John Ruskin
Selections from Lectures on Art
Art and
History
ATHENA ERGANE
This short selection is taken from the volume entitled The
Queen of the Air, in which Ruskin, fascinated by the deep significance of
the Greek myths and realizing the religious sincerity underlying them, attempts
to interpret those that cluster about Athena. The book was published June 22,
1869. It is divided into three "Lectures," parts of which actually
were delivered as lectures on different occasions, entitled respectively
"Athena Chalinitis" (Athena in the Heavens), "Athena
Keramitis" (Athena in the Earth), "Athena Ergane" (Athena in the
Heart). The first lecture is the only one which keeps to the title of the book;
in the others the legend is used merely as a starting-point for the expression
of various pregnant ideas on social and historical problems. The book as a
whole abounds in flashes of inspiration and insight, and is a favourite with
many readers of Ruskin. Carlyle, in a letter to Froude, wrote: "Passages
of that last book, Queen of the Air, went into my heart like
arrows."
In
different places of my writings, and through many years of endeavour to define
the laws of art, I have insisted on this Tightness 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, so
far as, by any effort, I can put it into unmistakable words. And, first, here
is a very simple statement of it, given lately in a lecture on the Architecture
of the Valley of the
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 honeycomb, by a bee; a worm-cast
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.
You
all 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
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 valour and honour, teaches
valour and honour. All art is either infection or education. It must be
one or other of these.
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
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. A good man is not necessarily a
painter, nor does an eye for colour 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.
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 vigour and harmony of invention, at
once. Perseverance in rightness of human conduct, renders, after a certain
number of generations, human art possible; every sin 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 have
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 light, or as a winding-sheet.
Then
farther, 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 bears 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 geld, 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 colourless, shed from behind the Voirons, increases into soft amber
along the slope of the Salève, 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 towerlike, into the zenith of dawn above.
There
is not as much colour in that low amber light upon the hill-side as there is in
the palest dead leaf. The lake is not blue, but grey 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 colour 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 colour that is only like the brown of a dead leaf? in the cold grey
of dawn—in the one white flower among the rocks—in these—and no more than
these?
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 power 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, no 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.
(gutenberg.org)
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