The Crown of Wild Olive by John Ruskin (audio ebook reader txt) 📖
- Author: John Ruskin
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86. I am obliged always to use the English word "Grace" in two senses, but remember that the Greek χαρις includes them both (the bestowing, that is to say of Beauty and Mercy); and especially it includes these in the passage of Pindar's first ode, which gives us the key to the right interpretation of the power of sculpture in Greece. You remember that I told you, in my Sixth Introductory Lecture (§ 151), that the mythic accounts of Greek sculpture begin in the legends of the family of Tantalus; and especially in the most grotesque legend of them all, the inlaying of the ivory shoulder of Pelops. At that story Pindar pauses—not, indeed, without admiration, nor alleging any impossibility in the circumstances themselves, but doubting the careless hunger of Demeter—and gives his own reading of the event, instead of the ancient one. He justifies this to himself, and to his hearers, by the plea that myths have, in some sort, or degree, (που τι), led the mind of mortals beyond the truth: and then he goes on:—
"Grace, which creates everything that is kindly and soothing for mortals, adding honour, has often made things at first untrustworthy, become trustworthy through Love."
87. I cannot, except in these lengthened terms, give you the complete force of the passage; especially of the αριστον εμησατο ριοτον—"made it trustworthy by passionate desire that it should be so"—which exactly describes the temper of religious persons at the present day, who are kindly and sincere, in clinging to the forms of faith which either have long been precious to themselves, or which they feel to have been without question instrumental in advancing the dignity of mankind. And it is part of the constitution of humanity—a part which, above others, you are in danger of unwisely contemning under the existing conditions of our knowledge, that the things thus sought for belief with eager passion, do, indeed, become trustworthy to us; that, to each of us, they verily become what we would have them; the force of the μηνις and μνημη with which we seek after them, does, indeed, make them powerful to us for actual good or evil; and it is thus granted to us to create not only with our hands things that exalt or degrade our sight, but with our hearts also, things that exalt or degrade our souls; giving true substance to all that we hoped for; evidence to things that we have not seen, but have desired to see; and calling, in the sense of creating, things that are not, as though they were.
88. You remember that in distinguishing Imagination from Idolatry, I referred you to the forms of passionate affection with which a noble people commonly regards the rivers and springs of its native land. Some conception of personality or of spiritual power in the stream, is almost necessarily involved in such emotion; and prolonged χαρις in the form of gratitude, the return of Love for benefits continually bestowed, at last alike in all the highest and the simplest minds, when they are honourable and pure, makes this untrue thing trustworthy; αριστον εμησατο ριστον, until it becomes to them the safe basis of some of the happiest impulses of their moral nature. Next to the marbles of Verona, given you as a primal type of the sculpture of Christianity, moved to its best energy in adorning the entrance of its temples, I have not unwillingly placed, as your introduction to the best sculpture of the religion of Greece, the forms under which it represented the personality of the fountain Arethusa. But, without restriction to those days of absolute devotion, let me simply point out to you how this untrue thing, made true by Love, has intimate and heavenly authority even over the minds of men of the most practical sense, the most shrewd wit, and the most severe precision of moral temper. The fair vision of Sabrina in Comus, the endearing and tender promise, "Fies nobilium tu quoque fontium," and the joyful and proud affection of the great Lombard's address to the lakes of his enchanted land,—
Fluctibus et fremitu assurgens, Benace, marino,
may surely be remembered by you with regretful piety, when you stand by the blank stones which at once restrain and disgrace your native river, as the final worship rendered to it by modern philosophy. But a little incident which I saw last summer on its bridge at Wallingford, may put the contrast of ancient and modern feeling before you still more forcibly.
89. Those of you who have read with attention (none of us can read with too much attention), Molière's most perfect work, the Misanthrope, must remember Celiméne's description of her lovers, and her excellent reason for being unable to regard with any favour, "notre grand flandrin de vicomte,—depuis que je l'ai vu, trois quarts d'heure durant, cracher dans un puits pour faire des ronds." That sentence is worth noting, both in contrast to the reverence paid by the ancients to wells and springs, and as one of the most interesting traces of the extension of the loathsome habit among the upper classes of Europe and America, which now renders all external grace, dignity, and decency, impossible in the thoroughfares of their principal cities. In connection with that sentence of Molière's you may advisably also remember this fact, which I chanced to notice on the bridge of Wallingford. I was walking from end to end of it, and back again, one Sunday afternoon of last May, trying to conjecture what had made this especial bend and ford of the Thames so important in all the Anglo-Saxon wars. It was one of the few sunny afternoons of the bitter spring, and I was very thankful for its light, and happy in watching beneath it the flow and the glittering of the classical river, when I noticed a well-dressed boy, apparently just out of some orderly Sunday-school, leaning far over the parapet; watching, as I conjectured, some bird or insect on the bridge-buttress. I went up to him to see what he was looking at; but just as I got close to him, he started over to the opposite parapet, and put himself there into the same position, his object being, as I then perceived, to spit from both sides upon the heads of a pleasure party who were passing in a boat below.
90. The incident may seem to you too trivial to be noticed in this place. To me, gentlemen, it was by no means trivial. It meant, in the depth of it, such absence of all true χαρις, reverence, and intellect, as it is very dreadful to trace in the mind of any human creature, much more in that of a child educated with apparently every advantage of circumstance in a beautiful English country town, within ten miles of our University. Most of all, is it terrific when we regard it as the exponent (and this, in truth, it is), of the temper which, as distinguished from former methods, either of discipline or recreation, the present tenor of our general teaching fosters in the mind of youth;—teaching which asserts liberty to be a right, and obedience a degradation; and which, regardless alike of the fairness of nature and the grace of behaviour, leaves the insolent spirit and degraded senses to find their only occupation in malice, and their only satisfaction in shame.
91. You will, I hope, proceed with me, not scornfully any more, to trace, in the early art of a noble heathen nation, the feeling of what was at least a better childishness than this of ours; and the efforts to express, though with hands yet failing, and minds oppressed by ignorant phantasy, the first truth by which they knew that they lived; the birth of wisdom and of all her powers of help to man, as the reward of his resolute labour.
92. "Αφαιστου τεχναισι." Note that word of Pindar in the Seventh Olympic. This axe-blow of Vulcan's was to the Greek mind truly what Clytemnestra falsely asserts hers to have been "της δε δεξιας χερος εργον δικαιας τεκτονος"; physically, it meant the opening of the blue through the rent clouds of heaven, by the action of local terrestrial heat of Hephæstus as opposed to Apollo, who shines on the surface of the upper clouds, but cannot pierce them; and, spiritually, it meant the first birth of prudent thought out of rude labour, the clearing-axe in the hand of the woodman being the practical elementary sign of his difference from the wild animals of the wood. Then he goes on, "From the high head of her Father, Athenaia rushing forth, cried with her great and exceeding cry; and the Heaven trembled at her, and the Earth Mother." The cry of Athena, I have before pointed out, physically distinguishes her, as the spirit of the air, from silent elemental powers; but in this grand passage of Pindar it is again the mythic cry of which he thinks; that is to say, the giving articulate words, by intelligence, to the silence of Fate. "Wisdom crieth aloud, she uttereth her voice in the streets," and Heaven and Earth tremble at her reproof.
93. Uttereth her voice in "the streets." For all men, that is to say; but to what work did the Greeks think that her voice was to call them? What was to be the impulse communicated by her prevailing presence; what the sign of the people's obedience to her?
This was to be the sign—"But she, the goddess herself, gave to them to prevail over the dwellers upon earth, with best-labouring hands in every art. And by their paths there were the likenesses of living and of creeping things; and the glory was deep. For to the cunning workman, greater knowledge comes, undeceitful."
94. An infinitely pregnant passage, this, of which to-day you are to note mainly these three things: First, that Athena is the goddess of Doing, not at all of sentimental inaction. She is begotten, as it were, of the woodman's axe; her purpose is never in a word only, but in a word and a blow. She guides the hands that labour best, in every art.
95. Secondly. The victory given by Wisdom, the worker, to the hands that labour best, is that the streets and ways, κελευθοι, shall be filled by likenesses of living and creeping things?
Things living, and creeping! Are the Reptile things not alive then? You think Pindar wrote that carelessly? or that, if he had only known a little modern anatomy, instead of "reptile" things, he would have said "monochondylous" things? Be patient, and let us attend to the main points first.
Sculpture, it thus appears, is the only work of wisdom that the Greeks care to speak of; they think it involves and crowns every other. Image-making art; this is Athena's, as queenliest of the arts. Literature, the order and the strength of word, of course belongs to Apollo and the Muses; under Athena are the Substances and the Forms of things.
96, Thirdly. By this forming of Images there is to be gained a "deep"—that is to say—a weighty, and prevailing, glory; not a floating nor fugitive one. For to the cunning workman, greater knowledge comes, "undeceitful."
"916()#;αεντι" I am forced to use two English words to translate that single Greek one. The
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