Kitabı oku: «The Eagle's Nest», sayfa 9

“Chaerephon. You say truly, and yesterday was just such another. But in the name of the Gods, Socrates, how is one to believe those old sayings, that birds were ever changed into women, or women into birds, for nothing could seem more impossible?

195. “Socrates. Ah, dear Chaerephon, it is likely that we are poor and blunt judges of what is possible and not: for we judge by comparing to human power a power unknown to us, unimaginable, and unseen. Many things, therefore, that are easy, seem to us difficult; and many things unattainable that may be attained; being thus thought of, some through the inexperience, and some through the infantine folly, of our minds. For in very deed every man may be thought of as a child—even the oldest of us,—since the full time of life is little, and as a baby’s compared to universal time. And what should we have to say, my good friend, who know nothing of the power of gods or of the spirits of Nature, whether any of such things are possible or not? You saw, Chaerephon, what a storm there was, the day before yesterday; it makes one tremble even to think of it again;—that lightning, and thunder, and sudden tempest, so great that one would have thought all the earth falling to ruin; and yet, in a little while, came the wonderful establishing of calm, which has remained even till now. Whether, then, do you think it the greater work, to bring such a calm out of that tormenting whirlwind, and reduce the universe to peace, or to change the form of a woman into that of a bird? For indeed we see how very little children, who know how to knead clay, do something like this also; often out of one lump they will make form after form, of different natures: and surely to the spirit-powers of Nature, being in vast and inconjecturable excess beyond ours, all such things must be in their hands easy. Or how much do you think heaven greater than thyself—can you say, perchance?

“Chaerephon. Who of men, O Socrates, could imagine or name any of these things?

196. “Socrates. Nay; do we not see also, in comparing man with man, strange differences in their powers and imbecilities? for complete manhood, compared with utter infancy, as of a child five or ten days old, has difference in power, which we may well call miraculous: and when we see man excel man so far, what shall we say that the strength of the whole heaven must appear, against ours, to those who can see them together, so as to compare them? Also, to you and me, and to many like us, sundry things are impossible that are easy to other people; as singing to those ignorant of music, and reading or writing to those ignorant of letters;—more impossible than to make women birds, or birds of women. For Nature, as with chance throw, and rough parable, making the form of a footless and wingless beast in changeable matter; then putting on feet and wings, and making it glitter all over with fair variegation and manifold colour, at last brings out, for instance, the wise bee, maker of the divine honey; and out of the voiceless and spiritless egg she brings many kinds of flying and foot-going and swimming creatures, using besides (as runs the old Logos) the sacred art of the great Aether.⁸ We then, being altogether mortal and mean, and neither able to see clearly great things nor small, and, for the most part being unable to help ourselves even in our own calamities,—what can we have to say about the powers of the immortals, either over halcyons or nightingales? But the fame of fable such as our fathers gave it to us, this, to my children, O thou bird singing of sorrow, I will deliver concerning thy hymns: and I myself will sing often of this religious and human love of thine, and of the honour thou hast for it from the Gods. Wilt not thou do likewise, O Chaerephon?

“Chaerephon. It is rightly due indeed, O Socrates, for there is two-fold comfort in this, both for men and women, in their relations with each other.

“Socrates. Shall we not then salute the halcyon, and so go back to the city by the sands, for it is time?

“Chaerephon. Indeed let us do so.”

197. The note of the scholiast on this dialogue is the only passage in which I can find any approximately clear description of the Greek halcyon. It is about as large, he says, as a small sparrow; (the question how large a Greek sparrow was we must for the present allow to remain open;) and it is mixed of green and blue, with gleaming of purple above, and it has a slender and long beak: the beak is said to be “chloros,” which I venture to translate “green,” when it is used of the feathers, but it may mean anything, used of the beak. Then follows the same account as other people’s, of the nest-building, except that the nest is compared in shape to a medicinal gourd. And then the writer goes on to say that there are two species of halcyons—one larger than the other, and silent, but the smaller, fond of singing (ᾠδική); and that the females of these are so true to their mates that, when the latter grow old, the female bird flies underneath them, and carries them wherever they would like to go; and after they die will not eat nor drink anything, and so dies too. “And there is a certain kind of them, of which, if any one hear the voice, it is an altogether true sign to him that he will die in a short time.”

198. You will, I think, forgive me, if after reading to you these lovely fables, I do not distract you, or detain, with the difficult investigation of the degree in which they are founded on the not yet sufficiently known facts of the Kingfisher’s life.

I would much rather that you should remain impressed with the effect which the lovely colour and fitful appearance of the bird have had on the imagination of men. I may satisfy you by the assurance that the halcyon of England is also the commonest halcyon of Greece and of Palestine; and I may at once prove to you the real gain of being acquainted with the traditions of it, by reading to you two stanzas, certainly among the most familiar to your ears in the whole range of English poetry; yet which, I am well assured, will sound, after what we have been reflecting upon to-day, almost as if they were new to you. Note especially how Milton’s knowledge that Halcyone was the daughter of the Winds, and Ceyx the son of the Morning Star, affects the course of his thought in the successive stanzas—

 
“But peaceful was the night,
Wherein the Prince of light
His reign of peace upon earth began:
The winds with wonder whist,
Smoothly the waters kist,
Whispering new joys to the mild ocean,
Who now hath quite forgot to rave,
While birds of calm sit brooding on the charmèd wave.
 
 
“The stars, with deep amaze,
Stand fix’d in steadfast gaze,
Bending one way their precious influence;
And will not take their flight,
For all the morning light
Of Lucifer, that often warn’d them thence;
But in their glimmering orbs did glow,
Until their Lord Himself bespake, and bid them go.”
 

199. I should also only weary you if I attempted to give you any interpretation of the much-entangled web of Greek fables connected with the story of Halcyone. You observe that in all these passages I have said “King of Trachis” instead of Ceyx. That is partly because I don’t know how to pronounce Ceyx either in Greek or English; but it is chiefly to make you observe that this story of the sea-mew and Halcyon, now known through all the world, like the sea-mew’s cry, has its origin in the “Rough country,” or crag-country, under Mount Œta, made sacred to the Greek mind by the death of Heracles; and observe what strange connection that death has with the Halcyon’s story. Heracles goes to this “Rough country” to seek for rest; all the waves and billows of his life having—as he thinks now—gone over him. But he finds death.

As far as I can form any idea of this “rough, or torn, country” from the descriptions of Colonel Leake or any other traveller, it must resemble closely the limestone cliffs just above Altorf, which break down to the valley from the ridge of the Windgelle, and give source, at their foot, to faultlessly clear streams,—green-blue among the grass.

You will find Pausanias noting the springs of Thermopylæ as of the bluest water he ever saw; and if you fancy the Lake Lucerne to be the sea bay running inland from Artemisium, you will have a clear and useful, nor in any serious way, inaccurate, image of the scene where the Greeks thought their best hero should die. You may remember also, with advantage, that Morgarten—the Thermopylæ of Switzerland—lies by the little lake of Egeri, not ten miles from this bay of Altorf; and that the Heracles of Switzerland is born under those Trachinian crags.

If, farther, you remember that the Halcyon would actually be seen flitting above the blue water of the springs, like one of their waves caught up and lighted by the sun; and the sea-mews haunting the cliffs, you will see how physical circumstances modify the under-tone of the words of every mythic tradition.

I cannot express to you how strange—how more and more strange every day—it seems to me, that I cannot find a single drawing, nor definite account, of scenes so memorable as this, to point you to; but must guess and piece their image together for you as best I can from their Swiss similitudes. No English gentleman can pass through public school-life without knowing his Trachiniæ; yet I believe, literally, we could give better account of the forms of the mountains in the moon, than we could of Œta. And what has art done to help us? How many Skiddaws or Benvenues, for one Œta,—if one! And when the English gentleman becomes an art-patron, he employs his painter-servant only to paint himself and his house; and when Turner was striving, in his youth, to enforce the mythology, and picture these very scenes in Greece, and putting his whole strength into the endeavour to conceive them, the noble pictures remained in his gallery; and for bread, he had to paint – Hall, the seat of –, Esquire, with the carriage drive, the summer-house, and the squire going out hunting.

If, indeed, the squire would make his seat worth painting, and would stay there, and would make the seats, or, shall we call them, forms, of his peasantry, worth painting too, he would be interpreting the fable of the Halcyon to purpose.

But you must, at once, and without any interpreter, feel for yourselves how much is implied in those wonderful words of Simonides—written six hundred years before Christ;—“when in the wild winter months, Zeus gives the wisdom of calm;” and how much teaching there is for us in the imagination of past days,—this dream-picture of what is true in days that are, and are to come,—that perfect domestic love not only makes its nest upon the waves, but that the waves will be calm that it may.

200. True, I repeat, for all ages, and all people, that, indeed, are desirous of peace, and loving in trouble! But what fable shall we invent, what creature on earth or sea shall we find, to symbolize this state of ours in modern England? To what sorrowful birds shall we be likened, who make the principal object of our lives dispeace, and unrest; and turn our wives and daughters out of their nests, to work for themselves?

Nay, strictly speaking, we have not even got so much as nests to turn them out of. I was infinitely struck, only the other day, by the saying of a large landed proprietor (a good man, who was doing all he could for his tenantry, and building new cottages for them), that the best he could do for them, under present conditions of wages, and the like, was, to give them good drainage and bare walls.

“I am obliged,” he said to me, “to give up all thought of anything artistic, and even then, I must lose a considerable sum on every cottage I build.”

201. Now, there is no end to the confused states of wrong and misery which that landlord’s experience signifies. In the first place, no landlord has any business with building cottages for his people. Every peasant should be able to build his own cottage,—to build it to his mind; and to have a mind to build it too. In the second place, note the unhappy notion which has grown up in the modern English mind, that wholesome and necessary delight in what is pleasant to the eye, is artistic affectation. You have the exponent of it all in the central and mighty affectation of the Houses of Parliament. A number of English gentlemen get together to talk; they have no delight whatever in any kind of beauty; but they have a vague notion that the appointed place for their conversation should be dignified and ornamental; and they build over their combined heads the absurdest and emptiest piece of filigree,—and, as it were, eternal foolscap in freestone,—which ever human beings disgraced their posterity by. Well, all that is done, partly, and greatly, in mere jobbery; but essentially also in a servile imitation of the Hôtel-de-Ville builders of old time; but the English gentleman has not the remotest idea that when Hôtels-de-Ville were built, the ville enjoyed its hotel;—the town had a real pride in its town hall, and place of council, and the sculptures of it had precious meaning for all the populace.

202. And in like manner, if cottages are ever to be wisely built again, the peasant must enjoy his cottage, and be himself its artist, as a bird is. Shall cock-robins and yellow-hammers have wit enough to make themselves comfortable, and bullfinches peck a Gothic tracery out of dead clematis,—and your English yeoman be fitted by his landlord with four dead walls and a drain-pipe? That is the result of your spending 300,000l. a year at Kensington in science and art, then? You have made beautiful machines, too, wherewith you save the peasant the trouble of ploughing and reaping, and threshing; and after being saved all that time and toil, and getting, one would think, leisure enough for his education, you have to lodge him also, as you drop a puppet into a deal box, and you lose money in doing it! and two hundred years ago, without steam, without electricity, almost without books, and altogether without help from “Cassell’s Educator” or the morning newspapers, the Swiss shepherd could build himself a châlet, daintily carved, and with flourished inscriptions, and with red and blue and white ποικιλία; and the burgess of Strasburg could build himself a house like this I showed you, and a spire such as all men know; and keep a precious book or two in his public library, and praise God for all: while we,—what are we good for, but to damage the spire, knock down half the houses, and burn the library,—and declare there is no God but Chemistry?

203. What are we good for? Are even our machines of destruction useful to us? Do they give us real power? Once, indeed, not like halcyons, but like sea-eagles, we had our homes upon the sea; fearless alike of storm or enemy, winged like the wave petrel; and as Arabs of an indeed pathless desert, we dwelt in the presence of all our brethren. Our pride is fallen; no reed shaken with the wind, near the little singing halcyon’s nest, is more tremulous than we are now; though we have built iron nests on the sea, with walls impregnable. We have lost our pride—but have we gained peace? Do we even care to seek it, how much less strive to make it?

204. Have you ever thought seriously of the meaning of that blessing given to the peace-makers? People are always expecting to get peace in heaven; but you know whatever peace they get there will be ready made. Whatever making of peace they can be blest for, must be on the earth here: not the taking of arms against, but the building of nests amidst, its ”sea of troubles.“ Difficult enough, you think? Perhaps so, but I do not see that any of us try. We complain of the want of many things—we want votes, we want liberty, we want amusement, we want money. Which of us feels, or knows, that he wants peace?

205. There are two ways of getting it, if you do want it. The first is wholly in your own power; to make yourselves nests of pleasant thoughts. Those are nests on the sea indeed, but safe beyond all others; only they need much art in the building. None of us yet know, for none of us have yet been taught in early youth, what fairy palaces we may build of beautiful thought—proof against all adversity. Bright fancies, satisfied memories, noble histories, faithful sayings, treasure-houses of precious and restful thoughts, which care cannot disturb, nor pain make gloomy, nor poverty take away from us—houses built without hands, for our souls to live in.

206. And in actual life, let me assure you, in conclusion, the first ‘wisdom of calm,’ is to plan, and resolve to labour for, the comfort and beauty of a home such as, if we could obtain it, we would quit no more. Not a compartment of a model lodging-house, not the number so-and-so of Paradise Row; but a cottage all of our own, with its little garden, its pleasant view, its surrounding fields, its neighbouring stream, its healthy air, and clean kitchen, parlours, and bedrooms. Less than this, no man should be content with for his nest; more than this few should seek: but if it seem to you impossible, or wildly imaginary, that such houses should ever be obtained for the greater part of the English people, again believe me, the obstacles which are in the way of our obtaining them are the things which it must be the main object now of all true science, true art, and true literature to overcome. Science does its duty, not in telling us the causes of spots in the sun; but in explaining to us the laws of our own life, and the consequences of their violation. Art does its duty, not in filling monster galleries with frivolous, or dreadful, or indecent pictures; but in completing the comforts and refining the pleasures of daily occurrence, and familiar service: and literature does its duty, not in wasting our hours in political discussion, or in idle fiction; but in raising our fancy to the height of what may be noble, honest, and felicitous in actual life;—in giving us, though we may ourselves be poor and unknown, the companionship of the wisest fellow-spirits of every age and country,—and in aiding the communication of clear thoughts and faithful purposes, among distant nations, which will at last breathe calm upon the sea of lawless passion, and change into such halcyon days the winter of the world, that the birds of the air may have their nests in peace, and the Son of Man, where to lay His head.

LECTURE X.
THE HERALDIC ORDINARIES

March 9th, 1872

207. In my last lecture, I endeavoured to illustrate to you the use of art to the science of physiology. I am to-day to introduce to you its elementary forms as an exponent of the science of history. Which, speaking with perfect accuracy, we ought to call, also, “physiology,” or natural history of man; for it ought to be in truth the history of his Nature; and not merely of the accidents which have befallen him. Do we not too much confuse the important part of the science with the unimportant?

In giving the natural history of the lion, you do not care materially where such and such a lion was trapped, or how many sheep it had eaten. You want to know what sort of a minded and shaped creature it is, or ought to be. But in all our books of human history we only care to tell what has happened to men, and how many of each other they have, in a manner, eaten, when they are, what Homer calls δημοβόροι, people-eaters; and we scarcely understand, even to this day, how they are truly minded. Nay, I am not sure that even this art of heraldry, which has for its main object the telling and proclamation of our chief minds and characters to each other, and keeping record of descent by race, as far as it is possible, (or, under the present aspect of Darwinism, pleasant,) to trace it;—I am not sure that even heraldry has always understood clearly what it had to tell. But I am very sure it has not been understood in the telling.

208. Some of you have, I hope, looked at this book⁹ of Arthur Helps, on ‘War and Culture,’ about which I cannot now say what I would, because he has done me the grace of dedicating it to me; but you will find in it, directly bearing on our present subject, this story about heraldry:

“A friend of mine, a physician, became entangled in the crowd at Kennington on that memorable evening when a great Chartist row was expected, and when Louis Napoleon armed himself with a constable’s staff to support the cause of order. My friend observed a young man of pleasant appearance, who was very busy in the crowd, and appeared to be a leader amongst them. Gradually, by the pressure of the crowd, the two were brought near together, and the good doctor had some talk with this fiery partisan. They exchanged confidences; and to his astonishment, the doctor found that this furious young Chartist gained his livelihood, and a very good livelihood too, by heraldic painting—by painting the coats-of-arms upon carriages. Now, if you can imagine this young man’s darling enterprise to have been successful, if Chartism had prevailed, what would have become of the painting of arms upon carriage-panels? I believe that my good doctor insinuated this suggestion to the young man, and that it was received with disdain. I must own, therefore, that the utile, even when brought home to a man’s self, has much less to do with people’s political opinions and desires, than might at first be supposed. Indeed, I would venture to maintain, that no great change has ever been produced in the world by motives of self-interest. Sentiment, that thing which many wise people affect to despise, is the commanding thing as regards popular impulses and popular action.”

209. This last sentence would have been wholly true, had Mr. Helps written ‘no great living change.’ The changes of Dissolution are continually produced by self-interest,—for instance, a great number of the changes in your methods of life in England just now, and many of those in your moral temper, are produced by the percentage on the sale of iron. And I should have otherwise interpreted the heroism of the young Chartist, and said that he was moved on the 10th of April, by a deep under-current of self-interest; that by overthrowing Lordship, he expected to get much more for himself than his salary as an heraldic painter; and that he had not, in painting his carriage-panels, sentiment enough, or even sentiment at all.

“Paint me my arms,—” said Giotto, as the youth threw him his white shield with that order—“he speaks as if he were one of the Bardi!” Our English panel-painter had lost the consciousness that there yet remained above him, so much as one, of the Bardi.

May not that be somewhat the Bardi’s fault? in that they have not taught their Giottos, lately, the function of heraldry, or of any other higher historical painting.

We have, especially, to-day, to consider what that function is.

210. I said that the function of historical painting, in representing animals, is to discern and record what is best and most beautiful in their ways of life, and their forms; so also, in representing man, it is to record of man what has been best in his acts and way of life, and fairest in his form.

But this way of the life of man has been a long one. It is difficult to know it—more difficult to judge; to do either with complete equity is impossible; but it is always possible to do it with the charity which does not rejoice in iniquity.

211. Among the many mistakes we have lately fallen into, touching that same charity, one of the worst is our careless habit of always thinking of her as pitiful, and to be concerned only with miserable and wretched persons; whereas her chief joy is in being reverent, and concerned mainly with noble and venerable persons. Her poorest function is the giving of pity; her highest is the giving of praise. For there are many men, who, however fallen, do not like to be pitied; but all men, however far risen, like to be praised.

212. I had occasion in my last lecture to express my regret that the method of education in this country has become so distinctly competitive. It is necessary, however, to distinguish carefully between the competition which is for the means of existence, and that which is for the praise of learning. For my own part, so far as they affect our studies here, I equally regret both: but competition for money I regret absolutely; competition for praise, only when it sets the reward for too short and narrow a race. I want you to compete, not for the praise of what you know, but for the praise of what you become; and to compete only in that great school, where death is the examiner, and God the judge. For you will find, if you look into your own hearts, that the two great delights, in loving and praising, and the two great thirsts, to be loved and praised, are the roots of all that is strong in the deeds of men, and happy in their repose. We yet, thank Heaven, are not ashamed to acknowledge the power of love; but we confusedly and doubtfully allege that of honour; and though we cannot but instinctively triumph still, over a won boat-race, I suppose the best of us would shrink somewhat from declaring that the love of praise was to be one of the chief motives of their future lives.

213. But I believe you will find it, if you think, not only one of the chief, but absolutely the chief, motive of human action; nay, that love itself is, in its highest state, the rendering of an exquisite praise to body and soul; and our English tongue is very sacred in this; for its Saxon word, love, is connected, through the old French verb, loer, (whence louange), with the Latin, ‘laus,’ not ‘amor.’

And you may sum the duty of your life in the giving of praise worthily, and being yourselves worthy of it.

214. Therefore in the reading of all history, your first purpose must be to seek what is to be praised; and disdain the rest: and in doing so, remember always that the most important part of the history of man is that of his imagination. What he actually does, is always in great part accidental; it is at best a partial fulfilment of his purpose; and what we call history is often, as I said, merely a record of the external accidents which befall men getting together in large crowds. The real history of mankind is that of the slow advance of resolved deed following laboriously just thought: and all the greatest men live in their purpose and effort more than it is possible for them to live in reality. If you would praise them more worthily, it is for what they conceived and felt; not merely for what they have done.

215. It is therefore a true historian’s work diligently to separate the deed from the imagination; and when these become inconsistent, to remember that the imagination, if precious at all, is indeed the most precious. It is no matter how much, or how little of the two first books of Livy may be literally true. The history of the Romans is the history of the nation which could conceive the battle of the Lake Regillus. I have rowed in rough weather on the Lake of the four cantons often enough to know that the legend of Tell is, in literal detail, absurd: but the history of Switzerland is that of the people who expressed their imagination of resistance to injustice by that legend, so as to animate their character vitally to this day.

216. But in no part of history does the ideal separate itself so far from the reality; and in no part of it is the ideal so necessary and noble, as in your own inherited history—that of Christian Chivalry.

For all English gentlemen this is the part of the tale of the race of man which it is most essential for them to know. They may be proud that it is also the greatest part. All that hitherto has been achieved of best,—all that has been in noble preparation instituted,—is begun in the period, and rooted in the conception, of Chivalry.

You must always carefully distinguish that conception from the base strength of the resultless passions which distort and confuse it. Infinitely weaker, the ideal is eternal and creative; the clamorous rages pass away,—ruinous it may be, prosperous it may be, for their time;—but insignificant for ever. You find kings and priests alike, always inventing expedients to get money; you find kings and priests alike, always inventing pretexts to gain power. If you want to write a practical history of the Middle Ages, and to trace the real reasons of the things that actually happened, investigate first the history of the money; and then of the quarrels for office and territory. But the things that actually happened were of small consequence—the thoughts that were developed are of infinite consequence.

217. As I was walking back from Hincksey last evening, somewhat discomfited by the look of bad weather, and more in myself, as I thought over this closing lecture, wondering how far you thought I had been talking idly to you, instead of teaching you to draw, through this term, I stopped before Messrs. Wyatt’s window; caught—as it was intended every one should be—by this display of wonderful things. And I was very unhappy as I looked, for it seemed to me you could not but think the little I could show you how to do quite valueless; while here were produced, by mysteries of craft which you might expect me at once to explain, brilliant water-colours in purple and gold, and photographs of sea-waves, and chromolithotints of beautiful young ladies, and exquisitely finished engravings of all sorts of interesting scenes, and sublime personages: patriots, saints, martyrs, penitents, and who not! and what not! all depicted with a dexterity which it has cost the workmen their life’s best energy to learn, and requires great cleverness thus to apply. While, in your room for study, there are only ugly photographs of Dürers and Holbeins, and my rude outlines from leaves, and you scarcely ever hear me say anything in praise of that delightful and elaborate modern art at all.

218. So I bought this Madonna,¹⁰ which was the prettiest thing I saw: and it will enable me to tell you why this modern art is, indeed, so little to be studied, even at its best. I think you will all like the plate, and you ought to like it; but observe in what its beauty consists. First, in very exquisite line engraving: against that I have nothing to say, feeling the greatest respect for the industry and skill it requires. Next, in a grace and severity of action which we all are ready to praise; but this is not the painter’s own bestowing; the trick of it is learned from Memling and Van Eyck, and other men of the northern religious school. The covering of the robe with jewels is pleasing to you; but that is learned from Angelico and John Bellini; and if you will compare the jewel-painting in the John Bellini (Standard No. 5), you will find this false and formal in comparison. Then the face is much dignified by having a crown set on it—which is copied from the ordinary thirteenth century form, and ill done. The face itself is studied from a young German mother’s, and is only by the painter’s want of skill made conventional in expression, and formal in feature. It would have been wiser and more difficult to have painted her as Raphael or Reynolds would, with true personal resemblance, perfected in expression.