now, note first in this, the myth of the air getting at ploughed land.
+You know I told you the Lord of all labor by which man lived was
+Hephæstus; therefore Athena adopts a child of his, and of the Earth,--
+Erichthonius,--literally, "the tearer up of the ground," who is the head
+(though not in direct line) of the kings of Attica; and, having adopted
+him, she gives him to be brought up by the three nymphs of the dew.  Of
+these, Aglauros, the dweller in the fields, is the envy or malice of the
+earth; she answers nearly to the envy of Cain, the tiller of the ground,
+against his shepherd brother, in her own envy against her two sisters,
+Herse, the cloud dew, who is the beloved of the shepherd Mercury; and
+Pandrosos, the diffused dew, or dew of heaven.  Literally, you have in
+this myth the words of the blessing of Esau: "Thy dwelling shall be of
+the fatness of the earth, and of the dew of heaven from above."  Aglauros
+is for her envy turned into a black stone; and hers is one of the voices
+--the other being that of Cain--which haunts the circle of envy in the
+Purgatory:
+
+      "Io sono Aglauro, chi divenne sasso."
+
+But to her two sisters, with Erichthonius (or the hero Erectheus), is
+built the most sacred temple of Athena in Athens; the temple to their own
+dearest Athena--to her, and to the dew together; so that it was divided
+into two parts: one, the temple of Athena of the city, and the other that
+of the dew.  And this expression of her power, as the air bringing the
+dew to the hill pastures, in the central temple of the central city of
+the heathen, dominant over the future intellectual world, is, of all the
+facts connected with her worship as the spirit of life, perhaps the most
+important.  I have no time now to trace for you the hundredth part of the
+different ways in which it bears both upon natural beauty, and on the
+best order and happiness of men's lives.  I hope to follow out some of
+these trains of thought in gathering together what I have to say about
+field herbage; but I must say briefly here that the great sign, to the
+Greeks, of the coming of spring in the pastures, was not, as with us, in
+the primrose, but in the various flowers of the asphodel tribe (of which
+I will give you some separate account presently); therefore it is that
+the earth answers with crocus flame to the cloud on Ida; and the power
+of Athena in eternal life is written by the light of the asphodel on the
+Elysian fields.
+
+But further, Athena is the air, not only to the lilies of the field, but
+to the leaves of the forest.  We saw before the reason why Hermes is said
+to be the son of Maia, the eldest of the sister stars of spring.  Those
+stars are called not only Pleiades, but Vergiliæ, from a word mingling
+the ideas of the turning or returning of springtime with the outpouring
+of rain.  The mother of Vergil bearing the name of Maia, Vergil himself
+received his name from the seven stars; and he, forming first the mind of
+Dante, and through him that of Chaucer (besides whatever special minor
+influence came from the Pastorals and Georgics) became the fountainhead
+of all the best literary power connected with the love of vegetative
+nature among civilized races of men.  Take the fact for what it is worth;
+still it is a strange seal of coincidence, in word and in reality, upon
+the Greek dream of the power over human life, and its purest thoughts, in
+the stars of spring.  But the first syllable of the name of Vergil has
+relation also to another group of words, of which the English ones,
+virtue and virgin, bring down the force to modern days.  It is a group
+containing mainly the idea of "spring," or increase of life in
+vegetation--the rising of the new branch of the tree out of the bud, and
+of the new leaf out of the ground.  It involves, secondarily, the idea
+of greenness and of strength, but, primarily, that of living increase of
+a new rod from a stock, stem, or root ("There shall come forth a rod out
+of the stem of Jesse"); and chiefly the stem of certain plants--either of
+the rose tribe, as in the budding of the almond rod of Aaron; or of the
+olive tribe, which has triple significance in this symbolism, from the
+use of its oil for sacred anointing, for strength in the gymnasium, and
+for light.  Hence, in numberless divided and reflected ways, it is
+connected with the power of Hercules and Athena: Hercules plants the wild
+olive, for its shade, on the course of Olympia, and it thenceforward
+gives the Olympic crown of consummate honor and rest; while the prize at
+the Panathenaic games is a vase of its oil (meaning encouragement to
+continuance of effort); and from the paintings on these Panathenaic vases
+we get the most precious clue to the entire character of Athena.  Then to
+express its propagation by slips, the trees from which the oil was to be
+taken were called "Moriai," trees of division (being all descendents of
+the sacred one in the Erechtheum).  And thus, in one direction, we get to
+the "children like olive plants round about thy table" and the olive
+grafting of St. Paul; while the use of the oil for anointing gives chief
+name to the rod itself of the stem of Jesse, and to all those who were by
+that name signed for his disciples first in Antioch.  Remember, further,
+since that name was first given the influence of the symbol, both in
+extreme unction and in consecration of priests and kings to their "divine
+right;" and thing, if you can reach with any grasp of thought, what the
+influence on the earth has been, of those twisted branches whose leaves
+give gray bloom to the hillsides under every breeze that blows from the
+midland sea.  But, above and beyond all, think how strange it is that the
+chief Agonia of humanity, and the chief giving of strength from heaven
+for its fulfilment, should have been under its night shadow in Palestine.
+
+39.  Thirdly, Athena is the air in its power over the sea.
+
+On the earliest Panathenaic vase known--the "Burgon" vase in the British
+museum--Athena has a dolphin on her shield.  The dolphin has two
+principal meanings in Greek symbolism.  It means, first, the sea;
+secondarily, the ascending and descending course of any of the heavenly
+bodies from one sea horizon to another--the dolphins' arching rise and
+replunge (in a summer evening, out of calm sea, their black backs roll
+round with exactly the slow motion of a water-wheel; but I do not know
+how far Aristotle's exaggerated account of their leaping or their
+swiftness has any foundation) being taken as a type of the emergence
+of the sun or stars from the sea in the east, and plunging beneath in the
+west.  Hence, Apollo, when in his personal power he crosses the sea,
+leading his Cretan colonists to Pytho, takes the form of a dolphin,
+becomes Apollo Delphinius, and names the founded colony "Delphi."  The
+lovely drawing of the Delphic Apollo on the hydria of the Vatican (Le
+Normand and De Witte, vol. ii. p. 6) gives the entire conception of this
+myth.  Again, the beautiful coins of Tarentum represent Taras coming to
+found the city, riding on a dolphin, whose leaps and plunges have partly
+the rage of the sea in them, and partly the spring of the horse, because
+the splendid riding of the Tarentines had made their name proverbial in
+Magna Græca.  The story of Arion is a collateral fragment of the same
+thought; and, again, the plunge, before their transformation, of the
+ships of Æneas.  Then, this idea of career upon, or conquest of, or by
+dolphin-like ships (compare the Merlin prophecy,
+
+            "They shall ride
+            Over ocean wide
+      With hempen bridle, ad horse of tree,")
+
+connects itself with the thought of undulation, and of the wave-power in
+the sea itself, which is always expressed by the serpentine bodies either
+of the sea-gods or of the sea-horse; and when Athena carries, as she does
+often in later work, a serpent for her shield-sign, it is not so much the
+repetition of her own ægis-snakes as the further expression of her power
+over the sea-wave; which, finally, Vergil gives in its perfect unity with
+her own anger, in the approach of the serpents against Laocoön from the
+sea; and then, finally, when her own storm-power is fully put forth on
+the ocean also, and the madness of the ægis-snake is give to the
+wave-snake, the sea-wave becomes the devouring hound at the waist of
+Scylla, and Athena takes Scylla for her helmet-crest; while yet her
+beneficent and essential power on the ocean, in making navigation
+possible, is commemorated in the Panathenaic festival by her peplus being
+carried to the Erechtheum suspended from the mast of a ship.
+
+In Plate cxv. of vol. ii, Le Normand, are given two sides of a vase,
+which, in rude and childish ways, assembles most of the principal
+thoughts regarding Athena in this relation.  In the first, the sunrise is
+represented by the ascending chariot of Apollo, foreshortened; the light
+is supposed to blind the eyes, and no face of the god is seen (Turner, in
+the Ulysses and Polyphemus sunrise, loses the form of the god in light,
+giving the chariot-horses only; rendering in his own manner, after 2,200
+years of various fall and revival of the arts, precisely the same thought
+as the old Greek potter).  He ascends out of the sea; but the sea itself
+has not yet caught the light.  In the second design, Athena as the
+morning breeze, and Hermes as the morning cloud, fly over the sea before
+the sun.  Hermes turns back his head; his face is unseen in the cloud, as
+Apollo's in the light; the grotesque appearance of an animal's face is
+only the cloud-phantasm modifying a frequent form of the hair of Hermes
+beneath the back of his cap.  Under the morning breeze, the dolphins leap
+from the rippled sea, and their sides catch the light.
+
+The coins of the Lucanian Heracleia give a fair representation of the
+helmed Athena, as imagined in later Greek art, with the embossed Scylla.
+
+40.  Fourthly, Athena is the air nourishing artificial light--unconsuming
+fire.  Therefore, a lamp was always kept burning in the Erechtheum; and
+the torch-race belongs chiefly to her festival, of which the meaning is
+to show the danger of the perishing of the light even by excess of the
+air that nourishes it; and so that the race is not to the swift, but to
+the wise.  The household use of her constant light is symbolized in the
+lovely passage in the Odyssey, where Ulysses and his son move the armor
+while the servants are shut in their chambers, and there is no one to
+hold the torches for them; but Athena herself, "having a golden lamp,"
+fills all the rooms with light.  Her presence in war-strength with her
+favorite heroes is always shown by the "unwearied" fire hovering on their
+helmets and shields; and the image gradually becomes constant and
+accepted, both for the maintenance of household watchfulness, as in the
+parable of the ten virgins, or as the symbol of direct inspiration, in
+the rushing wind and divided flames of Pentecost; but together with this
+thought of unconsuming and constant fire, there is always mingled in the
+Greek mind the sense of the consuming by excess, as of the flame by the
+air, so also of the inspired creature by its own fire (thus, again, "the
+zeal of thine house hath eaten me up"--"my zeal hath consumed me, because
+of thine enemies," and the like); and especially Athena has this aspect
+towards the truly sensual and bodily strength; so that to Ares, who is
+himself insane and consuming, the opposite wisdom seems to be insane and
+consuming: "All we the other gods have thee against us, O Jove! when we
+would give grace to men; for thou hast begotten the maid without a mind--
+the mischievous creature, the doer of unseemly evil.  All we obey thee,
+and are ruled by thee.  Her only thou wilt not resist in anything she
+says or does, because thou didst bear her--consuming child as she is."
+
+41.  Lastly, Athena is the air conveying vibration of sound.
+
+In all the loveliest representations in central Greek art of the birth
+of Athena, Apollo stands close to the sitting Jupiter, singing, with a
+deep, quiet joyfulness, to his lyre.  The sun is always thought of as the
+master of time and rhythm, and as the origin of the composing and
+inventive discovery of melody; but the air, as the actual element and
+substance of the voice, the prolonging and sustaining power of it, and
+the symbol of its moral passion.  Whatever in music is measured and
+designed belongs therefore to Apollo and the Muses; whatever is impulsive
+and passionate, to Athena; hence her constant strength a voice or cry (as
+when she aids the shout of Achilles) curiously opposed to the dumbness of
+Demeter.  The Apolline lyre, therefore, is not so much the instrument
+producing sound, as its measurer and divider by length or tension of
+string into given notes; and I believe it is, in a double connection with
+its office as a measurer of time or motion and its relation to the
+transit of the sun in the sky, that Hermes forms it from the
+tortoise-shell, which is the image of the dappled concave of the cloudy
+sky.  Thenceforward all the limiting or restraining modes of music belong
+to the Muses; but the more passionate music is wind music, as in the
+Doric flute.  Then, when this inspired music becomes degraded in its
+passion, it sinks into the pipe of Pan, and the double pipe of Marsyas,
+and is then rejected by Athena.  The myth which represents her doing so
+is that she invented the double pipe from hearing the hiss of the
+Gorgonian serpents; but when she played upon it, chancing to see her face
+reflected in water, she saw that it was distorted, whereupon she threw
+down the flute which Marsyas found.  Then, the strife of Apollo and
+Marsyas represents the enduring contest between music in which the words
+and thought lead, and the lyre measures or melodizes them (which Pindar
+means when he calls his hymns "kings over the lyre"), and music in which
+the words are lost and the wind or impulse leads,--generally, therefore,
+between intellectual, and brutal, or meaningless, music.  Therefore, when
+Apollo prevails, he flays Marsyas, taking the limit and external bond of
+his shape from him, which is death, without touching the mere muscular
+strength, yet shameful and dreadful in dissolution.
+
+42.  And the opposition of these two kinds of sound is continually dwelt
+upon by the Greek philosophers, the real fact at the root of all music is
+the natural expression of a lofty passion for a right cause; that in
+proportion to the kingliness and force of any personality, the expression
+either of its joy or suffering becomes measured, chastened, calm, and
+capable of interpretation only by the majesty of ordered, beautiful, and
+worded sound.  Exactly in proportion to the degree in which we become
+narrow in the cause and conception of our passions, incontinent in the
+utterance of them, feeble of perseverance in them, sullied or shameful in
+the indulgence of them, their expression by musical sound becomes broken,
+mean, fatuitous, and at last impossible; the measured waves of the air of
+heaven will not lend themselves to expression of ultimate vice, it must
+be forever sunk into discordance or silence.  And since, as before
+stated, every work of right art has a tendency to reproduce the ethical
+state which first developed it, this, which of all the arts is most
+directly in power of discipline; the first, the simplest, the most
+effective of all instruments of moral instruction; while in the failure
+and betrayal of its functions, it becomes the subtlest aid of moral
+degradation.  Music is thus, in her health, the teacher of perfect order,
+and is the voice of the obedience of angels, and the companion of the
+course of the spheres of heaven; and in her depravity she is also the
+teacher of perfect disorder and disobedience, and the Gloria in Excelsis
+becomes the Marseillaise.  In the third section of this volume, I reprint
+two chapters from another essay of mine ("The Cestus of Aglaia"), on
+modesty or measure, and on liberty, containing further reference to music
+in her two powers; and I do this now, because, among the many monstrous
+and misbegotten fantasies which are the spawn of modern license, perhaps
+the most impishly opposite to the truth is the conception of music which
+has rendered possible the writing, by educated persons, and, more
+strangely yet, the tolerant criticism, of such words as these: "This so
+persuasive art is the only one that has no didactic efficacy, that
+engenders no emotions save such as are without issue on the side of moral
+truth, that expresses nothing of God, nothing of reason, nothing of human
+liberty."  I will not give the author's name; the passage is quoted in
+the "Westminster Review" for last January [1869].
+
+43.  I must also anticipate something of what I have to say respecting
+the relation of the power of Athena to organic life, so far as to note
+that her name, Pallas, probably refers to the quivering or vibration of
+the air; and to its power, whether as vital force, or communicated wave,
+over every kind of matter, in giving it vibratory movement; first, and
+most intense, in the voice and throat of the bird, which is the air
+incarnate; and so descending through the various orders of animal life to
+the vibrating and semi-voluntary murmur of the insect; and, lower still,
+to the hiss or quiver of the tail of the half-lunged snake and deaf
+adder; all these, nevertheless, being wholly under the rule of Athena as
+representing either breath or vital nervous power; and, therefore, also,
+in their simplicity, the "oaten pipe and pastoral song," which belong to
+her dominion over the asphodel meadows, and breathe on their banks of
+violets.
+
+Finally, is it not strange to think of the influence of this one power of
+Pallas in vibration (we shall see a singular mechanical energy of it
+presently in the serpent's motion), in the voices of war and peace?  How
+much of the repose, how much of the wrath, folly, and misery of men, has
+literally depended on this one power of the air; on the sound of the
+trumpet and of the bell, on the lark's song, and the bee's murmur!
+
+44.  Such is the general conception in the Greek mind of the physical
+power of Athena.  The spiritual power associated with it is of two kinds:
+first, she is the Spirit of Life in material organism; not strength in
+the blood only, but formative energy in the clay; and, secondly, she is
+inspired and impulsive wisdom in human conduct and human art, giving the
+instinct of infallible decision, and of faultless invention.
+
+It is quite beyond the scope of my present purpose--and, indeed, will
+only be possible for me at all after marking the relative intention of
+the Apolline myths--to trace for you the Greek conception of Athena as
+the guide of moral passion.  But I will at least endeavor, on some near
+occasion,* to define some of the actual truths respecting the vital force
+in created organism, and inventive fancy in the works of man, which are
+more or less expressed by the Greeks, under the personality of Athena.
+You would, perhaps, hardly bear with me if I endeavored further to show
+you--what is nevertheless perfectly true--the analogy between the
+spiritual power of Athena in her gentle ministry, yet irresistible anger,
+with the ministry of anther Spirit whom we also, holding for the
+universal power of life, are forbidden, at our worst peril, to quench or
+to grieve.
+
+
+* I have tried to do this in mere outline in the two following sections
+of this volume.
+
+
+45.  But, I think, to-night, you should not let me close without
+requiring of me an answer on one vital point, namely, how far these
+imaginations of gods--which are vain to us--were vain to those who had
+no better trust? and what real belief the Greek had in these creations
+of his own spirit, practical and helpful to him in the sorrow of earth?
+I am able to answer you explicitly in this.  The origin of his thoughts
+is often obscure, and we may err in endeavoring to account or their form
+of realization; but the effect of that realization on his life is not
+obscure at all.  The Greek creed was, of course, different in its
+character, as our own creed is, according to the class of persons who
+held it.  The common people's was quite literal, simple, and happy; their
+idea of Athena was as clear as a good Roman Catholic peasant's idea of
+the Madonna.  In Athens itself, the centre of thought and refinement,
+Pisistratus obtained the reins of government through the ready belief of
+the populace that a beautiful woman, armed like Athena, was the goddess
+herself.  Even at the close of the last century some of this simplicity
+remained among the inhabitants of the Greek islands; and when a pretty
+English lady first made her way into the grotto of Antiparos, she was
+surrounded, on her return, by all the women of the neighboring village,
+believing her to be divine, and praying her to heal them of their
+sicknesses.
+
+46.  Then, secondly, the creed of the upper classes was more refined and
+spiritual, but quite as honest, and even more forcible in its effect on
+the life.  You might imagine that the employment of the artifice just
+referred to implied utter unbelief in the persons contriving it; but it
+really meant only that the more worldly of them would play with a popular
+faith of their own purposes, as doubly-minded persons have often done
+since, all the while sincerely holding the same ideas themselves in a
+more abstract form; while the good and unworldly men, the true Greek
+heroes, lived by their faith as firmly as St. Louis, or the Cid, or the
+Chevalier Bayard.
+
+47.  Then, thirdly, the faith of the poets and artists was, necessarily,
+less definite, being continually modified by the involuntary action of
+their own fancies; and by the necessity of presenting, in clear verbal or
+material form, things of which they had no authoritative knowledge.
+Their faith was, in some respects like Dante's or Milton's: firm in
+general conception, but not able to vouch for every detail in the forms
+they gave it; but they went considerably farther, even in that minor
+sincerity, than subsequent poets; and strove with all their might to be
+as near the truth as they could.  Pindar says, quite simply, "I cannot
+think so-and-so of the gods.  It must have been this way--it cannot have
+been that way--that the thing was done."  And as late among the Latins as
+the days of Horace, this sincerity remains.  Horace is just as true and
+simple in his religion as Wordsworth; but all power of understanding any
+of the honest classic poets has been taken away from most English
+gentlemen by the mechanical drill in verse-writing at school.  Throughout
+the whole of their lives afterwards, they never can get themselves quit
+of the notion that all verses were written as an exercise, and that
+Minerva was only a convenient word for the last of a hexameter, and
+Jupiter for the last but one.
+
+48.  It is impossible that any notion can be more fallacious or more
+misleading in its consequences.  All great song, from the first day when
+human lips contrived syllables, has been sincere song.  With deliberate
+didactic purpose the tragedians--with pure and native passion the lyrists
+--fitted their perfect words to their dearest faiths.  "Operosa parvus
+carmina fingo."  "I, little thing that I am, weave my laborious songs" as
+earnestly as the bee among the bells of thyme on the Matin mountains. Yes,
+and he dedicates his favorite pine to Diana, and he chants his autumnal
+hymn to the Faun that guards his fields, and he guides the noble youth and
+maids of Rome in their choir to Apollo, and he tells the farmer's little
+girl that the gods will love her, though she has only a handful of salt
+and meal to give them--just as earnestly as ever English gentleman taught
+Christian faith to English youth in England's truest days.
+
+49.  Then, lastly, the creed of the philosophers of sages varied
+according to the character and knowledge of each; their relative
+acquaintance with the secrets of natural science, their intellectual and
+sectarian egotism, and their mystic or monastic tendencies, for there is
+a classic as well as a mediæval monasticism.  They end in losing the life
+of Greece in play upon words; but we owe to their early thought some of
+the soundest ethics, and the foundation of the best practical laws, yet
+known to mankind.
+
+50.  Such was the general vitality of the heathen creed in its strength.
+Of its direct influence on conduct, it is, as I said, impossible for me
+to speak now; only, remember always, in endeavoring to form a judgment of
+it, that what of good or right the heathens did, they did looking for no
+reward.  The purest forms of our own religion have always consisted in
+sacrificing less things to win greater, time to win eternity, the world
+to win the skies.  The order, "Sell that thou hast," is not given without
+the promise, "Thou shalt have treasure in heaven;" and well for the
+modern Christian if he accepts the alternative as his Master left it, and
+does not practically read the command and promise thus: "Sell that thou
+hast in the best market, and thou shalt have treasure in eternity also."
+But the poor Greeks of the great ages expected no reward from heaven but
+honor, and no reward from earth but rest; though, when, on those
+conditions, they patiently, and proudly, fulfilled their task of the
+granted day, an unreasoning instinct of an immortal benediction broke
+from their lips in song; and they, even they, had sometimes a prophet to
+tell them of a land "where there is sun alike by day and alike by night,
+where they shall need no more to trouble the earth by strength of hands
+for daily bread; but the ocean breezes blow around the blessed islands,
+and golden flowers burn on their bright trees for evermore."
+
+
+
+II.
+
+ATHENA KERAMITIS.*
+
+(Athena in the Earth.)
+
+
+* "Athena, fit for being made into pottery."  I coin the expression as a
+counterpart of 'ge parthenia', "Clay intact."
+
+
+STUDY, SUPPLEMENTARY TO THE PRECEDING LECTURE, OF THE SUPPOSED AND
+      ACTUAL RELATIONS OF ATHENA TO THE VITAL FORCE IN MATERIAL ORGANISM
+
+
+51.  It has been easy to decipher approximately the Greek conception of
+the physical power of Athena in cloud and sky, because we know ourselves
+what clouds and skies are, and what the force of the wind is in forming
+them.  But it is not at all easy to trace the Greek thoughts about the
+power of Athena in giving life, because we do not ourselves know clearly
+what life is, or in what way the air is necessary to it, or what there
+is, besides the air, shaping the forms that it is put into.  And it is
+comparatively of small consequence to find out what the Greeks thought
+or meant, until we have determined what we ourselves think, or mean, when
+we translate the Greek word for "breathing" into the Latin-English word
+"spirit."
+
+52.  But it is of great consequence that you should fix in your minds--
+and hold, against the baseness of mere materialism on the one hand, and
+against the fallacies of controversial speculation on the other--the
+certain and practical sense of this word "spirit;" the sense in which you
+all know that its reality exists, as the power which shaped you into your
+shape, and by which you love and hate when you have received that shape.
+You need not fear, on the one hand, that either the sculpturing or the
+loving power can ever be beaten down by the philosophers into a metal, or
+evolved by them into a gas; but on the other hand, take care that you
+yourself, in trying to elevate your conception of it, do not lose its
+truth in a dream, or even in a word.  Beware always of contending for
+words: you will find them not easy to grasp, if you know them in several
+languages.  This very word, which is so solemn in your mouths, is one of
+the most doubtful.  In Latin it means little more than breathing, and may
+mean merely accent; in French it is not breath, but wit, and our
+neighbors are therefore obliged, even in their most solemn expressions,
+to say "wit" when we say "ghost."  In Greek, "pneuma," the word we
+translate "ghost," means either wind or breath, and the relative word
+"psyche" has, perhaps, a more subtle power; yet St. Paul's words
+"pneumatic body" and "psychic body" involve a difference in his mind
+which no words will explain.  But in Greek and in English, and in Saxon
+and in Hebrew, and in every articulate tongue of humanity the "spirit of
+man" truly means his passion and virtue, and is stately according to the
+height of his conception, and stable according to the measure of his
+endurance.
+
+53. Endurance, or patience, that is the central sign of spirit; a
+constancy against the cold and agony of death; and as, physically, it is
+by the burning power of the air that the heat of the flesh is sustained,
+so this Athena, spiritually, is the queen of all glowing virtue, the
+unconsuming fire and inner lamp of life.  And thus, as Hephæstus is lord
+of the fire of the hand, and Apollo of the fire of the brain, so Athena
+of the fire of the heart; and as Hercules wears for his chief armor the
+skin of the Nemean lion, his chief enemy, whom he slew; and Apollo has
+for his highest name "the Pythian," from his chief enemy, the Python
+slain; so Athena bears always on her breast the deadly face of her chief
+enemy slain, the Gorgonian cold, and venomous agony, that turns living
+men to stone.
+
+54.  And so long as you have the fire of the heart within you, and know
+the reality of it, you need to be under no alarm as to the possibility
+of its chemical or mechanical analysis.  The philosophers are very
+humorous in their ecstasy of hope about it; but the real interest of
+their discoveries in this direction is very small to humankind.  It is
+quite true that the tympanum of the ear vibrates under sound, and that
+the surface of the water in a ditch vibrates too; but the ditch hears
+nothing for all that; and my hearing is still to me as blessed a mystery
+as ever, and the interval between the ditch and me quite as great.  If
+the trembling sound in my ears was once of the marriage-bell which began
+my happiness, and is now of the passing-bell which ends it, the
+difference between those two sounds to me cannot be counted by the number
+of concussions.  There have been some curious speculations lately as to
+the conveyance of mental consciousness by "brain-waves."  What does it
+matter how it is conveyed?  The consciousness itself is not a wave.  It
+may be accompanied here or there by any quantity of quivers and shakes,
+up or down, of anything you can find in the universe that is shakable--
+what is that to me?  My friend is dead, and my--according to modern views
+--vibratory sorrow is not one whit less, or less mysterious, to me, than
+my old quiet one.
+
+55.  Beyond, and entirely unaffected by, any questionings of this kind,
+there are, therefore, two plain facts which we should all know: first,
+that there is a power which gives their several shapes to things, or
+capacities of feeling; and that we can increase or destroy both of these
+at our will.  By care and tenderness, we can extend the range of lovely
+life in plants and animals; by our neglect and cruelty, we can arrest it,
+and bring pestilence in its stead.  Again, by right discipline we can
+increase our strength of noble will and passion or destroy both.  And
+whether these two forces are local conditions of the elements in which
+they appear, or are part of a great force in the universe, out of which
+they are taken, and to which they must be restored, is not of the
+slightest importance to us in dealing with them; neither is the manner
+of their connection with light and air.  What precise meaning we ought to
+attach to expressions such as that of the prophecy to the four winds that
+the dry bones might be breathed upon, and might live, or why the presence
+of the vital power should be dependent on the chemical action of air, and
+its awful passing away materially signified by the rendering up of that
+breath or ghost, we cannot at present know, and need not at any time
+dispute.  What we assuredly know is that the states of life and death are
+different, and the first more desirable than the other, and by effort
+attainable, whether we understand being "born of the spirit" to signify
+having the breath of heaven in our flesh, or its power in our hearts.
+
+56.  As to its power on the body, I will endeavor to tell you, having
+been myself much led into studies involving necessary reference both to
+natural science and mental phenomena, what, at least, remains to us after
+science has done its worst; what the myth of Athena, as a formative and
+decisive power, a spirit of creation and volition, must eternally mean
+for all of us.
+
+57.  It is now (I believe I may use the strong word) "ascertained" that
+heat and motion are fixed in quantity, and measurable in the portions
+that we deal with.  We can measure portions of power, as we can measure
+portions of space; while yet, as far as we know, space may be infinite,
+and force infinite.  There may be heat as much greater than the sun's, as
+the sun's heat is greater than a candle's: and force as much greater than
+the force by which the world swings, as that is greater than the force by
+which a cobweb trembles.  Now, on hear and force, life is inseparably
+dependent; and I believe, also, on a form of substance, which the
+philosophers call "protoplasm."  I wish they would use English instead of
+Greek words.  When I want to know why a leaf is green, they tell me it is
+colored by "chlorophyll," which at first sounds very instructive; but if
+they would only say plainly that a leaf is colored green by a thing which
+is called "green leaf," we should see more precisely how far we had got.
+However, it is a curious fact that life is connected with a cellular
+structure called protoplasm, or in English, "first stuck together;"
+whence, conceivably through deuteroplasms, or second stickings, and
+tritoplasms, or third stickings,* we reach the highest plastic phase in
+the human pottery, which differs from common chinaware, primarily, by a
+measurable degree of heat, developed in breathing, which it borrows from
+the rest of the universe while it lives, and which it as certainly
+returns to the rest of the universe, when it dies.
+
+58.  Again, with this heat certain assimilative powers are connected,
+which the tendency of recent discovery is to simplify more and more into
+modes of one force; or finally into mere motion, communicable in various
+states, but not destructible.  We will assume that science has done its
+utmost; and that every chemical or animal force is demonstrably
+resolvable into heat or motion, reciprocally changing into each other.
+I would myself like better, in order of thought, to consider motion as a
+mode of heat than heat as a mode of motion; still, granting that we have
+got thus far, we have yet to ask, What is heat? or what is motion?  What
+is this "primo mobile," this transitional power, in which all things
+live, and move, and have their being?  It is by definition something
+different from matter, and we may call it as we choose, "first cause," or
+"first light," or "first heat;" but we can show no scientific proof of
+its not being personal, and coinciding with the ordinary conception of a
+supporting spirit in all things.
+
+59.  Still, it is not advisable to apply the word "spirit" or "breathing"
+to it, while it is only enforcing chemical affinities; but, when the
+chemical affinities are brought under the influence of the air, and of
+the sun's heat, the formative force enters and entirely different phase.
+It does not now merely crystallize indefinite masses, but it gives to
+limited portions of matter the power of gathering, selectively, other
+elements proper to them, and binding those elements into their own
+peculiar and adopted form.
+
+This force, now properly called life, or breathing, or spirit, is
+continually creating its own shell of definite shape out of the wreck
+around it; and this is what I meant by saying, in the "Ethics of the
+Dust," "you may always stand by form against force."  For the mere force
+of junction is not spirit; but the power that catches out of chaos
+charcoal, water, lime, or what not, and fastens them down into a given
+form, is properly called "spirit;" and we shall not diminish, but
+strengthen our conception of this creative energy by recognizing its
+presence in lower states of matter than our own; such recognition being
+enforced upon us by delight we instinctively receive from all the forms
+of matter which manifest it; and yet more, by the glorifying of those
+forms, in the parts of them that are most animated, with the colors that
+are pleasantest to our senses.  The most familiar instance of this is the
+best, and also the most wonderful: the blossoming of plants.
+
+60.  The spirit in the plant--that is to say, its power of gathering dead
+matter out of the wreck round it, and shaping it into its own chosen
+shape--is of course strongest at the moment of its flowering, for it then
+not only gathers, but forms, with the greatest energy.
+
+And where this life is in at full power, its form becomes invested with
+aspects that are chiefly delightful to our own human passions; namely, at
+first, with the loveliest outlines of shape; and, secondly, with the most
+brilliant phases of the primary colors, blue, yellow, and red or white,
+the unison of all; and, to make it all more strange, this time of
+peculiar and perfect glory is associated with relations of the plants or
+blossoms to each other, correspondent to the joy of love in human
+creatures, and having the same object in the continuance of the race.
+Only, with respect to plants, as animals, we are wrong in speaking as if
+the object of this strong life were only the bequeathing of itself.  The
+flower is the end or proper object of the seed, not the seed of the
+flower.  The reason for seeds is that flowers may be; not the reason of
+flowers that seeds may be.  The flower itself is the creature which the
+spirit makes; only, in connection with its perfectness is placed the
+giving birth to its successor.
+
+61.  The main fact then, about a flower is that it is part of the plant's
+form developed at the moment of its intensest life; and this inner
+rapture is usually marked externally for us by the flush of one or more
+of the primary colors.  What the character of the flower shall be,
+depends entirely upon the portion of the plant into which this rapture of
+spirit has been put.  Sometimes the life is put into its outer sheath,
+and then the outer sheath becomes white and pure, and full of strength
+and grace; sometimes the life is put into the common leaves, just under
+the blossom, and they become scarlet or purple; sometimes the life is put
+into the stalks of the flower and they flush blue; sometimes into its
+outer enclosure or calyx; mostly into its inner cup; but, in all cases,
+the presence of the strongest life is asserted by characters in which the
+human sight takes pleasure, and which seem prepared with distinct
+reference to us, or rather, bear, in being delightful, evidence of having
+been produced by the power of the same spirit as our own.
+
+62.  And we are led to feel this still more strongly because all the
+distinctions of species,* both in plants and animals, appear to have
+similar connection with human character.  Whatever the origin of species
+may be, or however those species, once formed, may be influenced by
+external accident, the groups into which birth or accident reduce them
+have distinct relation to the spirit of man.  It is perfectly possible,
+and ultimately conceivable, that the crocodile and the lamb may have
+descended from the same ancestral atom of protoplasm; and that the
+physical laws of the operation of calcareous slime and of meadow grass,
+on that protoplasm, may in time have developed the opposite natures and
+aspects of the living frames but the practically important fact for us
+is the existence of a power which creates that calcareous earth itself,
+--which creates, that separately--and quartz, separately; and gold,
+separately; and charcoal, separately; and then so directs the relation
+of these elements as that the gold shall destroy the souls of men by
+being yellow; and the charcoal destroy their souls by being hard and
+bright; and the quartz represent to them an ideal purity; and the
+calcareous earth, soft, shall beget crocodiles, and dry and hard, sheep;
+and that the aspects and qualities of these two products, crocodiles and
+lambs, shall be, the one repellant to the spirit of man, the other
+attractive to it, in a quite inevitable way; representing to him states
+of moral evil and good; and becoming myths to him of destruction or
+redemption, and, in the most literal sense, "words" of God.
+
+
+* The facts on which I am about to dwell are in nowise antagonistic to
+the theories which Mr. Darwin's unwearied and unerring investigations are
+every day rendering more probable.  The æsthetic relations of species are
+independent of their origin.  Nevertheless, it has always seemed to me
+in what little work I have done upon organic forms, as if the species
+mocked us by their deliberate imitation of each other when they met; yet
+did not pass one into another.
+
+
+63.  And the force of these facts cannot be escaped from by the thought
+that there are species innumerable, passing into each other by regular
+gradations, out of which we choose what we must love or dread, and say
+they were indeed prepared for us.  Species are not innumerable; neither
+are they now connected by consistent gradation.  They touch at certain
+points only; and even then are connected, when we examine them deeply,
+in a kind of reticulated way, not in chains, but in chequers; also,
+however connected, it is but by a touch of the extremities, as it were,
+and the characteristic form of the species is entirely individual.  The
+rose nearly sinks into a grass in the sanguisorba; but the formative
+spirit does not the less clearly separate the ear of wheat from the
+dog-rose, and oscillate with tremulous constancy round the central forms
+of both, having each their due relation to the mind of man.  The great
+animal kingdoms are connected in the same way.  The bird through the
+penguin drops towards the fish, and the fish in the cetacean reascends
+to the mammal, yet there is no confusion of thought possible between the
+perfect forms of an eagle, a trout, and a war-horse, in their relations
+to the elements, and to man.
+
+64.  Now we have two orders of animals to take some note of in connection
+with Athena, and one vast order of plants, which will illustrate this
+matter very sufficiently for us.
+
+The orders of animals are the serpent and the bird: the serpent, in which
+the breath or spirit is less than in any other creature, and the
+earth-power the greatest; the bird, in which the breath or spirit is more
+full than in any other creature, and the earth-power least.
+
+65.  We will take the bird first.  It is little more than a drift of the
+air in all its quills, it breathes through its whole frame and flesh and
+glows with air in its flying, like blown flames; it rests upon the air,
+subdues it, surpasses it, outraces it,--is the air, conscious of itself,
+conquering itself, ruling itself.
+
+Also, in the throat of the bird is given the voice of the air.  All that
+in the wind itself is weak, wild, useless in sweetness, is knit together
+in its song.  As we may imagine the wild form of the bird's wings, so the
+wild voice of the cloud into its ordered and commanded voice; unwearied,
+rippling through the clear heaven in its gladness, interpreting all
+intense passion through the soft spring nights, bursting into acclaim and
+rapture of choir at daybreak, or lisping and twittering among the boughs
+and hedges through heat of day, like little winds that only make the
+cowslip bells shake, and ruffle the petals of the wild rose.
+
+66.  Also, upon the plumes of the bird are put the colors of the air; on
+these the gold of the cloud, that cannot be gathered by any covetousness;
+the rubies of the clouds, that are not the price of Athena, but are
+Athena; the vermillion of the cloud-bar, and the flame of the
+cloud-crest, and the snow of the cloud, and its shadow, and the melted
+blue of the deep wells of the sky,--all these, seized by the creating
+spirit, and woven by Athena herself into films and threads of plume; with
+wave on wave following and fading along breast, and throat, and opened
+wings, infinite as the dividing of the foam and the sifting of the
+sea-sand; even the white down of the cloud seeming to flutter up between
+the stronger plumes,--seen, but too soft for touch.
+
+And so the Spirit of the Air is put into, and upon, this created form;
+and it becomes, through twenty centuries, the symbol of divine help,
+descending, as the Fire, to speak but as the Dove, to bless.
+
+67.  Next, in the serpent we approach the source of a group of myths,
+world-wide, founded on great and common human instincts, respecting which
+I must note one or two points which bear intimately on all our subject.
+For it seems to me that the scholars who are at present occupied in
+interpretation of human myths have most of them forgotten that there are
+any such thing as natural myths, and that the dark sayings of men may be
+both difficult to read, and not always worth reading.  And, indeed, all
+guidance to the right sense of the human and variable myths will probably
+depend on our first getting at the sense of the natural and invariable
+ones.  The dead hieroglyph may have meant this or that; the living
+hieroglyph means always the same; but remember, it is just as much a
+hieroglyph as the other; nay, more,--a "sacred or reserved sculpture," a
+thing with an inner language.  The serpent crest of the king's crown, or
+of the god's, on the pillars of Egypt, is a mystery, but the serpent
+itself, gliding past the pillar's foot, is it less a mystery?  Is there,
+indeed, no tongue, except the mute forked flash from its lips, in that
+running brook of horror on the ground?
+
+68.  Why that horror?  We all feel it, yet how imaginative it is, how
+disproportioned to the real strength of the creature!  There is more
+poison in an ill-kept drain, in a pool of dish-washing at a cottage door,
+than in the deadliest asp of Nile.  Every back yard which you look down
+into from the railway as it carries you out by Vauxhall or Deptford,
+holds its coiled serpent; all the walls of those ghastly suburbs are
+enclosures of tank temples for serpent worship; yet you feel no horror in
+looking down into them as you would if you saw the livid scales, and
+lifted head.  There is more venom, mortal, inevitable, in a single word,
+sometimes, or in the gliding entrance of a wordless thought than ever
+"vanti Libia con sua rena."  But that horror is of the myth, not of the
+creature.  There are myriads lower than this, and more loathsome, in the
+scale of being; the links between dead matter and animation drift
+everywhere unseen.  But it is the strength of the base element that is so
+dreadful in the serpent; it is the very omnipotence of the earth.  That
+rivulet of smooth silver, how does it flow, think you?  It literally rows
+on the earth, with every scale for an oar; it bites the dust with the
+ridges of its body.  Watch it, when it moves slowly.  A wave, but without
+wind! a current, but with no fall! all the body moving at the same
+instant, yet some of it to one side, some to another, or some forward,
+and the rest of the coil backwards, but all with the same calm will and
+equal way, no contraction, no extension; one soundless, causeless, march
+of sequent rings, and spectral processions of spotted dust, with
+dissolution in its fangs, dislocation in its coils.  Startle it, the
+winding stream will become a twisted arrow; the wave of poisoned life
+will lash through the grass like a cast lance.*  It scarcely breathes
+with its one lung (the other shriveled and abortive); it is passive
+to the sun and shade, and is cold or hot like a stone; yet "it can
+outclimb the monkey, outswim the fish, outleap the zebra, outwrestle the
+athlete, and crush the tiger."**  It is a divine hieroglyph of the
+demoniac power of the earth, of the entire earthly nature.  As the bird
+is the clothed power of the air, so this is the clothed power of the
+dust; as the bird is the symbol of the spirit of life, so this is the
+grasp and sting of death.
+
+
+* I cannot understand this swift forward motion of serpents.  The seizure
+of prey by the constrictor, though invisibly swift, is quite simple in
+mechanism; it is simply the return to its coil of an opened watch-spring,
+and is just as instantaneous.  But the steady and continuous motion,
+without a visible fulcrum (for the whole body moves at the same instant,
+and I have often seen even small snakes glide as fast as I could walk),
+seems to involve a vibration of the scales quite too rapid to be
+conceived.  The motion of the crest and dorsal fin of the hippocampus,
+which is one of the intermediate types between serpent and fish, perhaps
+gives some resemblance of it, dimly visible, for the quivering turns the
+fin into a mere mist.  The entrance of the two barbs of a bee's sting by
+alternate motion, "the teeth of one barb acting as a fulcrum for the
+other," must be something like the serpent motion on a small scale.
+** Richard Owen.
+
+
+69.  Hence the continual change in the interpretation put upon it in
+various religions.  As the worm of corruption, it is the mightiest of all
+adversaries of the gods--the special adversary of their light and
+creative power--Python against Apollo.  As the power of the earth against
+the air, the giants are serpent-bodied in the Gigantomachia; but as the
+power of the earth upon the seed--consuming it into new life ("that which
+thou sowest is not quickened except it die")--serpents sustain the
+chariot of the spirit of agriculture.
+
+70.  Yet on the other hand, there is a power in the earth to take away
+corruption, and to purify (hence the very fact of burial, and many uses
+of earth, only lately known): and in this sense the serpent is a healing
+spirit,--the representative of Æsculapius, and of Hygieia; and is a
+sacred earth-type in the temple of the native earth of Athens; so that
+its departure from the temple was a sign to the Athenians that they were
+to leave their homes.  And then, lastly, as there is a strength and
+healing in the earth, no less than the strength of air, so there is
+conceived to be a wisdom of earth no less than a wisdom of the spirit;
+and when its deadly power is killed, its guiding power becomes true; so
+that the Python serpent is killed at Delphi, where yet the oracle is from
+the breath of the earth.
+
+71.  You must remember, however, that in this, as in every other
+instance, I take the myth at its central time.  This is only the meaning
+of the serpent to the Greek mind which could conceive an Athena.  Its
+first meaning to the nascent eyes of men, and its continued influence
+over degraded races, are subjects of the most fearful mystery.  Mr.
+Fergusson has just collected the principal evidence bearing on the matter
+in a work of very great value, and if you read his opening chapters, they
+will put  you in possession of the circumstances needing chiefly to be
+considered.  I cannot touch upon any of them here, except only to point
+out that, though the doctrine of the so-called "corruption of human
+nature," asserting that there is nothing but evil in humanity, is just
+as blasphemous and false as a doctrine of the corruption of physical
+nature would be, asserting there was nothing but evil in the earth,--
+there is yet the clearest evidence of a disease, plague, or cretinous
+imperfection of development, hitherto allowed to prevail against the
+greater part of the races of men; and this in monstrous ways, more full
+of mystery than the serpent-being itself.  I have gathered for you
+tonight only instances of what is beautiful in Greek religion; but even
+in its best time there were deep corruptions in other phases of it, and
+degraded forms of many of its deities, all originating in a misunderstood
+worship of lower races, little less than these corrupted forms of
+devotion can be found, all having a strange and dreadful consistency with
+each other, and infecting Christianity, even at its strongest periods,
+with fatal terror of doctrine, and ghastliness of symbolic conception,
+passing through fear into frenzied grotesque, and thence into sensuality.
+
+In the Psalter of St. Louis itself, half of its letters are twisted
+snakes; there is scarcely a wreathed ornament, employed in Christian
+dress, or architecture, which cannot be traced back to the serpent's
+coil; and there is rarely a piece of monkish decorated writing in the
+world that is not tainted with some ill-meant vileness of grotesque,--
+nay, the very leaves of the twisted ivy-pattern of the fourteenth century
+can be followed back to wreaths for the foreheads of bacchanalian gods.
+And truly, it seems to me, as I gather in my mind the evidences of insane
+religion, degraded art, merciless war, sullen toil, detestable pleasure,
+and vain or vile hope, in which the nations of the world have lived since
+first they could bear record of themselves--it seems to me, I say, as if
+the race itself were still half-serpent, not extricated yet from its
+clay; a lacertine breed of bitterness--the glory of it emaciate with
+cruel hunger, and blotted on the leaf a glittering slime, and in the sand
+a useless furrow.
+
+72.  There are no myths, therefore, by which the moral state and fineness
+of intelligence of different races can be so deeply tried or measured, as
+by those of the serpent and the bird; both of them having an especial
+relation to the kind of remorse for sin, or for the grief in fate, of
+which the national minds that spoke by them had been capable.  The
+serpent and vulture are alike emblems of immortality and purification
+among races which desired to be immortal and pure; and as they recognize
+their own misery, the serpent becomes to them the scourge of the Furies,
+and the vulture finds its eternal prey in their breast.  The bird long
+contests among the Egyptians with the still received serpent symbol of
+power.  But the Draconian image of evil is established in the serpent
+Apap; while the bird's wings, with the globe, become part of a better
+symbol of deity, and the entire form of the vulture, as an emblem of
+purification, is associated with the earliest conception of Athena.  In
+the type of the dove with the olive branch, the conception of the spirit
+of Athena in renewed life prevailing over ruin is embodied for the whole
+of futurity; while the Greeks, to whom, in a happier climate and higher
+life than that of Egypt, the vulture symbol of cleansing became
+unintelligible, took the eagle instead for their hieroglyph of supreme
+spiritual energy, and it thenceforward retains its hold on the human
+imagination, till it is established among Christian myths as the
+expression of the most exalted form of evangelistic teaching.  The
+special relation of Athena to her favorite bird we will trace presently;
+the peacock of Hera, and dove of Aphrodite, are comparatively unimportant
+myths; but the bird power is soon made entirely human by the Greeks in
+their flying angel of victory (partially human, with modified meaning of
+evil, in the Harpy and Siren); and thenceforward it associates itself
+with the Hebrew cherubim, and has had the most singular influence on the
+Christian religion by giving its wings to render the conception of angels
+mysterious and untenable, and check rational endeavor to determine the
+nature of subordinate spiritual agency; while yet it has given to that
+agency a vague poetical influence of the highest value in its own
+imaginative way.
+
+73.  But with the early serpent-worship there was associated another,
+that of the groves, of which you will also find the evidence exhaustively
+collected in Mr. Fergussen's work.  This tree-worship may have taken a
+dark form when associated with the Draconian one; or opposed, as in
+Judea, to a purer faith; but in itself, I believe, it was always healthy,
+and though it retains little definite hieroglyphic power in subsequent
+religion, it becomes, instead of symbolic, real; the flowers and trees
+are themselves beheld and beloved with a half-worshipping delight, which
+is always noble and healthful.
+
+And it is among the most notable indications of the volition of the
+animating power that we find the ethical signs of good and evil set on
+these also, as well as upon animals; the venom of the serpent, and in
+some respects its image also, being associated even with the passionless
+growth of the leaf out of the ground; while the distinctions of species
+seem appointed with more definite ethical address to the intelligence of
+man as their material products become more useful to him.
+
+74.  I can easily show this, and, at the same time, make clear the
+relation to other plants of the flowers which especially belong to
+Athena, by examining the natural myths in the groups of the plants which
+would be used at any country dinner, over which Athena would, in her
+simplest household authority, cheerfully rule here in England.  Suppose
+Horace's favorite dish of beans, with the bacon; potatoes; some savory
+stuffing of onions and herbs, with the meat; celery, and a radish or
+two, with the cheese; nuts and apples for desert, and brown bread.
+
+75.  The beans are, from earliest time, the most important and
+interesting of the seeds of the great tribe of plants from which came the
+Latin and French name for all kitchen vegetables,--things that are
+gathered with the hand--podded seeds that cannot be reaped, or beaten, or
+shaken down, but must be gathered green.  "Leguminous" plants, all of
+them having flowers like butterflies, seeds in (frequently pendent) pods,
+--"lætum siliqua quassante legumen"--smooth and tender leaves, divided
+into many minor ones; strange adjuncts of tendril, for climbing (and
+sometimes of thorn); exquisitely sweet, yet pure scents of blossom, and
+almost always harmless, if not serviceable seeds.  It is of all tribes
+of plants the most definite, its blossoms being entirely limited in their
+parts, and not passing into other forms.  It is also the most usefully
+extended in range and scale; familiar in the height of the forest--
+acacia, laburnum, Judas-tree; familiar in the sown field--bean and vetch
+and pea; familiar in the pasture--in every form of clustered clover and
+sweet trefoil tracery; the most entirely serviceable and human of all
+orders of plants.
+
+76.  Next, in the potato, we have the scarcely innocent underground stem
+of one of a tribe set aside for evil; having the deadly nightshade for
+its queen, and including the henbane, the witch's mandrake, and the worst
+natural curse of modern civilization--tobacco.*  And the strange thing
+about this tribe is, that though thus set aside for evil, they are not a
+group distinctly separate from those that are happier in function.  There
+is nothing in other tribes of plants like the form of the bean blossom;
+but there is another family of forms and structure closely connected with
+this venomous one.  Examine the purple and yellow bloom of the common
+hedge nightshade; you will find it constructed exactly like some of the
+forms of the cyclamen; and, getting this clue, you will find at last the
+whole poisonous and terrible group to be--sisters of the primulas!
+
+
+* It is not easy to estimate the demoralizing effect on the youth of
+Europe of the cigar, in enabling them to pass their time happily in
+idleness.
+
+
+The nightshades are, in fact, primroses with a curse upon them; and a
+sign set in their petals, by which the deadly and condemned flowers may
+always be known from the innocent ones,--that the stamens of the
+nightshades are between the lobes, and of the primulas, opposite the
+lobes, of the corolla.
+
+77.  Next, side by side, in the celery and radish, you have the two great
+groups of unbelled and cruciferous plants; alike in conditions of rank
+among herbs: both flowering in clusters; but the unbelled group, flat,
+the crucifers, in spires: both of them mean and poor in the blossom, and
+losing what beauty they have by too close crowding; both of them having
+the most curious influence on human character in the temperate zones of
+the earth, from the days of the parsley crown, and hemlock drink, and
+mocked Euripidean chervil, until now; but chiefly among the northern
+nations, being especially plants that are of some humble beauty, and (the
+crucifers) of endless use, when they are chosen and cultivated; but that
+run to wild waste, and are the signs of neglected ground, in their rank
+or ragged leaves and meagre stalks, and pursed or podded seed clusters.
+Capable, even under cultivation, of no perfect beauty, thought reaching
+some subdued delightfulness in the lady's smock and the wallflower; for
+the most part they have every floral quality meanly, and in vain,--they
+are white without purity; golden, without preciousness; redundant,
+without richness; divided, without fineness; massive, without strength;
+and slender, without grace.  Yet think over that useful vulgarity of
+theirs; and of the relations of German and English peasant character to
+its food of kraut and cabbage (as of Arab character to its food of
+palm-fruit), and you will begin to feel what purposes of the forming
+spirit are in these distinctions of species.
+
+78.  Next we take the nuts and apples,--the nuts representing one of the
+groups of catkined trees, whose blossoms are only tufts and dust; and the
+other, the rose tribe, in which fruit and flower alike have been the
+types to the highest races of men, of all passionate temptation, or pure
+delight, from the coveting of Eve to the crowing of the Madonna, above
+the
+
+            "Rosa sempiterna,
+      Che si dilata, rigrada, e ridole
+      Odor di lode al Sol."
+
+We have no time now for these, we must go on to the humblest group of
+all, yet the most wonderful, that of the grass which has given us our
+bread; and from that we will go back to the herbs.
+
+79.  The vast family of plants which, under rain, make the earth green
+for man, and, under sunshine, give him bread, and, in their springing in
+the early year, mixed with their native flowers, have given us (far more
+than the new leaves of trees) the thought and word of "spring," divide
+themselves broadly into three great groups--the grasses, sedges, and
+rushes.  The grasses are essentially a clothing for healthy and pure
+ground, watered by occasional rain, but in itself dry, and fit for all
+cultivated pasture and corn.  They are distinctively plants with round
+and jointed stems, which have long green flexible leaves, and heads of
+seed, independently emerging from them.  The sedges are essentially the
+clothing of waste and more or less poor or uncultivated soils, coarse in
+their structure, frequently triangular in stem--hence called "acute" by
+Virgil--and with their heads of seed not extricated from their leaves.
+Now, in both the sedges and grasses, the blossom has a common structure,
+though undeveloped in the sedges, but composed always of groups of double
+husks, which have mostly a spinous process in the centre, sometimes
+projecting into a long awn or beard; this central process being
+characteristic also of the ordinary leaves of mosses, as if a moss were
+a kind of ear of corn made permanently green on the ground, and with a
+new and distinct fructification.  But the rushes differ wholly from the
+sedge and grass in their blossom structure.  It is not a dual cluster,
+but a twice threefold one, so far separate from the grasses, and so
+closely connected with a higher order of plants, that I think you will
+find it convenient to group the rushes at once with that higher order,
+to which, if you will for the present let me give the general name of
+Drosidæ, or dew-plants, it will enable me to say what I have to say of
+them much more shortly and clearly.
+
+80.  These Drosidæ, then, are plants delighting in interrupted moisture--
+or at certain seasons--into dry ground.  They are not among water-plants,
+but the signs of water resting among dry places.  Many of the true
+water-plants have triple blossoms, with a small triple calyx holding
+them; in the Drosidæ the floral spirit passes into the calyx also, and
+the entire flower becomes a six-rayed star, bursting out of the stem
+laterally, as if it were the first of flowers and had made its way to the
+light by force through the unwilling green.  They are often required to
+retain moisture or nourishment for the future blossom through long times
+of drought; and this they do in bulbs under ground, of which some become
+a rude and simple, but most wholesome, food for man.
+
+81.  So, now, observe, you are to divide the whole family of the herbs of
+the field into three great groups,--Drosidæ, Carices,* Gramineæ,--
+dew-plants, sedges, and grasses.  Then the Drosidæ are divided into five
+great orders: lilies, asphodels, amaryllids, irids, and rushes.  No
+tribes of flowers have had so great, so varied, or so healthy an
+influence on man as this great group of Drosidæ, depending, not so much
+on the whiteness of some of their blossoms, or the radiance of others, as
+on the strength and delicacy of the substance of their petals; enabling
+them to take forms of faultless elastic curvature, either in cups, as the
+crocus, or expanding bells, as the true lily, or heath-like bells, as the
+hyacinth, or bright and perfect stars, like the star of Bethlehem, or,
+when they are affected by the strange reflex of the serpent nature which
+forms the labiate group of all flowers, closing into forms of exquisitely
+fantastic symmetry in the gladiolus.  Put by their side their Nereid
+sisters, the water-lilies, and you have them in the origin of the
+loveliest forms of ornamental design, and the most powerful floral myths
+yet recognized among human spirits, born by the streams of Ganges, Nile,
+Arno, and Avon.
+
+
+* I think Carex will be found ultimately better than Cyperus for the
+generic name, being the Vergilian word, and representing a larger
+sub-species.
+
+
+82.  For consider a little what each of those five tribes* has been to
+the spirit of man.  First, in their nobleness, the lilies gave the lily
+of the Annunciation; the asphodels, the flower of the Elysian fields; the
+irids, the fleur-de-lys of chivalry; and the amaryllids, Christ's lily of
+the field; while the rush, trodden always under foot, became the emblem
+of humility.  Then take each of the tribes, and consider the extent of
+their lower influence.  Perdita's "The crown imperial, lilies of all
+kinds," are the first tribe, which, giving the type of perfect purity in
+the Madonna's lily, have, by their lovely form, influenced the entire
+decorative design of Italian sacred art; while ornament design of war was
+continually enriched by the curves of the triple petals of the Florentine
+"giglio," and French fleur-de-lys; so that it is impossible to count
+their influence for good in the middle ages, partly as a symbol of
+womanly character, and partly of the utmost brightness and refinement of
+chivalry in the city which was the flower of cities.
+
+
+* Take this rough distinction of the four tribes: lilies, superior ovary,
+white seeds; asphodels, superior ovary, black seeds; irids, inferior
+ovary, style (typically) rising into central crest; amaryllids, inferior
+ovary, stamens (typically) joined in central cup.  Then the rushes are a
+dark group, through which they stoop to the grasses.
+
+
+Afterwards, the group of the turban-lilies, or tulips, did some mischief
+(their splendid stains having made them the favorite caprice of
+florists); but they may be pardoned all such guilt for the pleasure they
+have given in cottage gardens, and are yet to give, when lowly life may
+again be possible among us; and the crimson bars of the tulips in their
+trim beds, with their likeness in crimson bars of morning above them, and
+its dew glittering heavy, globed in their glossy cups, may be loved
+better than the gray nettles of the ash heap, under gray sky, unveined by
+vermilion or by gold.
+
+83.  The next great group, of the asphodels, divides itself also into two
+principal families: one, in which the flowers are like stars, and
+clustered characteristically in balls, though opening sometimes into
+looser heads; and the other, in which the flowers are in long bells,
+opening suddenly at the lips, and clustered in spires on a long stem, or
+drooping from it, when bent by their weight.
+
+The star-group, of the squills, garlics, and onions, has always caused me
+great wonder.  I cannot understand why its beauty, and serviceableness,
+should have been associated with the rank scent which has been really
+among the most powerful means of degrading peasant life, and separating
+it from that of the higher classes.
+
+The belled group, of the hyacinth and convallaria, is as delicate as the
+other is coarse; the unspeakable azure light along the ground of the wood
+hyacinth in English spring; the grape hyacinth, which is in south France,
+as if a cluster of grapes and a hive of honey had been distilled and
+compressed together into one small boss of celled and beaded blue; the
+lilies of the valley everywhere, in each sweet and wild recess of rocky
+lands,--count the influences of these on childish and innocent life; then
+measure the mythic power of the hyacinth and asphodel as connected with
+Greek thoughts of immortality; finally take their useful and nourishing
+power in ancient and modern peasant life, and it will be strange if you
+do not feel what fixed relation exists between the agency of the creating
+spirit in these, and in us who live by them.
+
+84.  It is impossible to bring into any tenable compass for our present
+purpose, even hints of the human influence of the two remaining orders of
+Amaryllids and Irids; only note this generally, that while these in
+northern countries share with the Primulas the fields of spring, it seems
+that in Greece, the primulaceæ are not an extended tribe, while the
+crocus, narcissus, and Amaryllis lutea, the "lily of the field" (I
+suspect also that the flower whose name we translate "violet" was in
+truth an iris) represented to the Greek the first coming of the breath of
+life on the renewed herbage; and became in his thoughts the true
+embroidery of the saffron robe of Athena.  Later in the year, the
+dianthus (which, though belonging to an entirely different race of
+plants, has yet a strange look of being made out of the grasses by
+turning the sheath-membrane at the root of their leaves into a flower)
+seems to scatter, in multitudinous families, its crimson stars far and
+wide.  But the golden lily and crocus, together with the asphodel, retain
+always the old Greek's fondest thoughts,--they are only "golden" flowers
+that are to burn on the trees, and float on the streams of paradise.
+
+85.  I have but one tribe of plants more to note at our country feast--
+the savory herbs; but must go a little out of my way to come at them
+rightly.  All flowers whose petals are fastened together, and most of
+those whose petals are loose, are best thought of first as a kind of cup
+or tube opening at the mouth.  Sometimes the opening is gradual, as in
+the convolvulus or campanula; oftener there is a distinct change of
+direction between the tube and expanding lip, as in the primrose; or even
+a contraction under the lip, making the tube into a narrow-necked phial
+or vase, as in the heaths; but the general idea of a tube expanding into
+a quatrefoil, cinquefoil, or sixfoil, will embrace most of the forms.
+
+86.  Now, it is easy to conceive that flowers of this kind, growing in
+close clusters, may, in process of time, have extended their outside
+petals rather than the interior ones (as the outer flowers of the
+clusters of many umbellifers actually do), and thus elongated and
+variously distorted forms have established themselves; then if the stalk
+is attached to the side instead of the base of the tube, its base becomes
+a spur, and thus all the grotesque forms of the mints, violets, and
+larkspurs, gradually might be composed.  But, however this may be, there
+is one great tribe of plants separate from the rest, and of which the
+influence seems shed upon the rest, in different degrees; and these would
+give the impression, not so much of having been developed by change, as
+of being stamped with a character of their own, more or less serpentine
+or dragon-like.  And I think you will find it convenient to call these
+generally Draconidæ; disregarding their present ugly botanical name which
+I do not care even to write once--you may take for their principal types
+the foxglove, snapdragon, and calceolaria; and you will find they all
+agree in a tendency to decorate themselves by spots, and with bosses or
+swollen places in their leaves, as if they had been touched by poison.
+The spot of the foxglove is especially strange, because it draws the
+color out of the tissue all around it, as if it had been stung, and as if
+the central color was really an inflamed spot, with paleness round.  Then
+also they carry to its extreme the decoration by bulging or pouting out
+the petal,--often beautifully used by other flowers in a minor degree,
+like the beating out of bosses in hollow silver, as in the kalmia, beaten
+out apparently in each petal by the stamens instead of a hammer; or the
+borage, pouting towards; but the snapdragons and calceolarias carry it to
+its extreme.
+
+87.  Then the spirit of these Draconidæ seems to pass more or less into
+other flowers, whose forms are properly pure vases; but it affects some
+of them slightly, others not at all.  It never strongly affects the
+heaths; never once the roses; but it enters like an evil spirit into the
+buttercup, and turns it into a larkspur, with a black, spotted, grotesque
+centre, and a strange, broken blue, gorgeous and intense, yet impure,
+glittering on the surface as if it were strewn with broken glass, and
+stained or darkening irregularly into red.  And then at last the serpent
+charm changes the ranunculus into monkshood, and makes it poisonous.  It
+enters into the forget-me-not, and the star of heavenly turquoise is
+corrupted into the viper's bugloss, darkened with the same strange red as
+the larkspur, and fretted into a fringe of thorn; it enters, together
+with a strange insect-spirit, into the asphodels, and (though with a
+greater interval between the groups) they change to spotted orchideæ; it
+touches the poppy, it becomes a fumaria; the iris, and it pouts into a
+gladiolus; the lily, and it chequers itself into a snake's-head, and
+secretes in the deep of its bell, drops, not of venom indeed, but
+honey-dew, as if it were a healing serpent.  For there is an Æsculapian
+as well as an evil serpentry among the Draconidæ, and the fairest of
+them, the "erba della Madonna" of Venice (Linaria Cymbalaria), descends
+from the ruins it delights into the herbage at their feet, and touches
+it; and behold, instantly, a vast group of herbs for healing,--all
+draconid in form,--spotted and crested, and from their lip-like corollas
+named "labiatæ;" full of various balm, and warm strength for healing, yet
+all of them without splendid honor or perfect beauty, "ground ives,"
+richest when crushed under the foot; the best sweetness and gentle
+brightness of the robes of the field,--thyme, and marjoram, and Euphrasy.
+
+88.  And observe, again and again, with respect to all these divisions
+and powers of plants: it does not matter in the least by what
+concurrences of circumstance or necessity they may gradually have been
+developed; the concurrence of circumstance is itself the supreme and
+inexplicable fact.  We always come at last to a formative cause, which
+directs the circumstance, and mode of meeting it.  If you ask an ordinary
+botanist the reason of the form of the leaf, he will tell you that it is
+a "developed tubercle," and that its ultimate form "is owing to the
+directions of its vascular threads."  But what directs its vascular
+threads?  "They are seeking for something they want," he will probably
+answer.  What made them want that?  What made them seek for it thus?
+Seek for it, in five fibres or in three?  Seek for it, in serration, or
+in sweeping curves?  Seek for it, in servile tendrils, or impetuous
+spray?  Seek for it, in woolen wrinkles rough with stings, or in glossy
+surfaces, green with pure strength, and winterless delight?
+
+89.  There is no answer.  But the sum of all is, that over the entire
+surface of the earth, and its waters, as influenced by the power of the
+air under solar light, there is developed a series of changing forms, in
+clouds, plants, and animals, all of which have reference in their action,
+or nature, to the human intelligence that perceives them; and on which,
+in their aspects of horror and beauty, and their qualities of good and
+evil, there is engraved a series of myths, or words of the forming power,
+which, according to the true passion and energy of the human race, they
+have been enabled to read into religion.  And this forming power has been
+by all nations partly confused with the breath or air through which it
+acts, and partly understood as a creative wisdom, proceeding from the
+Supreme Deity; but entering into and inspiring all intelligences that
+work in harmony with Him.  And whatever intellectual results may be in
+modern days obtained by regarding this effluence only as a motion of
+vibration, every formative human art hitherto, and the best states of
+human happiness and order, may have depended on the apprehension of its
+mystery (which is certain,) and of its personality, which is probable.
+
+90.  Of its influence on the formative arts, I have a few words to say
+separately: my present business is only to interpret, as we are now
+sufficiently enabled to do, the external symbols of the myth under which
+it was represented by the Greeks as a goddess of counsel, taken first
+into that breast of their supreme Deity, then created out of his
+thoughts, and abiding closely beside him; always sharing and consummating
+his power.
+
+91.  And in doing this we have first to note the meaning of the principal
+epithet applied to Athena, "Glaukopis," "with eyes full of light," the
+first syllable being connected, by its root, with words signifying sight,
+not with words signifying color.  As far as I can trace the color
+perception of the Greeks, I find it all founded primarily on the degree
+of connection between color and light; the most important fact to them in
+the color of red being its connection with fire and sunshine; so that
+"purple" is, in its original sense, "fire-color," and the scarlet or
+orange, of dawn, more than any other fire-color.  I was long puzzled by
+Homer's calling the sea purple; and misled into thinking he meant the
+color of cloud shadows on green sea; whereas he really means the gleaming
+blaze of the waves under wide light.  Aristotle's idea (partly true) is
+that light, subdued by blackness, becomes red; and blackness, heated or
+lighted, also becomes red.  Thus, a color may be called purple because it
+is light subdued (and so death is called "purple" or "shadowy" death); or
+else it may be called purple as being shade kindled with fire, and thus
+said of the lighted sea; or even of the sun itself, when it is thought of
+as a red luminary opposed to the whiteness of the moon: "purpureos inter
+soles, et candida lunæ sidera;" or of golden hair: "pro purpureo pœnam
+solvens scelerata capillo;" while both ideas are modified by the
+influence of an earlier form of the word, which has nothing to do with
+fire at all, but only with mixing or staining; and then, to make the
+whole group of thoughts inextricably complex, yet rich and subtle in
+proportion to their intricacy, the various rose and crimson colors of the
+murex dye,--the crimson and purple of the poppy, and fruit of the palm,--
+and the association of all these with the hue of blood,--partly direct,
+partly through a confusion between the word signifying "slaughter" and
+"palm-fruit color," mingle themselves in, and renew the whole nature of
+the old word; so that, in later literature, it means a different color,
+or emotion of color, in almost every place where it occurs; and cast
+forever around the reflection of all that has been dipped in its dyes.
+
+92.  So that the world is really a liquid prism, and stream of opal.  And
+then, last of all, to keep the whole history of it in the fantastic
+course of a dream, warped here and there into wild grotesque, we moderns,
+who have preferred to rule over coal-mines instead of the sea (and so
+have turned the everlasting lamp of Athena into a Davy's safety-lamp in
+the hand of Britannia, and Athenian heavenly lightning into British
+subterranean "damp"), have actually got our purple out of coal instead of
+the sea!  And thus, grotesquely, we have had enforced on us the doubt
+that held the old word between blackness and fire, and have completed the
+shadow, and the fear of it, by giving it a name from battle, "Magenta."
+
+93.  There is precisely a similar confusion between light and color in
+the word used for the blue of the eyes of Athena--a noble confusion,
+however, brought about by the intensity of the Greek sense that the
+heaven is light, more than it is blue.  I was not thinking of this when I
+wrote in speaking of pictorial chiaroscuro, "The sky is not blue color
+merely: it is blue fire and cannot be painted" (Mod. P. iv. p. 36); but
+it was this that the Greeks chiefly felt of it, and so "Glaukopis"
+chiefly means gray-eyed: gray standing for a pale or luminous blue; but
+it only means "owl-eyed" in thought of the roundness and expansion, not
+from the color; this breath and brightness being, again, in their moral
+sense typical of the breadth, intensity, and singleness of the sight in
+prudence ("if thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of
+light").  Then the actual power of the bird to see in twilight enters
+into the type, and perhaps its general fineness of sense.  "Before the
+human form was adopted, her (Athena's) proper symbol was the owl, a bird
+which seems to surpass all other creatures in acuteness of organic
+perception, its eye being calculated to observe objects which to all
+others are enveloped in darkness, its ear to hear sounds distinctly, and
+its nostrils to discriminate effluvia with such nicety that it has been
+deemed prophetic, from discovering the putridity of death even in the
+first stages of disease."*
+
+
+* Payne Knight in his "Inquiry into the Symbolical Language of Ancient
+Art," not trustworthy, being little more than a mass of conjectural
+memoranda, but the heap is suggestive, if well sifted.
+
+
+I cannot find anywhere an account of the first known occurrence of the
+type; but, in the early ones on Attic coins, the wide round eyes are
+clearly the principal things to be made manifest.
+
+94.  There is yet, however, another color of great importance in the
+conception of Athena--the dark blue of her ægis.  Just as the blue or
+gray of her eyes was conceived more as light than color, so her aegis was
+dark blue, because the Greeks thought of this tint more as shade than
+color, and, while they used various materials in ornamentation,
+lapislazuli, carbonate of copper, or, perhaps, smalt, with real enjoyment
+of the blue tint, it was yet in their minds as distinctly representative
+of darkness as scarlet was of light, and, therefore, anything dark,* but
+especially the color of heavy thunder-cloud, was described by the same
+term.  The physical power of this darkness of the ægis, fringed with
+lightning, is given quite simply when Jupiter himself uses it to
+overshadow Ida and the Plain of Troy, and withdraws it at the prayer of
+Ajax for light; and again when he grants it to be worn for a time by
+Apollo, who is hidden by its cloud when he strikes down Patroclus; but
+its spiritual power is chiefly expressed by a word signifying deeper
+shadow,--the gloom of Erebus, or of our evening, which, when spoken of
+the ægis, signifies, not merely the indignation of Athena, but the entire
+hiding or withdrawal of her help, and beyond even this, her deadliest of
+all hostility,--the darkness by which she herself deceives and beguiles
+to final ruin those to whom she is wholly adverse; this contradiction of
+her own glory being the uttermost judgment upon human falsehood.  Thus it
+is she who provokes Pandarus to the treachery which purposed to fulfil
+the rape of Helen by the murder of her husband in time of truce; and then
+the Greek king, holding his wounded brother's hand, prophesies against
+Troy the darkness of the ægis which shall be over all, and for ever.**
+
+
+* In the breastplate and shield of Atrides the serpents and bosses are
+all of this dark color, yet the serpents are said to be like rainbows;
+but through all this splendor and opposition of hue, I feel distinctly
+that the literal "splendor," with its relative shade, are prevalent in
+the conception; and that there is always a tendency to look through the
+hue to its cause.  And in this feeling about color the Greeks are
+separated from the eastern nations, and from the best designers of
+Christian times.  I cannot find that they take pleasure in color for its
+own sake; it may be in something more than color, or better; but it is
+not in the hue itself.  When Homer describes cloud breaking from a
+mountain summit, the crags become visible in light, not color; he feels
+only their flashing out in bright edges and trenchant shadows; above, the
+"infinite," "unspeakable" æther is torn open--but not the blue of it.  He
+has scarcely any abstract pleasure in blue, or green, or gold; but only
+in their shade or flame.
+
+I have yet to trace the causes of this (which will be a long task,
+belonging to art questions, not to mythological ones); but it is, I
+believe, much connected with the brooding of the shadow of death over
+the Greeks without any clear hope of immortality.  The restriction of
+the color on their vases to dim red (or yellow) with black and white,
+is  greatly connected with their sepulchral use, and with all the
+melancholy of Greek tragic thought; and in this gloom the failure of
+color-perception is partly noble, partly base: noble, in its earnestness,
+which raises the design of Greek vases as far above the designing of mere
+colorist nations like the Chinese, as men's thoughts are above
+children's; and yet it is partly base and earthly, and inherently
+defective in one human faculty; and I believe it was one cause of the
+perishing of their art so swiftly, for indeed there is no decline so
+sudden, or down to such utter loss and ludicrous depravity, as the fall
+of Greek design on its vases from the fifth to the third century B.C.  On
+the other hand, the pure colored-gift, when employed for pleasure only,
+degrades in another direction; so that among the Indians, Chinese, and
+Japanese, all intellectual progress in art has been for ages rendered
+impossible by the prevalence of that faculty; and yet it is, as I have
+said again and again, the spiritual power of art; and its true brightness
+is the essential characteristic of all healthy schools.
+** 'eremnen Aigida pasi'.--Il. iv. 166.
+
+
+95.  This, then, finally, was the perfect color-conception of Athena: the
+flesh, snow-white (the hands, feet, and face of marble, even when the
+statue was hewn roughly in wood); the eyes of keen pale blue, often in
+statues represented by jewels; the long robe to the feet, crocus-colored;
+and the ægis thrown over it of thunderous purple; the helmet golden (Il.
+v. 744.), and I suppose its crest also, as that of Achilles.
+
+If you think carefully of the meaning and character which is now enough
+illustrated for you in each of these colors, and remember that the
+crocus-color and the purple were both of them developments, in opposite
+directions, of the great central idea of fire-color, or scarlet, you will
+see that this form of the creative spirit of the earth is conceived as
+robed in the blue, and purple, and scarlet, the white, and the gold,
+which have been recognized for the sacred chords of colors, from the day
+when the cloud descended on a Rock more mighty than Ida.
+
+96.  I have spoken throughout, hitherto, of the conception of Athena, as
+it is traceable in the Greek mind; not as it was rendered by Greek art.
+It is matter of extreme difficulty, requiring a sympathy at once
+affectionate and cautious, and a knowledge reaching the earliest springs
+of the religion of many lands, to discern through the imperfection, and,
+alas! more dimly yet, through the triumphs of formative art, what kind
+of thoughts they were that appointed for it the tasks of its childhood,
+and watched by the awakening of its strength.
+
+The religions passion is nearly always vividest when the art is weakest;
+and the technical skill only reaches its deliberate splendor when the
+ecstacy which gave it birth has passed away forever.  It is as vain an
+attempt to reason out the visionary power or guiding influence of Athena
+in the Greek heart, from anything we now read, or possess, of the work of
+Phidias, as it would be for the disciples of some new religion to infer
+the spirit of Christianity from Titian's "Assumption."  The effective
+vitality of the religious conception can be traced only through the
+efforts of trembling hands, and strange pleasures of untaught eyes; and
+the beauty of the dream can no more be found in the first symbols by
+which it is expressed, than a child's idea of fairy-land can be gathered
+from its pencil scrawl, or a girl's love for her broken doll explained by
+the defaced features.  On the other hand, the Athena of Phidias was, in
+very fact, not so much the deity, as the darling of the Athenian people.
+Her magnificence represented their pride and fondness, more than their
+piety; and the great artist, in lavishing upon her dignities which might
+be ended abruptly by the pillage they provoked, resigned, apparently
+without regret, the awe of her ancient memory; and (with only the
+careless remonstrance of a workman too strong to be proud) even the
+perfectness of his own art.  Rejoicing in the protection of their
+goddess, and in their own hour of glory, the people of Athena robed her,
+at their will, with the preciousness of ivory and gems; forgot or denied
+the darkness of the breastplate of judgment, and vainly bade its
+unappeasable serpents relax their coils in gold.
+
+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, passing 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 goddess-Avengers, an altar to a God 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 God
+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 worship.  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 sunshine
+vainly sweet, and passionate folly of storm, waste themselves in the
+silent places of knowledge that has passed away, and of tongues that have
+ceased?
+
+This only we may discern assuredly; 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 passion, 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 passion, 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 passionate in the art, and intensifies itself in all its noblest
+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 ignobly if he is ignoble.
+
+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
+assert 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
+assertion 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 hardship
+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 soldiership 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 asserted two
+things,--first, the foundation of art in moral character; next, the
+foundation of moral character in war.  I must make both these assertions
+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, Dürer'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 manuscript, 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 assuredly 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 Salëve, 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 grass, 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, passing into deep shadow beneath the Voirons' pines; a few
+dark clusters of leaves, a single white flower--scarcely seen--are all
+the gladness given to the rocks of the shore.  One of the ruby spots of
+the eastern manuscript 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 gods of dawn, and the
+givers of dew to the fields; because he knew the faces of the crags, and
+the imagery of the passionate 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 compassion 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 assuredly 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 passages 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 asserted 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 multitude 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 multitude 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 noble nation will yet, by the
+grace of heaven, rule over the ignoble, and force of heart hold its own
+against fireballs.
+
+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 Iræ.
+
+And that is, indeed, the sorrowfullest fact we have to know about our own
+several lives.  Wisdom never forgives.  Whatever resistance we have
+offered to her loaw, she avenges forever; the lost hour can never be
+redeemed, and the accomplished wrong never atoned for.  The best that can
+be done afterwards, but for that, had been better; the falsest of all the
+cries of peace, where there is no peace, is that of the pardon of sin, as
+the mob expect it.  Wisdom can "put away" sin, but she cannot pardon it;
+and she is apt, in her haste, to put away the sinner as well, when the
+black ægis is on her breast.
+
+118.  And this is also a fact we have to know about our national life,
+that it is ended as soon as it has lost the power of noble Anger.  When
+it paints over, and apologizes for its pitiful criminalities; and endures
+its false weights, and its adulterated food; dares not to decide
+practically between good and evil, and can neither honor the one, nor
+smite the other, but sneers at the good, as if it were hidden evil, and
+consoles the evil with pious sympathy, and conserves it in the sugar of
+its leaden heart,--the end is come.
+
+119.  The first sign, then, of Athena's presence with any people is that
+they become warriors, and that the chief thought of every man of them is
+to stand rightly in his rank, and not fail from his brother's side in
+battle.  Wealth, and pleasure, and even love, are all, under Athena's
+orders, sacrificed to this duty of standing fast in the rank of war.
+
+But further: Athena presides over industry, as well as battle; typically,
+over women's industry; that brings comfort with pleasantness.  Her word
+to us all is: "Be well exercised, and rightly clothed.  Clothed, and in
+your right minds; not insane and in rags, nor in soiled fine clothes
+clutched from each other's shoulders.  Fight and weave.  Then I myself
+will answer for the course of the lance, and the colors of the loom."
+
+And now I will ask the reader to look with some care through these
+following passages respecting modern multitudes and their occupations,
+written long ago, but left in fragmentary form, in which they must now
+stay, and be of what use they can.
+
+120.  It is not political economy to put a number of strong men down on
+an acre of ground, with no lodging, and nothing to eat.  Nor is it
+political economy to build a city on good ground, and fill it with store
+of corn and treasure, and put a score of lepers to live in it.  Political
+economy creates together the means of life, and the living persons who
+are to use them; and of both, the best and the most that it can, but
+imperatively the best, not the most.  A few good and healthy men, rather
+than a multitude of diseased rogues; and a little real milk and wine
+rather than much chalk and petroleum; but the gist of the whole business
+is that the men and their property must both be produced together--not
+one to the loss of the other.  Property must not be created in lands
+desolate by exile of their people, nor multiplied and depraved humanity,
+in lands barren of bread.
+
+121.  Nevertheless, though the men and their possessions are to be
+increased at the same time, the first object of thought is always to be
+the multiplication of a worthy people.  The strength of the nation is in
+its multitude, not in its territory; but only in its sound multitude.  It
+is one thing, both in a man and a nation, to gain flesh, and another to
+be swollen with putrid humors.  Not that multitude ever ought to be
+inconsistent with virtue.  Two men should be wiser than one, and two
+thousand than two; nor do I know another so gross fallacy in the records
+of human stupidity as that excuse for neglect of crime by greatness of
+cities.  As if the first purpose of congregation were not to devise laws
+and repress crimes!  As if bees and wasps could live honestly in flocks--
+men, only in separate dens!  As if it were easy to help one another on
+the opposite sides of a mountain, and impossible on the opposite sides of
+a street!  But when the men are true and good, and stand shoulder to
+shoulder, the strength of any nation is in its quantity of life, not in
+its land nor gold.  The more good men a state has, in proportion to its
+territory, the stronger the state.  And as it has been the madness of
+economists to seek for gold instead of life, so it has been the madness
+of kings to seek for land instead of life.  They want the town on the
+other side of the river, and seek it at the spear point; it never enters
+their stupid heads that to double the honest souls in the town on this
+side of the river would make them stronger kings; and that this doubling
+might be done by the ploughshare instead of the spear, and through
+happiness instead of misery.
+
+Therefore, in brief, this is the only object of all true policy and true
+economy: "utmost multitude of good men on every given space of ground"--
+imperatively always good, sound, honest men,--not a mob of white-faced
+thieves.  So that, on the one hand all aristocracy is wrong which is
+inconsistent with numbers; and on the other all numbers are wrong which
+are inconsistent with breeding.
+
+122.  Then, touching the accumulation of wealth for the maintenance of
+such men, observe, that you must never use the terms "money" and "wealth"
+as synonymous.  Wealth consists of the good, and therefore useful, things
+in the possession of the nation; money is only the written or coined sign
+of the relative quantities of wealth in each person's possession.  All
+money is a divisible title-deed, of immense importance as an expression
+of right to property, but absolutely valueless as property itself.  Thus,
+supposing a nation isolated from all others, the money in its possession
+is, at its maximum value, worth all the property of the nation, and no
+more, because no more can be got for it.  And the money of all nations
+is worth, at its maximum, the property of all nations, and no more, for
+no more can be got for it.  Thus, every article of property produced
+increases, by its value, the value of all the money in the world, and
+every article of property destroyed, diminishes the value of all the
+money in the world.  If ten men are cast away on a rock, with a thousand
+pounds in their pockets, and there is on the rock, neither food nor
+shelter, their money is worth simply nothing, for nothing is to be had
+for it.  If they built ten huts, and recover a cask of biscuit from the
+wreck, then their thousand pounds, at its maximum value, is worth ten
+huts and a cask of biscuit.  If they make their thousand pounds into two
+thousand by writing new notes, their two thousand pounds are still worth
+ten huts and a cask of biscuit.  And the law of relative value is the
+same for all the world, and all the people in it, and all their property,
+as for ten men on a rock.  Therefore, money is truly and finally lost in
+the degree in which its value is taken from it (ceasing in that degree to
+be money at all); and it is truly gained in the degree in which value is
+added to it.  Thus, suppose the money coined by the nation be a fixed
+sum, and divided very minutely (say into francs and cents), and neither
+to be added to nor diminished.  Then every grain of food and inch of
+lodging added to its possessions makes every cent in its pockets worth
+proportionally more, and every gain of food it consumes, and inch of roof
+it allows to fall to ruin, makes every cent in its pockets worth less;
+and this with mathematical precision.  The immediate value of the money
+at particular times and places depends, indeed, on the humors of the
+possessors of property; but the nation is in the one case gradually
+getting richer, and will feel the pressure of poverty steadily everywhere
+relaxing, whatever the humors of individuals may be; and, in the other
+case, is gradually growing poorer, and the pressure of its poverty will
+every day tell more and more, in ways that it cannot explain, but will
+most bitterly feel.
+
+123.  The actual quantity of money which it coins, in relation to its
+real property, is therefore only of consequence for convenience of
+exchange; but the proportion in which this quantity of money is divided
+among individuals expresses their various rights to greater or less
+proportions of the national property, and must not, therefore, be
+tampered with.  The government may at any time, with perfect justice,
+double its issue of coinage, if it gives every man who has ten pounds in
+his pocket another ten pounds, and every man who had ten pence another
+ten pence; for it thus does not make any of them richer; it merely
+divides their counters for them into twice the number.  But if it gives
+the newly-issued coins to other people, or keeps them itself, it simply
+robs the former holders to precisely that extent.  This most important
+function of money, as a title-deed, on the non-violation of which all
+national soundness of commerce and peace of life depend, has been never
+rightly distinguished by economists from the quite unimportant function
+of money as a means of exchange.  You can exchange goods--at some
+inconvenience, indeed, but you can still contrive to do it--without money
+at all; but you cannot maintain your claim to the savings of your past
+life without a document declaring the amount of them, which the nation
+and its government will respect.
+
+124.  And as economists have lost sight of this great function of money
+in relation to individual rights, so they have equally lost sight of its
+function as a representative of good things.  That, for every good thing
+produced, so much money is put into everybody's pocket, is the one simple
+and primal truth for the public to know, and for economists to teach.
+How many of them have taught it?  Some have; but only incidentally; and
+others will say it is a truism.  If it be, do the public know it?  Does
+your ordinary English householder know that every costly dinner he gives
+has destroyed forever as much money as it is worth?  Does every
+well-educated girl--do even the women in high political position--know
+that every fine dress they wear themselves, or cause to be worn, destroys
+precisely so much of the national money as the labor and material of it
+are worth?  If this be a truism, it is one that needs proclaiming
+somewhat louder.
+
+125.  That, then, is the relation of money and goods.  So much goods, so
+much money; so little goods, so little money.  But, as there is this true
+relation between money and "goods," or good things, so there is a false
+relation between money and "bads," or bad things.  Many bad things will
+fetch a price in exchange; but they do not increase the wealth of the
+country.  Good wine is wealth, drugged wine is not; good meat is wealth,
+putrid meat is not; good pictures are wealth, bad pictures are not.  A
+thing is worth precisely what it can do for you; not what you choose to
+pay for it.  You may pay a thousand pounds for a cracked pipkin, if you
+please; but you do not by that transaction make the cracked pipkin worth
+one that will hold water, nor that, nor any pipkin whatsoever, worth more
+than it was before you paid such sum for it.  You may, perhaps, induce
+many potters to manufacture fissured pots, and many amateurs of clay to
+buy them; but the nation is, through the whole business so encouraged,
+rich by the addition to its wealth of so many potsherds,--and there an
+end.  The thing is worth what it CAN do for you, not what you think it
+can; and most national luxuries, nowadays, are a form of potsherd,
+provided for the solace of a self-complacent Job, voluntary sedent on his
+ash-heap.
+
+126.  And, also, so far as good things already exist, and have become
+media of exchange, the variations in their prices are absolutely
+indifferent to the nation.  Whether Mr. A. buys a Titian from Mr. B. for
+twenty, or for two thousand, pounds, matters not sixpence to the national
+revenue; that is to say, it matters in nowise to the revenue whether Mr.
+A. has the picture, and Mr. B. the money, or Mr. B. the picture, and Mr.
+A. the money.  Which of them will spend the money most wisely, and which
+of them will keep the picture most carefully, is, indeed, a matter of
+some importance; but this cannot be known by the mere fact of exchange.
+
+127.  The wealth of a nation then, first, and its peace and well-being
+besides, depend on the number of persons it can employ in making good and
+useful things.  I say its well-being also, for the character of men
+depends more on their occupations than on any teaching we can give them,
+or principles with which we can imbue them.  The employment forms the
+habits of body and mind, and these are the constitution of the man,--the
+greater part of his moral or persistent nature, whatever effort, under
+special excitement, he may make to change or overcome them.  Employment
+is the half, and the primal half, of education--it is the warp of it; and
+the fineness or the endurance of all subsequently woven pattern depends
+wholly on its straightness and strength.  And, whatever difficulty there
+may be in tracing through past history the remoter connections of event
+and cause, one chain of sequence is always clear: the formation, namely,
+of the character of nations by their employments, and the determination
+of their final fate by their character.  The moment, and the first
+direction of decisive revolutions, often depend on accident; but their
+persistent course, and their consequences, depend wholly on the nature of
+the people.  The passing of the Reform Bill by the late English
+Parliament may have been more or less accidental; the results of the
+measure now rest on the character of the English people, as it has been
+developed by their recent interests, occupations, and habits of life.
+Whether, as a body, they employ their new powers for good or evil will
+depend, not on their facilities of knowledge, nor even on the general
+intelligence they may possess, but on the number of persons among them
+whom wholesome employments have rendered familiar with the duties, and
+modest in their estimate of the promises, of life.
+
+128.  But especially in framing laws respecting the treatment or
+employment of improvident and more or less vicious persons, it is to be
+remembered that as men are not made heroes by the performance of an act
+of heroism, but must be brave before they can perform it, so they are not
+made villains by the commission of a crime, but were villains before they
+committed it; and the right of public interference with their conduct
+begins when they begin to corrupt themselves,--not merely at the moment
+when they have proved themselves hopelessly corrupt.
+
+All measures of reformation are effective in exact proportion to their
+timeliness: partial decay may be cut away and cleansed; incipient error
+corrected; but there is a point at which corruption can be no more
+stayed, nor wandering recalled.  It has been the manner of modern
+philanthropy to remain passive until that precise period, and to leave
+the sick to perish, and the foolish to stray, while it spends itself in
+frantic exertions to raise the dead, and reform the dust.
+
+The recent direction of a great weight of public opinion against capital
+punishment is, I trust, the sign of an awakening perception that
+punishment is the last and worst instrument in the hands of the
+legislator for the prevention of crime.  The true instruments of
+reformation are employment and reward; not punishment.  Aid the willing,
+honour the virtuous, and compel the idle into occupation, and there will
+be no deed for the compelling of any into the great and last indolence of
+death.
+
+129.  The beginning of all true reformation among the criminal classes
+depends on the establishment of institutions for their active employment,
+while their criminality is still unripe, and their feelings of
+self-respect, capacities of affection, and sense of justice, not
+altogether quenched.  That those who are desirous of employment should
+always be able to find it, will hardly, at the present day, be disputed;
+but that those who are undesirous of employment should of all persons be
+the most strictly compelled to it, the public are hardly yet convinced;
+and they must be convinced.  If the danger of the principal thoroughfares
+in their capital city, and the multiplication of crimes more ghastly than
+ever yet disgraced a nominal civilization, are not enough, they will not
+have to wait long before they receive sterner lessons.  For our neglect
+of the lower orders has reached a point at which it begins to bear its
+necessary fruit, and every day makes the fields, not whiter, but more
+stable, to harvest.
+
+130.  The general principles by which employment should be regulated may
+be briefly stated as follows:
+
+   I. There being three great classes of mechanical powers at our
+disposal, namely, (a) vital or muscular power; (b) natural mechanical
+power of wind, water, and electricity; and (c) artificially produced
+mechanical power; it is the first principle of economy to use all
+available vital power first, then the inexpensive natural forces, and
+only at last have recourse to artificial power.  And this because it is
+always better for a man to work with his own hands to feed and clothe
+himself, than to stand idle while a machine works for him; and if he
+cannot by all the labor healthily possible to him feed and clothe
+himself, then it is better to use an inexpensive machine--as a windmill
+or watermill--than a costly one like a steam-engine, so long as we have
+natural force enough at our disposal.  Whereas at present we continually
+hear economists regret that the water-power of the cascades or streams of
+a country should be lost, but hardly ever that the muscular power of its
+idle inhabitants should be lost; and, again, we see vast districts, as
+the south of Provence, where a strong wind* blows steadily all day long
+for six days out of seven throughout the year, without a windmill, while
+men are continually employed at a hundred miles to the north, in digging
+fuel to obtain artificial power.  But the principal point of all to be
+kept in view is, that in every idle arm and shoulder throughout the
+country there is a certain quantity of force, equivalent to the force of
+so much fuel; and that it is mere insane waste to dig for coal for our
+force, while the vital force is unused, and not only unused, but in being
+so, corrupting and polluting itself.  We waste our coal, and spoil our
+humanity at one and the same instant.  Therefore, wherever there is an
+idle arm, always save coal with it, and the stores of England will last
+all the longer.  And precisely the same argument answers the common one
+about "taking employment out of the hands of the industrious laborer."
+Why, what is "employment" but the putting out of vital force instead of
+mechanical force?  We are continually in search of means to pull, to
+hammer, to fetch, to carry.  We waste our future resources to get this
+strength, while we leave all the living fuel to burn itself out in mere
+pestiferous breath, and production of its variously noisome forms of
+ashes!  Clearly, if we want fire for force, we want men for force first.
+The industrious hands must already have so much to do that they can do
+no more, or else we need not use machines to help them.  Then use the
+idle hands first.  Instead of dragging petroleum with a steam-engine, put
+it on a canal, and drag it with human arms and shoulders.  Petroluem
+cannot possibly be in a hurry to arrive anywhere.  We can always order
+that, and many other things, time enough before we want it.  So, the
+carriage of everything which does not spoil by keeping may most
+wholesomely and safely be done by water-traction and sailing-vessels; and
+no healthier work can men be put to, nor better discipline, than such
+active porterage.
+
+
+* In order fully to utilize this natural power, we only require machinery
+to turn the variable into a constant velocity--no insurmountable
+difficulty.
+
+
+131.  (2d.) In employing all the muscular power at our disposal we are to
+make the employments we choose as educational as possible; for a
+wholesome human employment is the first and best method of education,
+mental as well as bodily.  A man taught to plough, row, or steer well,
+and a woman taught to cook properly, and make a dress neatly, are already
+educated in many essential moral habits.  Labor considered as a
+discipline has hitherto been thought of only for criminals; but the real
+and noblest function of labor is to prevent crime, and not to be
+Reformatory, but Formatory.
+
+132.  The third great principle of employment is, that whenever there is
+pressure of poverty to be met, all enforced occupation should be directed
+to the production of useful articles only; that is to say, of food, of
+simple clothing, of lodging, or of the means of conveying, distributing,
+and preserving these.  It is yet little understood by economists, and not
+at all by the public, that the employment of persons in a useless
+business cannot relieve ultimate distress.  The money given to employ
+riband-makers at Coventry is merely so much money withdrawn from what
+would have employed lace-makers at Honiton; or makers of something else,
+as useless, elsewhere.  We must spend our money in some way, at some
+time, and it cannot at any time be spent without employing somebody.  If
+we gamble it away, the person who wins it must spend it; if we lose it in
+a railroad speculation, it has gone into some one else's pockets, or
+merely gone to pay navies for making a useless embankment, instead of to
+pay riband or button makers for making useless ribands or buttons; we
+cannot lose it (unless by actually destroying it) without giving
+employment of some kind; and, therefore, whatever quantity of money
+exists, the relative quantity of employment must some day come out of it;
+but the distress of the nation signifies that the employments given have
+produced nothing that will support its existence.  Men cannot live on
+ribands, or buttons, or velvet, or by going quickly from place to place;
+and every coin spent in useless ornament, or useless motion, is so much
+withdrawn from the national means of life.  One of the most beautiful
+uses of railroads is to enable A to travel from the town of X to take
+away the business of B in the town of Y; while, in the mean time, B
+travels from the town of Y to take away A's business in the town of X.
+But the national wealth is not increased by these operations.  Whereas
+every coin spent in cultivating ground, in repairing lodging, in making
+necessary and good roads, in preventing danger by sea or land, and in
+carriage of food or fuel where they are required, is so much absolute and
+direct gain to the whole nation.  To cultivate land round Coventry makes
+living easier at Honiton, and every acre of sand gained from the sea in
+Lincolnshire, makes life easier all over England.
+
+4th, and lastly.  Since for every idle person some one else must be
+working somewhere to provide him with clothes and food, and doing,
+therefore, double the quantity of work that would be enough for his own
+needs, it is only a matter of pure justice to compel the idle person to
+work for his maintenance himself.  The conscription has been used in many
+countries to take away laborers who supported their families, from their
+useful work, and maintain them for purposes chiefly of military display
+at the public expense.  Since this has been long endured by the most
+civilized nations, let it not be thought they would not much more gladly
+endure a conscription which should seize only the vicious and idle,
+already living by criminal procedures at the public expense; and which
+should discipline and educate them to labor which would not only maintain
+themselves, but be serviceable to the commonwealth.  The question is
+simply this: we must feed the drunkard, vagabond, and thief; but shall we
+do so by letting them steal their food, and do no work for it? or shall
+we give them their food in appointed quantity, and enforce their doing
+work which shall be worth it, and which, in process of time, will redeem
+their own characters and make them happy and serviceable members of
+society?
+
+I find by me a violent little fragment of undelivered lecture, which puts
+this, perhaps, still more clearly.  Your idle people (it says), as they
+are now, are not merely waste coal-beds.  They are explosive coal-beds,
+which you pay a high annual rent for.  You are keeping all these idle
+persons, remember, at far greater cost than if they were busy.  Do you
+think a vicious person eats less than an honest one? or that it is
+cheaper to keep a bad man drunk, than a good man sober?  There is, I
+suppose, a dim idea in the mind of the public, that they don't pay for
+the maintenance of people they don't employ.  Those staggering rascals
+at the street corner, grouped around its splendid angle of public-house,
+we fancy that they are no servants of ours! that we pay them no wages!
+that no cash out of our pockets is spent over that beer-stained counter!
+
+Whose cash is it then they are spending?  It is not got honestly by work.
+You know that much.  Where do they get it from?  Who has paid for their
+dinner and their pot?  Those fellows can only live in one of two ways--by
+pillage or beggary.  Their annual income by thieving comes out of the
+public pocket, you will admit.  They are not cheaply fed, so far as they
+are fed by theft.  But the rest of their living--all that they don't
+steal--they must beg.  Not with success from you, you think.  Wise, as
+benevolent, you never gave a penny in "indiscriminate charity."  Well,
+I congratulate you on the freedom of your conscience from that sin, mine
+being bitterly burdened with the memory of many a sixpence given to
+beggars of whom I knew nothing but that they had pale faces and thin
+waists.  But it is not that kind of street beggary that is the worst
+beggars' trade.  Home alms which it is their worst degradation to
+receive.  Those scamps know well enough that you and your wisdom are
+worth nothing to them.  They won't beg of you.  They will beg of their
+sisters, and mothers, and wives, and children, and of any one else who is
+enough ashamed of being of the same blood with them to pay to keep them
+out of sight.  Every one of those blackguards is the bane of a family.
+That is the deadly "indiscriminate charity"--the charity which each
+household pays to maintain its own private curse.
+
+133.  And you think that is no affair of yours? and that every family
+ought to watch over and subdue its own living plague?  Put it to
+yourselves this way, then: suppose you knew every one of those families
+kept an idol in an inner room--a big-bellied bronze figure, to which
+daily sacrifice and oblation was made; at whose feet so much beer and
+brandy was poured out every morning on the ground; and before which,
+every night, good meat, enough for two men's keep, was set, and left,
+till it was putrid, and then carried out and thrown on the dunghill; you
+would put an end to that form of idolatry with your best diligence, I
+suppose.  You would understand then that the beer, and brandy, and meat,
+were wasted; and that the burden imposed by each household on itself lay
+heavily through them on the whole community?  But, suppose further, that
+this idol were not of silent and quiet bronze only, but an ingenious
+mechanism, wound up every morning, to run itself down into automatic
+blasphemies; that it struck and tore with its hands the people who set
+food before it; that it was anointed with poisonous unguents, and
+infected the air for miles round.  You would interfere with the idolatry
+then, straightway?  Will you not interfere with it now, when the
+infection that they venomous idol spreads is not merely death, but sin?
+
+134.  So far the old lecture.  Returning to cool English, the end of the
+matter is, that, sooner or later, we shall have to register our people;
+and to know how they live; and to make sure, if they are capable of work,
+that right work is given them to do.
+
+The different classes of work for which bodies of men could be
+consistently organized, might ultimately become numerous; these following
+divisions of occupation may all at once be suggested:
+
+   I.  Road-making.--Good roads to be made, wherever needed, and kept in
+repair; and the annual loss on unfrequented roads, in spoiled horses,
+strained wheels, and time, done away with.
+
+   II.  Bringing in of waste land.--All waste lands not necessary for
+public health, to be made accessible and gradually reclaimed; chiefly our
+wide and waste seashores.  Not our mountains nor moorland.  Our life
+depends on them, more than on the best arable we have.
+
+   III.  Harbor-making.--The deficiencies of safe or convenient harborage
+in our smaller ports to be remedied; other harbors built at dangerous
+points of coast, and a disciplined body of men always kept in connection
+with the pilot and life-boat services.  There is room for every order of
+intelligence in this work, and for a large body of superior officers.
+
+   IV.  Porterage.--All heavy goods, not requiring speed in transit, to
+be carried (under preventative duty on transit, by railroad) by
+canal-boats, employing men for draught; and the merchant-shipping service
+extended by sea; so that no ships may be wrecked for want of hands, while
+there are idle ones in mischief on shore.
+
+   V.  Repair of buildings.--A body of men in various trades to be kept
+at the disposal of the authorities in every large town, for repair of
+buildings, especially the houses of the poorer orders, who, if no such
+provision were made, could not employ workmen on their own houses, but
+would simply live with rent walls and roofs.
+
+   VI.  Dressmaking.--Substantial dress, of standard material and kind,
+strong shoes, and stout bedding, to be manufactured for the poor, so as
+to render it unnecessary for them, unless by extremity of improvidence,
+to wear cast clothes, or be without sufficiency of clothing.
+
+   VII.  Works of Art.--Schools to be established on thoroughly sound
+principles of manufacture, and use of materials, and with sample and, for
+given periods, unalterable modes of work; first, in pottery, and
+embracing gradually metal work, sculpture, and decorative painting; the
+two points insisted upon, in distinction from ordinary commercial
+establishments, being perfectness of material to the utmost attainable
+degree; and the production of everything by hand-work, for the special
+purpose of developing personal power and skill in the workman.
+
+The last two departments, and some subordinate branches of others, would
+include the service of women and children.
+
+I give now, for such further illustrations as they contain of the points
+I desire most to insist upon with respect both to education and
+employment, a portion of the series of notes published some time ago in
+the "Art Journal," on the opposition of Modesty and Liberty, and the
+unescapable law of wise restraint.  I am sorry that they are written
+obscurely--and it may be thought affectedly; but the fact is, I have
+always had three different ways of writing: one, with the single view of
+making myself understood, in which I necessarily omit a great deal of
+what comes into my head; another, in which I say what I think ought to be
+said, in what I suppose to be the best words I can find for it (which is
+in reality an affected style--be it good or bad); and my third way of
+writing is to say all that comes into my head for my own pleasure, in the
+first words that come, retouching them afterward into (approximate)
+grammar.  These notes for the "Art Journal" were so written; and I like
+them myself, of course; but ask the reader's pardon for their
+confusedness.
+
+135.  "Sir, it cannot be better done."
+
+We will insist, with the reader's permission, on this comfortful saying
+of Albert Dürer's in order to find out, if we may, what Modesty is; which
+it will be well for painters, readers, and especially critics, to know,
+before going farther.  What it is; or, rather, who she is, her fingers
+being among the deftest in laying the ground-threads of Aglaia's cestus.
+
+For this same opinion of Albert's is entertained by many other people
+respecting their own doings--a very prevalent opinion, indeed, I find it;
+and the answer itself, though rarely made with the Nuremberger's crushing
+decision, is nevertheless often enough intimated, with delicacy, by
+artists of all countries, in their various dialects.  Neither can it
+always be held an entirely modest one, as it assuredly was in the man who
+would sometimes estimate a piece of his unconquerable work at only the
+worth of a plate of fruit, or a flask of wine--would have taken even one
+"fig for it," kindly offered; or given it royally for nothing, to show
+his hand to a fellow-king of his own, or any other craft--as Gainsborough
+gave the "Boy at the Stile" for a solo on the violin.  An entirely modest
+saying, I repeat, in him--not always in us.  For Modesty is "the
+measuring virtue," the virtue of modes or limits.  She is, indeed, said
+to be only the third or youngest of the children of the cardinal virtue,
+Temperance; and apt to be despised, being more given to arithmetic, and
+other vulgar studies (Cinderella-like), than her elder sisters; but she
+is useful in the household, and arrives at great results with her
+yard-measure and slate-pencil--a pretty little Marchande des Modes,
+cutting her dress always according to the silk (if this be the proper
+feminine reading of "coat according to the cloth"), so that, consulting
+with her carefully of a morning, men get to know not only their income,
+but their in being--to know themselves, that is, in a gauger's manner,
+round, and up and down--surface and contents; what is in them and what
+may be got out of them; and in fine, their entire canon of weight and
+capacity.  That yard-measure of Modesty's, lent to those who will use it,
+is a curious musical reed, and will go round and round waists that are
+slender enough, with latent melody in every joint of it, the dark root
+only being soundless, moist from the wave wherein
+
+      "Null' altra pianta che facesse fronda
+         O che 'n durasse, vi puote aver vita."*
+
+
+* "Purgatorio," i. 108, 109.
+
+
+But when the little sister herself takes it in hand, to measure things
+outside of us with, the joints shoot out in an amazing manner: the
+four-square walls even of celestial cities being measurable enough by
+that reed; and the way pointed to them, though only to be followed, or
+even seen, in the dim starlight shed down from worlds amidst which there
+is no name of Measure any more, though the reality of it always.  For,
+indeed, to all true modesty the necessary business is not inlook, but
+outlook, and especially uplook: it is only her sister Shamefacedness, who
+is known by the drooping lashes--Modesty, quite otherwise, by her large
+eyes full of wonder; for she never contemns herself, nor is ashamed of
+herself, but forgets herself--at least until she has done something worth
+memory.  It is easy to peep and potter about one's own deficiencies in a
+quiet immodest discontent; but Modesty is so pleased with other people's
+doings, that she has no leisure to lament her own: and thus, knowing the
+fresh feeling of contentment, unstained with thought of self, she does
+not fear being pleased, when there is cause, with her own rightness, as
+with another's, as with another's, saying calmly, "Be it mine or yours,
+or whose else's it may, it is no matter; this also is well."  But the
+right to say such a thing depends on continual reverence and manifold
+sense of failure.  If you have known yourself to have failed, you may
+trust, when it comes, the strange consciousness of success; if you have
+faithfully loved the noble work of others, you need not fear to speak
+with respect of things duly done, of your own.
+
+136.  But the principal good that comes of art being followed in this
+reverent feeling is of it.  Men who know their place can take it and
+keep it, be it low or high, contentedly and firmly, neither yielding
+nor grasping; and the harmony of hand and thought follows, rendering all
+great deeds of art possible--deeds in which the souls of men meet like
+the jewels in the windows of Aladdin's palace, the little gems and the
+large all equally pure, needing no cement but the fitting of facets;
+while the associative work of immodest men is all jointless, and astir
+with wormy ambition; putridly dissolute, and forever on the crawl: so
+that if it come together for a time, it can only be by metamorphosis
+through a flash of volcanic fire out of the vale of Siddim, vitrifying
+the clay of it, and fastening the slime, only to end in wilder
+scattering; according to the fate of those oldest, mightiest, immodestest
+of builders, of whom it is told in scorn, "They had brick for stone, and
+slime had they for mortar."
+
+137.  The first function of Modesty, then, being this recognition of
+place, her second is the recognition of law, and delight in it, for the
+sake of law itself, whether her part be to assert it, or obey.  For as it
+belongs to all immodesty to defy or deny law, and assert privilege and
+license, according to its own pleasure (it being therefore rightly called
+"insolent," that is, "custom-breaking," violating some usual and
+appointed order to attain for itself greater forwardness or power), so it
+is the habit of all modesty to love the constancy and "solemnity," or,
+literally, "accustomedness," of law, seeking first what are the solemn,
+appointed, inviolable customs and general orders of nature, and of the
+Master of nature, touching the matter in hand; and striving to put
+itself, as habitually and inviolably, in compliance with them.  Out of
+which habit, once established, arises what is rightly called
+"conscience," nor "science" merely, but "with-science," a science "with
+us," such as only modest creatures can have--with or within them--and
+within all creation besides, every member of it, strong or weak,
+witnessing together, and joining in the happy consciousness that each
+one's work is good; the bee also being profoundly of that opinion; and
+the lark; and the swallow, in that noisy, but modestly upside-down, Babel
+of hers, under the eaves, with its unvolcanic slime for mortar; and the
+two ants who are asking of each other at the turn of that little
+ant's-foot-worn bath through the moss "lor via e lor fortuna;" and the
+builders also, who built yonder pile of cloud-marble in the west, and the
+gilder who gilded it, and is gone down behind it.
+
+138.  But I think we shall better understand what we ought of the nature
+of Modesty, and of her opposite, by taking a simple instance of both, in
+the practice of that art of music which the wisest have agreed in
+thinking the first element of education; only I must ask the reader's
+patience with me through a parenthesis.
+
+Among the foremost men whose power has had to assert itself, though with
+conquest, yet with countless loss, through peculiarly English
+disadvantages of circumstance, are assuredly to be ranked together, both
+for honor, and for mourning, Thomas Bewick and George Cruikshank.  There
+is, however, less cause for regret in the instance of Bewick.  We may
+understand that it was well for us once to see what an entirely keen and
+true man's temper, could achieve, together, unhelped, but also unharmed,
+among the black bans and wolds of Tyne.  But the genius of Cruikshank has
+been cast away in an utterly ghastly and lamentable manner: his superb
+line-work, worthy of any class of subject, and his powers of conception
+and composition, of which I cannot venture to estimate the range in their
+degraded application, having been condemned, by his fate, to be spent
+either in rude jesting, or in vain war with conditions of vice too low
+alike for record or rebuke, among the dregs of the British populace.  Yet
+perhaps I am wrong in regretting even this: it may be an appointed lesson
+for futurity, that the art of the best English etcher in the nineteenth
+century, spent on illustrations of the lives of burglars and drunkards,
+should one day be seen in museums beneath Greek vases fretted with
+drawings of the wars of Troy, or side by side with Dürer's "Knight and
+Death."
+
+139.  Be that as it may, I am at present glad to be able to refer to one
+of these perpetuations, by his strong hand, of such human character as
+our faultless British constitution occasionally produces in
+out-of-the-way corners.  It is among his illustrations of the Irish
+Rebellion, and represents the pillage and destruction of a gentleman's
+house by the mob.  They have made a heap in the drawing-room of the
+furniture and books, to set first fire to; and are tearing up the floor
+for its more easily kindled planks, the less busily-disposed meanwhile
+hacking round in rage, with axes, and smashing what they can with
+butt-ends of guns.  I do not care to follow with words the ghastly truth
+of the picture into its detail; but the most expressive incident of the
+whole, and the one immediately to my purpose, is this, that one fellow
+has sat himself at the piano, on which, hitting down fiercely with his
+clenched fists, he plays, grinning, such tune as may be so producible, to
+which melody two of his companions, flourishing knotted sticks, dance,
+after their manner, on the top of the instrument.
+
+140.  I think we have in this conception as perfect an instance as we
+require of the lowest supposable phase of immodest or licentious art in
+music; the "inner consciousness of good" being dim, even in the musician
+and his audience, and wholly unsympathized with, and unacknowledged by
+the Delphian, Vestal, and all other prophetic and cosmic powers.  This
+represented scene came into my mind suddenly one evening, a few weeks
+ago, in contrast with another which I was watching in its reality;
+namely, a group of gentle school-girls, leaning over Mr. Charles Hallê,
+as he was playing a variation on "Home, Sweet Home."  They had sustained
+with unwonted courage the glance of subdued indignation with which,
+having just closed a rippling melody of Sebastian Bach's (much like what
+one might fancy the singing of nightingales would be if they fed on honey
+instead of flies), he turned to the slight, popular air.  But they had
+their own associations with it, and besought for, and obtained it, and
+pressed close, at first, in vain, to see what no glance could follow, the
+traversing of the fingers.  They soon thought no more of seeing.  The wet
+eyes, round-open, and the little scarlet upper lips, lifted, and drawn
+slightly together, in passionate glow of utter wonder, became
+picture-like, porcelain-like, in motionless joy, as the sweet multitude
+of low notes fell, in their timely infinities, like summer rain.  Only
+La Robbia himself (nor even he, unless with tenderer use of color than is
+usual in his work) could have rendered some image of that listening.
+
+141.  But if the reader can give due vitality in his fancy to these two
+scenes, he will have in them representative types, clear enough for all
+future purpose, of the several agencies of debased and perfect art.  And
+the interval may easily and continuously be filled by mediate gradations.
+Between the entirely immodeset, unmeasured, and (in evil sense)
+unmannered, execution with the fist; and the entirely modest, measured,
+and (in the noblest sense) mannered, or moral'd execution with the
+finger; between the impatient and unpractised doing, containing in itself
+the witness of lasting impatience and idleness through all previous life,
+and the patient and practised doing, containing in itself the witness
+of self-restraint and unwearied toil through all previous life; between
+the expressed subject and sentiment of home violation, and the expressed
+subject and sentiment of home love; between the sympathy of audience,
+given in irreverent and contemptuous rage, joyless as the rabidness of a
+dog, and the sympathy of audience given in an almost appalled humility of
+intense, rapturous, and yet entirely reasoning and reasonable pleasure;
+between these two limits of octave, the reader will find he can class,
+according to its modesty, usefulness and grace, or becomingness, all
+other musical art.  For although purity of purpose and fineness of
+execution by no means go together, degree to degree (since fine, and
+indeed all but the finest, work is often spent in the most wanton purpose
+--as in all our modern opera--and the rudest execution is again often
+joined with purest purpose, as in a mother's song to her child), still
+the entire accomplishment of music is only in the union of both.  For the
+difference between that "all but" finest and "finest" is an infinite one;
+and besides this, however the power of the performer, once attained, may
+be afterwards misdirected, in slavery to popular passion or childishness,
+and spend itself, at its sweetest, in idle melodies, cold and ephemeral
+(like Michael Angelo's snow statue in the other art), or else in vicious
+difficulty and miserable noise--crackling of thorns under the pot of
+public sensuality--still, the attainment of this power, and the
+maintenance of it, involve always in the executant some virtue or courage
+of high kind; the understanding of which, and of the difference between
+the discipline which develops it and the disorderly efforts of the
+amateur, it will be one of our first businesses to estimate rightly.  And
+though not indeed by degree to degree, yet in essential relation (as of
+winds to waves, the one being always the true cause of the other, though
+they are not necessarily of equal force at the same time,) we shall find
+vice in its varieties, with art-failure,--and virtue in its varieties,
+with art-success,--fall and rise together; the peasant-girl's song at her
+spinning-wheel, the peasant laborer's "to the oaks and rills,"--domestic
+music, feebly yet sensitively skilful,--music for the multitude, of
+beneficent or of traitorous power,--dance-melodies, pure and orderly, or
+foul and frantic,--march-music, blatant in mere fever of animal
+pugnacity, or majestic with force of national duty and memory,--
+song-music, reckless, sensual, sickly, slovenly, forgetful even of the
+foolish words it effaces with foolish noise,--or thoughtful, sacred,
+healthful, artful, forever sanctifying noble thought with separately
+distinguished loveliness of belonging sound,--all these families and
+graduations of good or evil, however mingled, follow, in so far as they
+are good, one constant law of virtue (or "life-strength," which is the
+literal meaning of the word, and its intended one, in wise men's mouths),
+and in so far as they are evil, are evil by outlawry and unvirtue, or
+death-weakness.  Then, passing wholly beyond the domain of death, we may
+still imagine the ascendant nobleness of the art, through all the
+concordant life of incorrupt creatures, and a continually deeper harmony
+of "puissant words and murmurs made to bless," until we reach
+
+      "The undisturbed song of pure consent,
+      Aye sung before the sapphire-colored throne."
+
+142.  And so far as the sister arts can be conceived to have place or
+office, their virtues are subject to a law absolutely the same as that of
+music, only extending its authority into more various conditions, owing
+to the introduction of a distinctly representative and historical power,
+which acts under logical as well as mathematical restrictions, and is
+capable of endlessly changeful fault, fallacy, and defeat, as well as of
+endlessly manifold victory.
+
+143.  Next to Modesty, and her delight in measures, let us reflect a
+little on the character of her adversary, the Goddess of Liberty, and her
+delight in absence of measures, or in false ones.  It is true that there
+are liberties and liberties.  Yonder torrent, crystal-clear, and
+arrow-swift, with its spray leaping into the air like white troops of
+fawns, is free enough.  Lost, presently, amidst bankless, boundless marsh
+--soaking in slow shallowness, as it will, hither and thither, listless
+among the poisonous reeds and unresisting slime--it is free also.  We may
+choose which liberty we like,--the restraint of voiceful rock, or the
+dumb and edgeless shore of darkened sand.  Of that evil liberty which men
+are now glorifying and proclaiming as essence of gospel to all the earth,
+and will presently, I suppose, proclaim also to the stars, with
+invitation to them out of their courses,--and of its opposite continence,
+which is the clasp and 'chrusee perone' of Aglaia's cestus, we must try
+to find out something true.  For no quality of Art has been more powerful
+in its influence on public mind; none is more frequently the subject of
+popular praise, or the end of vulgar effort, than what we call "Freedom."
+It is necessary to determine the justice or injustice of this popular
+praise.
+
+144.  I said, a little while ago, that the practical teaching of the
+masters of Art was summed by the O of Giotto.  "You may judge my
+masterhood of craft," Giotto tells us, "by seeing that I can draw a
+circle unerringly."  And we may safely believe him, understanding him to
+mean that, though more may be necessary to an artist than such a power,
+at least this power is necessary.  The qualities of hand and eye needful
+to do this are the first conditions of artistic craft.
+
+145.  Try to draw a circle yourself with the "free" hand, and with a
+single line.  You cannot do it if your hand trembles, nor if it is in the
+common sense of the word "free."  So far from being free, it must be as
+if it were fastened to an inflexible bar of steel.  And yet it must move,
+under this necessary control, with perfect, untormented serenity of ease.
+
+146.  That is the condition of all good work whatsoever.  All freedom is
+error.  Every line you lay down is either right or wrong; it may be
+timidly and awkwardly wrong, or fearlessly and impudently wrong.  The
+aspect of the impudent wrongness is pleasurable to vulgar persons, and is
+what they commonly call "free" execution; the timid, tottering,
+hesitating wrongness is rarely so attractive; yet sometimes, if
+accompanied with good qualities, and right aims in other directions, it
+becomes in a manner charming, like the inarticulateness of a child; but,
+whatever the charm or manner of the error, there is but one question
+ultimately to be asked respecting every line you draw, Is it right or
+wrong?  If right, it most assuredly is not a "free" line, but an
+intensely continent, restrained, and considered line; and the action of
+the hand in laying it is just as decisive, and just as "free," as the
+hand of a first-rate surgeon in a critical incision.  A great operator
+told me that his hand could check itself within about the two-hundredth
+of an inch, in penetrating a membrane; and this, of course, without the
+help of sight, by sensation only.  With help of sight, and in action on a
+substance which does not quiver or yield, a fine artist's line is
+measurable in its proposed direction to considerably less than the
+thousandth of an inch.
+
+A wide freedom, truly!
+
+147.  The conditions of popular art which most foster the common ideas
+about freedom, are merely results of irregularly energetic effort by men
+imperfectly educated; these conditions being variously mingled with
+cruder mannerisms resulting from timidity, or actual imperfection of
+body.  Northern hands and eyes are, of course, never so subtle as
+Southern; and in very cold countries, artistic execution is palsied.  The
+effort to break through this timidity, or to refine the bluntness, may
+lead to a licentious impetuosity, or an ostentatious minuteness.  Every
+man's manner has this kind of relation to some defect in his physical
+powers or modes of thought; so that in the greatest work there is no
+manner visible.  It is at first uninteresting from its quietness; the
+majesty of restrained power only dawns gradually upon us, as we walk
+towards its horizon.
+
+There is, indeed, often great delightfulness in the innocent manners of
+artists who have real power and honesty, and draw in this way or that, as
+best they can, under such and such untoward circumstances of life.  But
+the greater part of the looseness, flimsiness, or audacity of modern work
+is the expression of an inner spirit of license in mind and heart,
+connected, as I said, with the peculiar folly of this age, its hope of,
+and trust in, "liberty," of which we must reason a little in more general
+terms.
+
+148.  I believe we can nowhere find a better type of a perfectly free
+creature than in the common house-fly.  Nor free only, but brave; and
+irreverent to a degree which I think no human republican could by any
+philosophy exalt himself to.  There is no courtesy in him; he does not
+care whether it is king or clown whom he teases; and in every step of his
+swift mechanical march, and in every pause of his resolute observation,
+there is one and the same expression of perfect egotism, perfect
+independence and self-confidence, and conviction of the world's having
+been made for flies.  Strike at him with your hand, and to him, the
+mechanical fact and external aspect of the matter is, what to you it
+would be if an acre of red clay, ten feet thick, tore itself up from the
+ground in one massive field, hovered over you in the air for a second,
+and came crashing down with an aim.  That is the external aspect of it;
+the inner aspect, to his fly's mind, is of a quite natural and
+unimportant occurrence--one of the momentary conditions of his active
+life.  He steps out of the way of your hand, and alights on the back of
+it.  You cannot terrify him, nor govern him, nor persuade him, nor
+convince him.  He has his own positive opinion on all matters; not an
+unwise one, usually, for his own ends; and will ask no advice of yours.
+He has no work to do--no tyrannical instinct to obey.  The earthworm has
+his digging; the bee her gathering and building; the spider her cunning
+network; the ant her treasury and accounts.  All these are comparatively
+slaves, or people of vulgar business.  But your fly, free in the air,
+free in the chamber--a black incarnation of caprice, wandering,
+investigating, flitting, flirting, feasting at his will, with rich
+variety of choice in feast, from the heaped sweets in the grocer's window
+to those of the butcher's back-yard, and from the galled place on your
+cab-horse's back, to the brown spot in the road, from which, as the hoof
+disturbs him, he rises with angry republican buzz--what freedom is like
+his?
+
+149.  For captivity, again, perhaps your poor watch-dog is as sorrowful
+a type as you will easily find.  Mine certainly is.  The day is lovely,
+but I must write this, and cannot go out with him.  He is chained in the
+yard because I do not like dogs in rooms, and the gardener does not like
+dogs in gardens.  He has no books,--nothing but his own weary thoughts
+for company, and a group of those free flies, whom he snaps at, with
+sullen ill success.  Such dim hope as he may have that I may take him out
+with me, will be, hour by hour, wearily disappointed; or, worse, darkened
+at once into a leaden despair by an authoritative "No"--too well
+understood.  His fidelity only seals his fate; if he would not watch for
+me, he would be sent away, and go hunting with some happier master: but
+he watches, and is wise, and faithful, and miserable; and his high animal
+intellect only gives him the wistful powers of wonder, and sorrow, and
+desire, and affection, which embitter his captivity.  Yet of the two,
+would we rather be watch-dog or fly?
+
+150.  Indeed, the first point we have all to determine is not how free
+we are, but what kind of creatures we are.  It is of small importance to
+any of us whether we get liberty; but of the greatest that we deserve it.
+Whether we can win it, fate must determine; but that we will be worthy of
+it we may ourselves determine; and the sorrowfullest fate of all that we
+can suffer is to have it without deserving it.
+
+151.  I have hardly patience to hold my pen and go on writing, as I
+remember (I would that it were possible for a few consecutive instants to
+forget) the infinite follies of modern thought in this matter, centred in
+the notion that liberty is good for a man, irrespectively of the use he
+is likely to make of it.  Folly unfathomable! unspeakable! unendurable to
+look in the full face of, as the laugh of a cretin.  You will send your
+child, will you, into a room where the table is loaded with sweet wine
+and fruit--some poisoned, some not?--you will say to him, "Choose freely,
+my little child!  It is so good for you to have freedom of choice; it
+forms your character--your individuality!  If you take the wrong cup or
+the wrong berry, you will die before the day is over, but you will have
+acquired the dignity of a Free child?"
+
+152.  You think that puts the case too sharply?  I tell you, lover of
+liberty, there is no choice offered to you, but it is similarly between
+life and death.  There is no act, nor option of act, possible, but the
+wrong deed or option has poison in it which will stay in your veins
+thereafter forever.  Never more to all eternity can you be as you might
+have been had you not done that--chosen that.  You have "formed your
+character," forsooth!  No; if you have chosen ill, you have De-formed
+it, and that for ever!  In some choices it had been better for you that
+a red-hot iron bar struck you aside, scarred and helpless, than that you
+had so chosen.  "You will know better next time!"  No.  Next time will
+never come.  Next time the choice will be in quite another aspect--
+between quite different things,--you, weaker than you were by the evil
+into which you have fallen; it, more doubtful than it was, by the
+increased dimness of your sight.  No one ever gets wiser by doing wrong,
+nor stronger.  You will get wiser and stronger only by doing right,
+whether forced or not; the prime, the one need is to do that, under
+whatever compulsion, until you can do it without compulsion.  And then
+you are a Man.
+
+153.  "What!" a wayward youth might perhaps answer, incredulously, "no
+one ever gets wiser by doing wrong?  Shall I not know the world best by
+trying the wrong of it, and repenting?  Have I not, even as it is,
+learned much by many of my errors?"  Indeed, the effort by which
+partially you recovered yourself was precious; that part of your thought
+by which you discerned the error was precious.  What wisdom and strength
+you kept, and rightly used, are rewarded; and in the pain and the
+repentance, and in the acquaintance with the aspects of folly and sin,
+you have learned something; how much less than you would have learned in
+right paths can never be told, but that it is less is certain.  Your
+liberty of choice has simply destroyed for you so much life and strength
+never regainable.  It is true, you now know the habits of swine, and the
+taste of husks; do you think your father could not have taught you to
+know better habits and pleasanter tastes, if you had stayed in his house;
+and that the knowledge you have lost would not have been more, as well as
+sweeter, than that you have gained?  But "it so forms my individuality
+to be free!"  Your individuality was given you by God, and in your race,
+and if you have any to speak of, you will want no liberty.  You will want
+a den to work in, and peace, and light--no more,--in absolute need; if
+more, in anywise, it will still not be liberty, but direction,
+instruction, reproof, and sympathy.  But if you have no individuality, if
+there is no true character nor true desire in you, then you will indeed
+want to be free.  You will begin early, and, as a boy, desire to be a
+man; and, as a man, think yourself as good as every other.  You will
+choose freely to eat, freely to drink, freely to stagger and fall,
+freely, at last, to curse yourself and die.  Death is the only real
+freedom possible to us; and that is consummate freedom, permission for
+every particle in the rotting body to leave its neighbor particle, and
+shift for itself.  You call it "corruption" in the flesh; but before it
+comes to that, all liberty is an equal corruption in mind.  You ask for
+freedom of thought; but if you have not sufficient grounds for thought,
+you have no business to think; and if you have sufficient grounds, you
+have no business to think wrong.  Only one thought is possible to you if
+you are wise--your liberty is geometrically proportionate to your folly.
+
+154.  "But all this glory and activity of our age; what are they owing
+to, but to freedom of thought?"  In a measure, they are owing--what good
+is in them--to the discovery of many lies, and the escape from the power
+of evil.  Not to liberty, but to the deliverance from evil or cruel
+masters.  Brave men have dared to examine lies which had long been
+taught, not because they were free-thinkers, but because they were such
+stern and close thinkers that the lie could no longer escape them.  Of
+course the restriction of thought, or of its expression, by persecution,
+is merely a form of violence, justifiable or not, as other violence is,
+according to the character of the persons against whom it is exercised,
+and the divine and eternal laws which it vindicates or violates.  We must
+not burn a man alive for saying that the Athanasian creed is
+ungrammatical, nor stop a bishop's salary because we are getting the
+worst of an argument with him; neither must we let drunken men howl in
+the public streets at night.  There is much that is true in the part of
+Mr. Mill's essay on Liberty which treats of freedom of thought; some
+important truths are there beautifully expressed, but many, quite vital,
+are omitted; and the balance, therefore, is wrongly struck.  The liberty
+of expression, with a great nation, would become like that in a
+well-educated company, in which there is indeed freedom of speech, but
+not of clamor; or like that in an orderly senate, in which men who
+deserve to be heard, are heard in due time, and under determined
+restrictions.  The degree of liberty you can rightly grant to a number
+of men is in the inverse ratio of their desire for it; and a general
+hush, or call to order, would be often very desirable in this England of
+ours.  For the rest, of any good or evil extent, it is impossible to say
+what measure is owing to restraint, and what to license where the right
+is balanced between them.  I was not a little provoked one day, a summer
+or two since, in Scotland, because the Duke of Athol hindered me from
+examining the gneiss and slate junctions in Glen Tilt, at the hour
+convenient to me; but I saw them at last, and in quietness; and to the
+very restriction that annoyed me, owed, probably, the fact of their being
+in existence, instead of being blasted away by a mob-company; while the
+"free" paths and inlets of Loch Katrine and the Lake of Geneva are
+forever trampled down and destroyed, not by one duke, but by tens of
+thousands of ignorant tyrants.
+
+155.  So, a Dean and Chapter may, perhaps, unjustifiably charge me
+twopence for seeing a cathedral; but your free mob pulls spire and all
+down about my ears, and I can see it no more forever.  And even if I
+cannot get up to the granite junctions in the glen, the stream comes down
+from them pure to the Garry; but in Beddington Park I am stopped by the
+newly-erected fence of a building speculator; and the bright Wandel,
+divine of waters as Castaly, is filled by the free public with old shoes,
+obscene crockery, and ashes.
+
+156.  In fine, the arguments for liberty may in general be summed in a
+few very simple forms, as follows:
+
+Misguiding is mischievous: therefore guiding is.
+
+If the blind lead the blind, both fall into the ditch: therefore, nobody
+should lead anybody.
+
+Lambs and fawns should be left free in the fields; much more bears and
+wolves.
+
+If a man's gun and shot are his own, he may fire in any direction he
+pleases.
+
+A fence across a road is inconvenient; much more one at the side of it.
+
+Babes should not be swaddled with their hands bound down to their sides:
+therefore they should be thrown out to roll in the kennels naked.
+
+None of these arguments are good, and the practical issues of them are
+worse.  For there are certain eternal laws for human conduct which are
+quite clearly discernible by human reason.  So far as these are
+discovered and obeyed, by whatever machinery or authority the obedience
+is procured, there follow life and strength.  So far as they are
+disobeyed, by whatever good intention the disobedience is brought about,
+there follow ruin and sorrow.  And the first duty of every man in the
+world is to find his true master, and, for his own good, submit to him;
+and to find his true inferior, and, for that inferior's good, conquer
+him.  The punishment is sure, if we either refuse the reverence, or are
+too cowardly and indolent to enforce the compulsion.  A base nation
+crucifies or poisons its wise men, and lets its fools rave and rot in the
+streets.  A wise nation obeys the one, restrains the other, and cherishes
+all.
+
+157.  The best examples of the results of wise normal evidence in Art
+will be found in whatever evidence remains respecting the lives of great
+Italian painters, though, unhappily, in eras of progress, but just in
+proportion to the admirableness and efficiency of the life, will be
+usually the scantiness of its history.  The individualities and liberties
+which are causes of destruction may be recorded; but the loyal conditions
+of daily breath are never told.  Because Leonardo made models of
+machines, dug canals, built fortifications, and dissipated half his
+art-power in capricious ingenuities, we have many anecdotes of him;--but
+no picture of importance on canvas, and only a few withered stains of one
+upon a wall.  But because his pupil, or reputed pupil, Luini, labored in
+constant and successful simplicity, we have no anecdotes of him;--only
+hundreds of noble works.  Luini is, perhaps, the best central type of the
+highly-trained Italian painter.  He is the only man who entirely united
+the religious temper which was the spirit-life of art, with the physical
+power which was its bodily life.  He joins the purity and passion of
+Angelico to the strength of Veronese: the two elements, poised in perfect
+balance, are so calmed and restrained, each by the other, that most of us
+lose the sense of both.  The artist does not see the strength, by reason
+of the chastened spirit in which it is used: and the religious visionary
+does not recognize the passion, by reason of the frank human truth with
+which it is rendered.  He is a man ten times greater than Leonardo;--a
+mighty colorist, while Leonardo was only a fine draughtsman in black,
+staining the chiaroscuro drawing, like a colored print: he perceived and
+rendered the delicatest types of human beauty that have been painted
+since the days of the Greeks, while Leonardo depraved his finer instincts
+by caricature, and remained to the end of his days the slave of an
+archaic smile: and he is a designer as frank, instinctive, and
+exhaustless as Tintoret, while Leonardo's design is only an agony of
+science, admired chiefly because it is painful, and capable of analysis
+in its best accomplishment.  Luini has left nothing behind him that is
+not lovely; but of his life I believe hardly anything is known beyond
+remnants of tradition which murmur about Lugano and Saronno, and which
+remain ungleaned.  This only is certain, that he was born in the
+loveliest district of North Italy, where hills, and streams, and air
+meet in softest harmonies.  Child of the Alps, and of their divinest
+lake, he is taught, without doubt or dismay, a lofty religious creed, and
+a sufficient law of life, and of its mechanical arts.  Whether lessoned
+by Leonardo himself, or merely one of many disciplined in the system of
+the Milanese school, he learns unerringly to draw, unerringly and
+enduringly to paint.  His tasks are set him without question day by day,
+by men who are justly satisfied with his work, and who accept it without
+any harmful praise, or senseless blame.  Place, scale, and subject are
+determined for him on the cloister wall or the church dome; as he is
+required, and for sufficient daily bread, and little more, he paints what
+he has been taught to design wisely, and has passion to realize
+gloriously: every touch he lays is eternal, every thought he conceives is
+beautiful and pure: his hand moves always in radiance of blessing; from
+day to day his life enlarges in power and peace; it passes away
+cloudlessly, the starry twilight remaining arched far against the night.
+
+158.  Oppose to such a life as this that of a great painter amidst the
+elements of modern English liberty.  Take the life of Turner, in whom the
+artistic energy and inherent love of beauty were at least as strong as in
+Luini: but, amidst the disorder and ghastliness of the lower streets of
+London, his instincts in early infancy were warped into toleration of
+evil, or even into delight in it.  He gathers what he can of instruction
+by questioning and prying among half-informed masters; spells out some
+knowledge of classical fable; educates himself, by an admirable force, to
+the production of wildly majestic or pathetically tender and pure
+pictures, by which he cannot live.  There is no one to judge them, or to
+command him: only some of the English upper classes hire him to paint
+their houses and parks, and destroy the drawings afterwards by the most
+wanton neglect.  Tired of laboring carefully, without either reward or
+praise, he dashes out into various experimental and popular works--makes
+himself the servant of the lower public, and is dragged hither and
+thither at their will; while yet, helpless and guideless, he indulges his
+idiosyncrasies till they change into insanities; the strength of his soul
+increasing its sufferings, and giving force to its errors; all the
+purpose of life degenerating into instinct; and the web of his work
+wrought, at last, of beauties too subtle to be understood, his liberty,
+with vices too singular to be forgiven--all useless, because magnificent
+idiosyncrasy had become solitude, or contention, in the midst of a
+reckless populace, instead of submitting itself in loyal harmony to the
+Art-laws of an understanding nation.  And the life passed away in
+darkness; and its final work, in all the best beauty of it, has already
+perished, only enough remaining to teach us what we have lost.
+
+159.  These are the opposite effects of Law and of Liberty on men of the
+highest powers.  In the case of inferiors the contrast is still more
+fatal: under strict law, they become the subordinate workers in great
+schools, healthily aiding, echoing, or supplying, with multitudinous
+force of hand, the mind of the leading masters: they are the nameless
+carvers of great architecture--stainers of glass--hammerers of iron--
+helpful scholars, whose work ranks round, if not with, their master's,
+and never disgraces it.  But the inferiors under a system of license
+for the most part perish in miserable effort;* a few struggle into
+pernicious eminence--harmful alike to themselves and to all who admire
+them; many die of starvation; many insane, either in weakness of insolent
+egotism, like Haydon, or in a conscientious agony of beautiful purpose
+and warped power, like Blake.  There is no probability of the persistence
+of a licentious school in any good accidentally discovered by them; there
+is an approximate certainty of their gathering, with acclaim, round any
+shadow of evil, and following it to whatever quarter of destruction it
+may lead.
+
+
+* As I correct this sheet for press, my "Pall Mall Gazette" of last
+Saturday, April 17, is lying on the table by me.  I print a few lines out
+of it:
+
+   "AN ARTIST'S DEATH.--A sad story was told at an inquest held in St.
+Pancras last night by Dr. Lankester on the body of . . ., aged
+fifty-nine, a French artist who was found dead in his bed at his rooms in
+. . . Street.  M. . . ., also an artist, said he had known the deceased
+for fifteen years.  He once held a high position, and being anxious to
+make a name in the world, he five years ago commenced a large picture,
+which he hoped, when completed, to have in the gallery at Versailles; and
+with that view he sent a photograph of it to the French Emperor.  He also
+had an idea of sending it to the English Royal Academy.  He labored on
+this picture, neglecting other work which would have paid him well, and
+gradually sank lower and lower into poverty.  His friends assisted him,
+but being absorbed in his great work, he did not heed their advice, and
+they left him.  He was, however, assisted by the French Ambassador, and
+last Saturday, he (the witness) saw deceased, who was much depressed in
+spirits, as he expected the brokers to be put in possession for rent.  He
+said his troubles were so great that he feared his brain would give way.
+The witness gave him a shilling for which he appeared very thankful.  On
+Monday the witness called upon him, but received no answer to his knock.
+He went again on Tuesday, and entered the deceased's bedroom and found
+him dead.  Dr. George Ross said that when called into the deceased he had
+been dead at least two days.  The room was in a filthy, dirty condition,
+and the picture referred to--certainly a very fine one--was in that room.
+The post-mortem examination showed that the cause of death was fatty
+degeneration of the heart, the latter probably having ceased its action
+through the mental excitement of the deceased."
+
+
+160.  Thus far the notes of Freedom.  Now, lastly, here is some talk
+which I tried at the time to make intelligible; and with which I close
+this volume, because it will serve sufficiently to express the practical
+relation in which I think the art and imagination of the Greeks stand to
+our own; and will show the reader that my view of that relation is
+unchanged, from the first day on which I began to write, until now.
+
+
+***
+
+
+THE HERCULES OF CAMARINA.
+
+ADDRESS TO THE STUDENTS OF THE ART SCHOOL OF SOUTH LAMBERT, MARCH 15,
+1869.
+
+
+161.  Among the photographers of Greek coins which present so many
+admirable subjects for your study, I must speak for the present of one
+only: the Hercules of Camarina.  You have, represented by a Greek
+workman, in that coin, the face of a man and the skin of a lion's head.
+And the man's face is like a man's face, but the lion's skin is not like
+a lion's skin.
+
+162.  Now there are some people who will tell you that Greek art is fine,
+because it is true; and because it carves men's faces as like men's as it
+can.
+
+And there are other people who will tell you that Greek art is fine,
+because it is not true; and carves a lion's skin so as to look not at all
+like a lion's skin.
+
+And you fancy that one or the other of these sets of people must be
+wrong, and are perhaps much puzzled to find out which you should believe.
+
+But neither of them are wrong, and you will have eventually to believe,
+or rather to understand and know, in reconciliation, the truths taught by
+each; but for the present, the teachers of the first group are those you
+must follow.
+
+It is they who tell you the deepest and usefullest truth, which involves
+all others in time.  Greek art, and all other art, is fine when it makes
+a man's face as like a man's face as it can.  Hold to that.  All kinds of
+nonsense are talked to you, nowadays, ingeniously and irrelevantly about
+art.  Therefore, for the most part of the day, shut your ears, and keep
+your eyes open: and understand primarily, what you may, I fancy, easily
+understand, that the greatest masters of all greatest schools--Phidias,
+Donatello, Titian, Velasquez, or Sir Joshua Reynolds--all tried to make
+human creatures as like human creatures as they could; and that anything
+less like humanity than their work, is not so good as theirs.
+
+Get that well driven into your heads; and don't let it out again, at your
+peril.
+
+163.  Having got it well in, you may then further understand, safely,
+that three is a great deal of secondary work in pots, and pans, and
+floors, and carpets, and shawls, and architectural ornament, which ought
+essentially, to be unlike reality, and to depend for its charm on quite
+other qualities than imitative ones.  But all such art is inferior and
+secondary--much of it more or less instinctive and animal, and a
+civilized human creature can only learn those principles rightly, by
+knowing those of great civilized art first--which is always the
+representation, to the utmost of its power, of whatever it has got to
+show--made to look as like the thing as possible.  Go into the National
+Gallery, and look at the foot of Correggio's Venus there.  Correggio
+made it as like a foot as he could, and you won't easily find anything
+liker.  Now, you will find on any Greek vase something meant for a foot,
+or a hand, which is not at all like one.  The Greek vase is a good thing
+in its way, but Correggio's picture is the best work.
+
+164.  So, again, go into the Turner room of the National Gallery, and
+look at Turner's drawing of "Ivy Bridge."  You will find the water in it
+is like real water, and the ducks in it are like real ducks.  Then go
+into the British Museum, and look for an Egyptian landscape, and you will
+find the water in that constituted of blue zigzags, not at all like
+water; and ducks in the middle of it made of blue lines, looking not in
+the least as if they could stand stuffing with sage and onions.  They are
+very good in their way, but Turner's are better.
+
+165.  I will not pause to fence my general principle against what you
+perfectly well know of the due contradiction,--that a thing may be
+painted very like, yet painted ill.  Rest content with knowing that it
+must be like, if it is painted well; and take this further general law:
+Imitation is like charity.  When it is done for love it is lovely; when
+it is done for show, hateful.
+
+166.  Well, then, this Greek coin is fine, first because the face is like
+a face.  Perhaps you think there is something particularly handsome in
+the face, which you can't see in the photograph, or can't at present
+appreciate.  But there is nothing of the kind.  It is a very regular,
+quiet, commonplace sort of face; and any average English gentleman's, of
+good descent, would be far handsomer.
+
+167.  Fix that in your heads also, therefore, that Greek faces are not
+particularly beautiful.  Of that much nonsense against which you are to
+keep your ears shut, that which is talked to you of the Greek ideal of
+beauty is the absolutest.  There is not a single instance of a very
+beautiful head left by the highest school of Greek art.  On coins, there
+is even no approximately beautiful one.  The Juno of Argos is a virago;
+the Athena of Athens grotesque, the Athena of Corinth is insipid; and of
+Thurium, sensual.  The Siren Ligeia, and fountain of Arethusa, on the
+coins of Terina and Syracuse, are prettier, but totally without
+expression, and chiefly set off by their well-curled hair.  You might
+have expected something subtle in Mercuries; but the Mercury of Ænus is
+a very stupid-looking fellow, in a cap like a bowl, with a knob on the
+top of it.  The Bacchus of Thasos is a drayman with his hair pomatum'd.
+The Jupiter of Syracurse is, however, calm and refined; and the Apollo
+of Clazomenæ would have been impressive, if he had not come down to us,
+much flattened by friction.  But on the whole, the merit of Greek coins
+does not primarily depend on beauty of features, nor even, in the period
+of highest art, that of the statues.  You make take the Venus of Melos as
+a standard of beauty of the central Greek type.  She has tranquil,
+regular, and lofty features; but could not hold her own for a moment
+against the beauty of a simple English girl, of pure race and kind heart.
+
+168.  And the reason that Greek art, on the whole, bores you (and you
+know it does), is that you are always forced to look in it for something
+that is not there; but which may be seen every day, in real life, all
+round you; and which you are naturally disposed to delight in, and ought
+to delight in.  For the Greek race was not at all one of exalted beauty,
+but only of general and healthy completeness of form.  They were only,
+and could be only, beautiful in body to the degree that they were
+beautiful in soul (for you will find, when you read deeply into the
+matter, that the body is only the soul made visible).  And the Greeks
+were indeed very good people, much better people than most of us think,
+or than many of us are; but there are better people alive now than the
+best of them, and lovelier people to be seen now than the loveliest of
+them.
+
+169.  Then what are the merits of this Greek art, which make it so
+exemplary for you?  Well, not that it is beautiful, but that it is
+Right.*  All that it desires to do, it does, and all that it does, does
+well.  You will find, as you advance in the knowledge of art, that its
+laws of self-restraint are very marvelous; that its peace of heart, and
+contentment in doing a simple thing, with only one or two qualities,
+restrictedly desired, and sufficiently attained, are a most wholesome
+element of education for you, as opposed to the wild writhing, and
+wrestling, and longing for the moon, and tilting at windmills, and agony
+of eyes, and torturing of fingers, and general spinning out of one's
+soul into fiddle-strings, which constitute the ideal life of a modern
+artist.
+
+
+* Compare above, §101.
+
+
+Also observe, there is an entire masterhood of its business up to the
+required point.  A Greek does not reach after other people's strength,
+nor outreach his own.  He never tries to paint before he can draw; he
+never tries to lay on flesh where there are no bones; and he never
+expects to find the bones of anything in his inner consciousness.  Those
+are his first merits--sincere and innocent purpose, strong common-sense
+and principle, and all the strength that follows on that strength.
+
+170.  But, secondly, Greek art is always exemplary in disposition of
+masses, which is a thing that in modern days students rarely look for,
+artists not enough, and the public never.  But, whatever else Greek work
+may fail of, you may always be sure its masses are well placed, and their
+placing has been the object of the most subtle care.  Look, for instance,
+at the inscription in front of this Hercules of the name of the town--
+Camarina.  You can't read it, even though you may know Greek, without
+some pains; for the sculptor knew well enough that it mattered very
+little whether you read it or not, for the Camarina Hercules could tell
+his own story; but what did above all things matter was, that no K or A
+or M should come in a wrong place with respect to the outline of the
+head, and divert the eye from it, or spoil any of its lines.  So the
+whole inscription is thrown into a sweeping curve of gradually
+diminishing size, continuing from the lion's paws, round the neck, up to
+the forehead, and answering a decorative purpose as completely as the
+curls of the mane opposite.  Of these, again, you cannot change or
+displace one without mischief; they are almost as even in reticulation as
+a piece of basket-work; but each has a different form and a due relation
+to the rest, and if you set to work to draw that mane rightly, you will
+find that, whatever time you give to it, you can't get the tresses quite
+into their places, and that every tress out of its place does an injury.
+If you want to test your powers of accurate drawing, you may make that
+lion's mane your pons asinorum, I have never yet met with a student who
+didn't make an ass in a lion's skin of himself when he tried it.
+
+171.  Granted, however, that these tresses may be finely placed, still
+they are not like a lion's mane.  So we come back to the question,--if
+the face is to be like a man's face, why is not the lion's mane to be
+like a lion's mane?  Well, because it can't be like a lion's mane without
+too much trouble,--and inconvenience after that, and poor success, after
+all.  Too much trouble, in cutting the die into fine fringes and jags;
+inconvenience after that,--because, though you can easily stamp cheeks
+and foreheads smooth at a blow, you can't stamp projecting tresses fine
+at a blow, whatever pains you take with your die.
+
+So your Greek uses his common sense, wastes no time, uses no skill, and
+says to you, "Here is beautifully set tresses, which I have carefully
+designed and easily stamped.  Enjoy them, and if you cannot understand
+that they mean lion's mane, heaven mend your wits."
+
+172.  See, then, you have in this work well-founded knowledge, simple and
+right aims, thorough mastery of handicraft, splendid invention in
+arrangement, unerring common sense in treatment,--merits, these, I think,
+exemplary enough to justify our tormenting you a little with Greek art.
+But it has one merit more than these, the greatest of all.  It always
+means something worth saying.  Not merely worth saying for that time
+only, but for all time.  What do you think this helmet of lion's hide is
+always given to Hercules for?  You can't suppose it means only that he
+once killed a lion, and always carried its skin afterwards to show that
+he had, as Indian sportsmen sent home stuffed rugs, with claws at the
+corners, and a lump in the middle which one tumbles over every time one
+stirs the fire.  What was this Nemean Lion, whose spoils were evermore to
+cover Hercules from the cold?  Not merely a large specimen of Felis Leo,
+ranging the fields of Nemea, be sure of that.  This Nemean cub was one of
+a bad litter.  Born of Typhon and Echidna,--of the whirlwind and the
+snake,--Cerberus his brother, the Hydra of Lerna his sister,--it must
+have been difficult to get his hide off him.  He had to be found in
+darkness, too, and dealt upon without weapons, by grip at the throat--
+arrows and club of no avail against him.  What does all that mean?
+
+173.  It means that the Nemean Lion is the first great adversary of life,
+whatever that may be--to Hercules, or to any of us, then or now.  The
+first monster we have to strangle, or be destroyed by, fighting in the
+dark, and with none to help us, only Athena standing by to encourage with
+her smile.  Every man's Nemean Lion lies in wait for him somewhere.  The
+slothful man says, There is a lion in the path.  He says well.  The quiet
+unslothful man says the same, and knows it too.  But they differ in their
+further reading of the text.  The slothful man says, I shall be slain,
+and the unslothful, IT shall be.  It is the first ugly and strong enemy
+that rises against us, all future victory depending on victory over that.
+Kill it; and through all the rest of your life, what was once dreadful is
+your armor, and you are clothed with that conquest for every other, and
+helmed with its crest of fortitude for evermore.
+
+Alas, we have most of us to walk bare-headed; but that is the meaning of
+the story of Nemea,--worth laying to heart and thinking of sometimes,
+when you see a dish garnished with parsley, which was the crown at the
+Nemean games.
+
+174.  How far, then, have we got in our list of the merits of Greek art
+now?
+
+      Sound knowledge.
+      Simple aims.
+      Mastered craft.
+      Vivid invention.
+      Strong common sense.
+      And eternally true and wise meaning.
+
+Are these not enough?  Here is one more, then, which will find favor, I
+should think, with the British Lion.  Greek art is never frightened at
+anything; it is always cool.
+
+175.  It differs essentially from all other art, past or present, in this
+incapability of being frightened.  Half the power and imagination of
+every other school depend on a certain feverish terror mingling with
+their  sense of beauty,--the feeling that a child has in a dark room, or
+a sick person in seeing ugly dreams.  But the Greeks never have ugly
+dreams.  They cannot draw anything ugly when they try.  Sometimes they
+put themselves to their wits'-end to draw an ugly thing,--the Medusa's
+head, for instance,--but they can't do it, not they, because nothing
+frightens them.  They widen the mouth, and grind the teeth, and puff the
+cheeks, and set the eyes a goggling; and the thing is only ridiculous
+after all, not the least dreadful, for there is no dread in their hearts.
+Pensiveness; amazement; often deepest grief and desolateness.  All these;
+but terror never.  Everlasting calm in the presence of all fate; and joy
+such as they could win, not indeed in a perfect beauty, but in beauty at
+perfect rest!  A kind of art this, surely, to be looked at, and thought
+upon sometimes with profit, even in these latter days.
+
+176.  To be looked at sometimes.  Not continually, and never as a model
+for imitation.  For you are not Greeks; but, for better or worse, English
+creatures; and cannot do, even if it were a thousand times better worth
+doing, anything well, except what your English hearts shall prompt, and
+your English skies teach you.  For all good art is the natural utterance
+of its own people in its own day.
+
+But also, your own art is a better and brighter one than ever this Greek
+art was.  Many motives, powers, and insights have been added to those
+elder ones.  The very corruptions into which we have fallen are signs of
+a subtle life, higher than theirs was, and therefore more fearful in its
+faults and death.  Christianity has neither superceded, nor, by itself,
+excelled heathenism; but it has added its own good, won also by many a
+Nemean contest in dark valleys, to all that was good and noble in
+heathenism; and our present thoughts and work, when they are right, are
+nobler than the heathen's.  And we are not reverent enough to them,
+because we possess too much of them.  That sketch of four cherub heads
+from and English girl, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, at Kensington, is an
+incomparably finer thing than ever the Greeks did.  Ineffably tender in
+the touch, yet Herculean in power; innocent, yet exalted in feeling; pure
+in color as a pearl; reserved and decisive in design, as this Lion crest,
+--if it alone existed of such,--if it were a picture by Zeuxis, the only
+one left in the world, and you build a shrine for it, and were allowed to
+see it only seven days in a year, it alone would teach you all of art
+that you ever needed to know.  But you do not learn from this or any
+other such work, because you have not reverence enough for them, and are
+trying to learn from all at once, and from a hundred other masters
+besides.
+
+177.  Here, then, is the practical advice which I would venture to deduce
+from what I have tried to show you.  Use Greek art as a first, not a
+final, teacher.  Learn to draw carefully from Greek work; above all, to
+place forms correctly, and to use light and shade tenderly.  Never allow
+yourselves black shadows.  It is easy to make things look round and
+projecting; but the things to exercise yourselves in are the placing of
+the masses, and the modelling of the lights.  It is an admirable exercise
+to take a pale wash of color for all the shadows, never reinforcing it
+everywhere, but drawing the statue as if it were in far distance, making
+all the darks one flat pale tint.  Then model from those into the lights,
+rounding as well as you can, on those subtle conditions.  In your chalk
+drawings, separate the lights from the darks at once all over; then
+reinforce the darks slightly where absolutely necessary, and put your
+whole strength on the lights and their limits.  Then, when you have
+learned to draw thoroughly, take one master for your painting, as you
+would have done necessarily in old times by being put into his school
+(were I to choose for you, it should be among six men only--Titian,
+Correggio, Paul Veronese, Velasquez, Reynolds, or Holbein).  If you are a
+landscapist, Turner must be your only guide (for no other great landscape
+painter has yet lived); and having chosen, do your best to understand
+your own chosen master, and obey him, and no one else, till you have
+strength to deal with the nature itself round you, and then, be your own
+master, and see with your own eyes.  If you have got masterhood or sight
+in you, that is the way to make the most of them; and if you have
+neither, you will at least be sound in your work, prevented from immodest
+and useless effort, and protected from vulgar and fantastic error.
+
+And so I wish you all, good speed, and the favor of Hercules and of the
+Muses; and to those who shall best deserve them, the crown of Parsley
+first and then of the Laurel.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12641 ***