THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
BEQUEST
OF
ANITA D. S. BLAKE
/C
THE
QUEEN OF THE AIR
BEING
A STUDY OF THE GREEK MYTHS
OF
CLOUD AND STORM.
r.v
JOHN RUSKIN, LL.D.
LONDON:
SMITH, ELDER & CO., 15, WATERLOO PLACE.
1869.
[77/d' Riglit of Translatioti is reserved. \
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 labour 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 investi-
gation has removed from the region of conjecture
into that of rational inquiry. I have some advan-
tage, 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
iv " Preface.
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 has 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 right 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 i6th of
Preface. V
January, but was hindered by .mischance ; and which,
I now find, completes, in two important particulars,
the evidence of an instinctive truth in ancient sym-
bolism ; showing, first, that the Greek conception of
an aetherial 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 aegis,
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 com-
petency 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
vi Preface.
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 dis-
covery. 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
Preface. vii
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 Neuchatel ;
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 arti-
ficial rockery, with a fountain twisted through a
spinning spout, and an inscription on one of its
loose-tumbled stones, —
" Aux Botanistes,
Le club Jiirassique."
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
viii Preface.
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.
Vn<ay, May i, 1869.
THE QUEEN OF THE AIR.
I.
ATHENA CHALINITIS.*
{Athena in the Heavens)
Lecture on the Greek Myths of Storm^ given {partly,) in University College,
London, March <)th, 1869.
I. I WILL not ask your pardon for endeavouring
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 in some
particulars be mistaken. You must forgive me, there-
* "Athena the Restrainer." The name is given to her as having
helped Bellerophon to bridle Pegasus, the flying cloud.
I
2 The Queen of the Air.
fore, 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 Philologist 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,
Athena in the Heavens. 3
if I left it in that simplicity, you would probably
look for nothing beyond, it will be wise in me to
surprise your attention by adding some singular cir-
cumstance ; for instance, that the water-snake had
several heads, which revived as fast as they were
killed, and which poisoned even the foot that trode
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 vapour 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 was by a
palm-tree ; and that for every head of it that was
cut off, two rose up with renev/ed life ; and that the
hero found at last 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
4 The Queen of the Air.
nonsense from the beginning, and never meant any-
thing 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 deter-
mine, 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,
Athena i?i the Heavens. 5
you must at once understand that this literal belief
was, in the qjind 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 tne 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 vitally religious earnestness 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 origin 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
6 The Queen of the Air.
average Englishman is from seeing in St. George the
Red Cross Knight of Spenser, or in the Dragon the
Spirit of Infidelity. But, for all that, there was a
certain under-current of consciousness in all minds,
that the figures meant more than they at first showed ;
and, according to each man's own faculties of senti-
ment, 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 the one, and the more sacred to the other : until
vulgar commentators explained it entirely away,
while Virgil made it the crowning glory of his choral
hymn to Hercules :
" Around thee, powerless to infect thy soul,
Rose, in his crested crowd, the Lema worm."
** Non te rationis egentem
Lernseus turba capitum circumstetit anguis."
And although, in any special toil of the hero's life,
the moral interpretation was rarely with definiteness
attached to its event, yet in the whole course of the
life, not only a symbolical meaning, but the warrant
for the existence of a real spiritual power, was appre-
hended of all men. Hercules was no dead hero, to
I
Athena in the Heavens. 7
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 crys-
tallized 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 in-
fluence 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 for ever remain rooted. Thus, from
8 The Queen of the Air.
the real sun, rising and setting ; — from the real atmo-
sphere, 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 corporeal
gods, whose limbs are clothed 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, of
which one illuminates, 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 im-
portance, and certainly in every one of those of 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 sig-
nificance of the image, which is in all the great myths
eternally and beneficently true.
I
Atkena in the Heavens. 9
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
had looked at the sky. If the myth is about justice
and fortitude, it must have been made by some one
who knew what it was to be just or patient. Accord-
ing 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 neces-
sarily 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 intelli-
gence and passion of the race develope, they cling
to and nourish their beloved and sacred legend ; leaf
lo The Qttee7i of the Ai7\
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 stain-
less skies, and measured their journeys by ascending
and decHning stars, we certainly cannot read their
story, if we have never seen anything above us in the
day, but smoke ; nor anything round 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 that 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
A tJie7ta m the Heavens. 1 1
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 labour, it will, indeed, not be
easy for us to conceive the power, over a Greek, of
the name of Apollo. But if, for 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 labour, rang round the earth, and whose
going forth was to the ends of heaven.
12 The Queen of the Air.
9. The time, then, at which I shall take up for
you, as well as I can decipher it, the tradition 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 iEschylus, who are both of them out-
spokenly 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 Hving 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 sether supposed to be beyond the
heavens ; * but at this time we find the four quite
* And by modern science now also asserted, and with probability
argued, to exist.
Athena inimjneaSens. 13
definite, both in their kingdoms and in their per-
sonalities. They are the rulers of the earth that we
tread upon, and the air that we breathe ; and are with
us as 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.
II. 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 grotmdy 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
14 The Queen of the Air.
by the mill. And it is a singular proof of the sim-
plicity 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 beau-
tiful, as the symbol of this spirit of agriculture.
12. Then the dominant spirit of the element of
water is Neptune, but subordinate to him are myriads
of other water spirits, of whom Nereus is the chief, with
Palaemon, 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 precious-
ness 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 is the meaning of
the dedication of the hair, as the sign of the strength
of life, to the river of 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 labour, is set Hephaestus,
Athena in the Heavens. * 15
lord of all labour 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, purify-
ing, 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 accept-
ance from all men as rightly discerned, and have
1 6 The Qiieen of the Air.
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 favour 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 colour, or the
colour of the daybreak, falls to her feet, covering her
wholly with favour 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
* There are many other meanings in the epithet ; see, farther on,
§ 91, P- 105-
Athena in the Heavens. 17
with Gorgonian cold, turning, men to stone ; physically,
the lightning and the hail of chastisement by storm.
Then in her fortitude she wears the crested and un-
stooping helmet ; * and lastly, in her temperance, she
is the queen of maidenhood — stainless as the air of
heaven.
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 had
divinely written for them, and for all men after them,
two mighty songs, — one, of the Menis,t 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, main-
tained 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.
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
* 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 aether : but I cannot speak
of all this at once.
+ 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 of the English "mind."
1 8 The Queen of the Air.
gather at least a few of them into a separate body of
evidence respecting the power of Athena, and 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 increas-
ing 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 in-
tensely 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 was impossible
that the Iliad could be instructive because it is not
like a sermon. Horace 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
Athena in the Heavens. 19
again" (thus he writes to a noble youth of Rome
whom he cared for), " quietly at Praeneste, 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 Grantor'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 subtle 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 with-
held 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."
* 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.
20 The Qiceen of the Air.
And neither Pindar, nor ^schylus, 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 mean-
ing which they themselves cannot interpret, — which it
may be for ages long after them to interpret, — 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.
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
Athena in the Heavens. 21
extensive. Not that the poet's impressions or ren-
derings 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
labour 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 reverbera-
tion 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 colours in a hill-
side, redoubled by a lake.
2 2 The Queen of the Air.
I shall be able partly to show you, even to-
pight, 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 ^olus, (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 ^olian island, and there dwelt
iEolus 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 for ever 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 precipice (occurring
Athena in the Heavens, 23
in another myth as the brazen tower of Danae) 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 ^olus 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 storehouse 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 : —
iEolus 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 ^olus, and prays him again to
help him, note the deliberate words of the King's
refusal, — " Did I not," he says, " 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 favourably on his journey
a man hated by the happy gods." This idea of the
beneficence of ^Eolus 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,
^olus is still a kind-hearted monarch, who lived on
24 The Quee7i of the Air.
the coast of Sorrento, invented the use of sails, and
estabhshed 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 — notwithstanding 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.
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, " Storm-
swift " and " Swiftfoot," are the sisters of the rain-
bow— 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, X spiral gusts that lift the dust before
coming rain : the Harpies get identified first with
these, and then with more violent whirlwinds, and so
* Translated by Max Miiller in the opening of his essay on
'* Comparative Mythology." {Chips from a German Workshops vol. ii.)
Athena in the Heavens. 25
iey 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
sudden storm. There is a sense of provocation and
apparent bitterness of purpose in their thin and sense-
less fury, wholly different from the noble 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 malicious
temper, the Harpies rise into a greater terror, always
associated with their whirling motion, which is indeed
indicative of the most destructive winds : and they
d6 The Queen of the Air.
are thus related to the nobler tempests, as Charybdis
to the sea ; they are devouring and desolating, merci-
less, making all things disappear that come in their
grasp : and so, spiritually, they are the gusts of
vexatious, fretful, lawless passion, vain and over-
shadowing, discontented and lamenting, meagre and
insane, — spirits of wasted energy, and wandering dis-
ease, 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 and self-involved
returns of some sickening famine and thirst of heart :
— and you will know what was in the sound of the
Harpy Celaeno'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 colours 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
K
Athena in the Heavens. 27
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.
23. 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 for ever 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.
28 The Queen of the Air.
stealing the food of the Gods to give it to men ;
another, sacrificing his son to feed the Gods them-
selves, (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
utterly 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 is its gate-
keeper— 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 descensus" being a later recognition of this
mythic character of Hades :) the last labour 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 mediaeval representation of the mouth of hell
perpetuates the same thought. Then, also, the power
of evil passion is partly associated with the red and
Athena in the Heavens. 29
scorching light of Sirius, as opposed to the pure hght
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.
The story of Actaeon, 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 watchful-
ness, 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
30 The Queen of the Air.
the 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 them-
selves 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, defihng
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 interpre-
Athena in the Heavens. 31
tation 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 difiiculty
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
* 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
32 The Queen of the Air.
that the changes which Hermes undergoes in becoming
a Greek from an Egyptian and Phoenician 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 of souls at death, has been else-
where ratified.
consequence whether one conception was, or was not, in this case,
derived from the other ; my object is only to mark the essential differ-
ences between them.
Athena in the Heavens. 33
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 Lacedsemon ; 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 the 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 form-
ing 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 "
3
34 The Queen of the Air.
mountain, called also " cold," because there the
vapours 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."
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 flat cap, petasos, named from a word meaning to
expand ; which shaded from the sun, and is worn
* 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.
Athena in the Heavens, 55
on journeys. You have the epithet of mountains
"cloud-capped" as an estabHshed 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.
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
* I am convinced that the tpi in epiovviog is not intensitive ; but
retained from tpiov : 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
dyiktia has a parallel significance.
36 The Queen of the Air.
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 bright-
ness, 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 interpre-
tation is right, from a passage in which Euripides
describes the shield of Hippomedon, which bore for
its 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 move-
ment 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
Athena in the Heavens. 37
night foray of Ulysses and Diomed, Ulysses wears
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 even
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 ^olus, 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 Erio-
phoros). With this, there is the fate of Salmoneus,
and the destruction of Glaucus by his own horses ;
all these minor myths of storm concentrating them-
selves darkly into the legend of Bellerophon and the
Chimaera, 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 Chimaera is the
cloud of volcanic lightning, connected wholly with
earth-fire, but resembling the heavenly cloud in its
38 The Queen of the Air,
height and its thunder). Finally, in the ^olic group,
there is the legend of Sisyphus, 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 Corinthian 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 connec-
tion with a melancholy story about the sea gods ; but
he himself is /ce^Sicttoc ai^Spwi/, 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 feeble-
ness,— the deceit of its hiding, — and the emptiness of
its vanishing, — 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
Athena in the Heavens. 39
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 elen;ents of the impious '^ '^"woq "
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 mis-
apprehend or reject the true words of their existing
teachers.
30. All this we have from the legends of the
historic ^olus 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 clear
air at the fringe of its edges being exquisitely ren-
dered by Pindar's epithet for her, Semele, "with the
stretched-out hair" (TavvWeipa). Then there is the
entire tradition of the Danaides, and of the tower of
Danae and golden shower ; the birth of Perseus con-
necting this legend with that of the Gorgons and
Graise, who are the true clouds of thunderous and
ruinous tempest. I must, in passing, mark for you
40 The Queen of the Air.
that the form of the sword or sickle of Perseus, with
which he kills Medusa, is another image of the whirl-
ing 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 Gorgo-
nian 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, how-
ever 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 con-
suming* fire on the other.
V. She is the air conveying vibration of sound.
* Not a scientific, but a very practical and expressive distinction.
Athena in the Heavens. 41
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 rela-
tion 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 some-
what saucily styled itself the Modern Athens, is
indeed more under her especial tutelage and favour
in this respect than perhaps any other town in the
island. Athena is first simply what in the Modern
Athens you so 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, whenever 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
42 The Queen of the Air.
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
Shakspeare 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 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
Athena in the Heavens. 43
instances of her direct agency in this function. First,
when she wants to make Penelope bright and beauti-
ful ; and to do away with the signs of her waiting
and her grief "Then Athena thought of another
thing ; she laid her into 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
44 ^'^^ Queen of the Air.
must come widely, — she sweeps round 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 colour 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, and
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
Athena in the Heavens. 45
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 mea-
sured by thousands of strokes in the minute, and an
endurance, by miles and hours of flight."*
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
* Ormerod. Natural History of Wasps.
46 The Queen of the Air.
in Egypt, the vulture ; and as a venomous and tor-
menting creature, has more than the strength of the
serpent in proportion to its size, b^eing 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 ques-
tioned, but assuredly no other animal, exposed to
continual danger, is so absolutely without sign of fear.
36. You will, perhaps, have still patience to hear
two instances, not of the communication of 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 caiised 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 ofl". There is no instance
* See farther on, § 148, pp. 170-172.
Athena in the Heavens. 47
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. Com-
pare also the turning of Hector's lance from Achilles :
IHad XX. 439.
37. The last instance I will give you is as lovely
as it is subtle. 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 Atrides,
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 Hfts 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 ordain-
ing 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
48 The Queen of the Air.
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 ground. You know I told you the Lord
of all labour by which man lived was Hephaestus ;
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 Pan-
drosos, the diffused dew, or dew of heaven. Liter-
ally, 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 : —
** lo sono Aglauro, chi divenne sasso."
Athena in the Heavens. 49
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 intel-
lectual 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 farther, Athena is the air, not only to the
lilies of the field, but- to the leaves of the forest. We
50 The Queen of the Air.
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 Vergilise,
from a word mingling the ideas of the turning or
returning of spring-time with the outpouring of rain.
The mother of Virgil bearing the name of Maia,
Virgil himself received his name from the seven stars ;
and he, in 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 fountain-head 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 Virgil 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 con-
taining 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 green-
ness 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
Athena in the Heavens. 51
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 honour and rest ; while the prize at the
Panathenaic games is a vase of its oil, (meaning en-
couragement 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 descendants 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, farther, since that name
was first given, thq influence of the symbol, both in
extreme unction, and in consecration of priests and
52 The Queen of the Air.
kings to their "divine right;" and think, if you can
reach with any grasp of thought, what the influence
on the earth has been, of those twisted branches whose
leaves give grey bloom to the hill-sides 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,
Athena in the Heavens. 53
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 Graecia.
The story of Arion is a collateral fragment of the
same thought ; and, again, the plunge before their
transformation, of the ships of ^neas. Then, this
idea of career upon, or conquest of the sea, either
by the creatures themselves, or by dolphin-like ships,
(compare the Merlin prophecy, —
* ' They shall ride
Over ocean wide
With hempen bridle, and 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 aegis-snakes as the farther expression of her
power over the sea-wave ; which, finally, Virgil gives
in its perfect unity with her own anger, in the
54 ^^^ Queen of the Air.
approach of the serpents against Laocoon from the
sea : and then, finally, when her own storm-power is
fully put forth on the ocean also, and the madness of
the aegis-snake is given 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 commemo-
rated 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 way,
assembles most of the principal thoughts regarding
Athena in this relation. In the first, the sunrise is
represented by the ascending chariot of Apollo, fore-
shortened ; 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
Athena in the Heavejis. 55
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 tl^e lovely passage in the Odyssey, where Ulysses
and his son move the armour while the servants are
shut in their chambers, and there is no one to hold
torches for them ; but Athena herself, " having a
golden lamp," fills all the rooms with light. Her
presence in war-strength with her favourite 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 main-
tenance of household watchfulness, as in the parable
56 The Queen of the Air.
of the ten virgins, or as the symbol of direct inspira-
tion, in the rushing wind and divided flames of
Pentecost : but, together with this thought of un-
consuming 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
joy fulness, to his lyre. The sun is always thought
of as the master of time and rhythm, and as the origin
Athena in the Heavens. 57
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 of voice or
cry (as when she aids the shout of Achilles) curiously
opposed to the dumbness of Demeter. The ApoUine
lyre, therefore, is not so much the instrument pro-
ducing 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 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
58 The Queen of the Air.
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 mus-
cular strength ; yet shameful and dreadful in dis-
solution.
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 their
teaching being this, — that true 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 suffer-
ing becomes measured, chastened, calm, and capable
of interpretation only by the majesty of ordered,
beautiful, and worded sound. Exactly in propor-
tion 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
Athena in the Heavens. 59
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 for ever
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 ethical in
origin, is also the most direct in power of discipline ;
the first, the simplest, the most effective of all instru-
ments 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 farther 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 licence, perhaps the most impishly
opposite to the truth is the conception of music which
6d The Queeii of the Air.
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 tJie side
of moral truth, that expresses nothing of God, nothing
of reason, nothing of human liberty y I will not give
the author's name; the passage is quoted in the
Westminster Review for last January, p. 153.
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.
Athena in the Heavens. 6i
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 hterally 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 pur-
pose— 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 endeavour, 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
* I have tried to do this in mere outline in the two following
sections of this volume.
62 The Queen of the Air.
Greeks, under the personality of Athena. You would,
perhaps, hardly bear with me if I endeavoured farther
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 another Spirit whom we also, holding for
the universal power of life, are forbidden, at our worst
peril, to quench or to grieve.
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 t I am able
to answer you explicitly in this. The origin of his
thoughts is often obscure, and we may err in en-
deavouring to account for 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
Atheria hi the Heavens. 63
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 neighbouring 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 for
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
64 The Queen of the Air.
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 an 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
Athena in the Heavens. 65
words to their dearest faiths. '' Operosa parvus car-
mina 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 favourite pine to Diana, and he chants
his autumnal hymn to the Faun that guards his fields,
and he guides the noble youths 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 Chris-
tian faith to English youth, in England's truest days.
49. Then, lastly, the creed of the philosophers or
sages varied according to the character and know-
ledge of each ; — their relative acquaintance with the
secrets of natural science — their intellectual and sect-
arian egotism — and their mystic or monastic ten-
dencies, for there is a classic as well as a mediaeval
monasticism. They ended 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 endeavouring to
form a judgment of it, that what of good or right the
5
66 The Queen of the Air.
heathens did, they did looking for no reward. The
purest forms of our own reh'gion 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 pro-
mise,— "thou shalt have treasure in heaven;" and
well for the modern Christian if he accepts the alter-
native 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 honour, 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 ahke 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."
( 67 )
11.
ATHENA KERAMITIS*
{Athena in the Earth).
Study, suppleijientary 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
* "Athena, fit for being made into pottery." I coin the expression
as a counterpart of yjy -TrapQkvia, " Clay intact."
68 The Queen of the Air,
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 yourselves, 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 neighbours are therefore obliged, even in their
most solemn expressions, to say " wit " when we say
"ghost." In Greek, "pneuma," the word we trans-
late " ghost," means either wind or breath, and the
Athena in the Earth, 69
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 burn-
ing 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 Hephsestus 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 armour 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 that fire of the heart
within you, and know the reality of it, you need be
70 The Qtieen of the Air.
under no alarm as to the possibility of its chemical
or mechanical analysis. The philosophers are very
humourous in their ecstasy of hope about it ; but the
real interest of their discoveries in this direction is
very small to human-kind. 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 in-
terval 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
shakeable — 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 ques-
tionings of this kind, there are, therefore, two plain
Athena in the Ea7^th. 71
facts which we should all know : first, that there is
a power which gives their several shapes to things, or
capacities of shape ; and, secondly, a power which
gives them their several feelings, or capacities of feel-
ing ; 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 con-
nection 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 pre-
sence of the vital power should be dependent on the
chemical action of the 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
72 The Queen of the Air.
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 endeavour
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 out 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 heat and force, life is in-
separably 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 coloured by "chlorophyll," which at first
Athena in the Earth. 73
sounds very instructive ; but if they would only say
plainly that a leaf is coloured 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
* Or, perhaps, we may be indulged with one consummating gleam of
"glycasm" — visible "Sweetness," — according to the good old monk
"Full moon," or "All moonshine." I cannot get at his original Greek,
but am content with M. Durand's clear French (Manuel d'lcono-
graphie Chretienne. Paris, 1845) : — "Lorsque vous aurez fait le
proplasme, et esquisse un visage, vous ferez les chairs avec le glycasme
dont nous avons donne la recette. Chez les vieillards, vous indiquerez
les rides, et chez les jeunes gens, les angles des yeux. C'est ainsi que
I'on fait les chairs, suivant Panselinos."
74 The Queen of the Ai7\
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
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 support-
ing 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 an entirely dif-
ferent phase. It does not now merely crystallize in-
definite masses, but it gives to limited portions of
matter the power of gathering, selectively, other
elements proper to them, and binding these elements
into their own peculiar and adopted form.
This force, now properly called life, or breathing,
or spirit, is continually creating its own shells of
definite shape out of the wreck round it : and this is
Athena in the Earth. 75
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 a 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 colours 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 it at full power, its
form becomes invested with aspects that are chiefly
delightful to our own human passions ; namely, first,
with the loveliest outlines of shape ; and, secondly,
with the most brilliant phases of the primary colours,
blue, yellow, and red or white, the unison of all ;
76 The Qiieen of the Air.
and, to make it all more strange, this time of
peculiar and perfect glory is associated with rela-
tions of the plants or blossoms to each other, corre-
spondent 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 perfect-
ness, is placed the giving birth to its successor.
6 1. The main fact, then, about a flower is that
it is the 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 colours. 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
Athena in the Earth. J J
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 refer-
ence 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 pos-
sible, 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
* The facts on which I am about to dwell are m nowise antagonistic
to the theories which Mr. Darwin's unwearied and unerring investigations
are every day rendering more probable. The sesthetic 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.
yS The Queen of the Air.
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 sepa-
rately— and quartz, separately ; and gold, separately ;
and charcoal, separately ; and then so directs the
relations 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 quali-
ties of these two products, crocodiles and lambs, shall
be, the one repellent to the spirit of man, the other
attractive to it, in a quite inevitable way ; repre-
senting 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.
6i. And the force of these facts cannot be escaped
from by the thought that there are species innumer-
able, passing into each other by regular gradations,
out of which we choose what we most love or dread,
and say they were indeed prepared for ns. 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
Athena in the Earth. 79
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 con-
nected 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 two 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
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 brought into form by plumes ;
the air is in all its quills, it breathes through its
8o The Queen of the Air.
whole frame and flesh, and glows with air in its fly-
ing, like a blown flame : it rests upon the air, subdues
it, surpasses it, outraces it ; — is the air, conscious of
itself, conquering itself, ruling itself.
Also, into the throat of the bird is given the voice
of the air. AH that in the wind itself is weak, wild, use-
less in sweetness, is knit together in its song. As we
may imagine the wild form of the cloud closed into
the perfect 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 colours 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 vermilion 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
Athe7ia in the Earth. 8i
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, de-
scending, as the Fire, to speak, but as the Dove, to
bless.
6^. 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 things as natural myths ; and that
the dark sayings of men maybe both difficult to read,
and not always worth reading ; but the dark sayings
of nature will probably become clearer for the looking
into, and will very certainly be 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 ;
6
82 The Queen of the Air.
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 ?
()Z. 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-washings 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, some-
times, 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 loath-
some, in the scale of being ; the links between dead
Athena in the Earth. Zi
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 t 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 procession 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 shrivelled and abortive) ; it is passive to the
* 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
84 The Queen of the Air.
sun and shade, and is cold or hot hke a stone ; yet
" it can outcHmb the monkey, outswim the fish, out-
leap 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 the
symbol of the spirit of life, so this of the grasp and
sting of death.
69. Hence the continual change in the interpreta-
tion 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 Giganto-machia ; 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
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,
Athena in the Earth. 85
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 yEsculapius,
and of Hygieia ; and is a sacred earth-type in the
temple of the Dew ; — being there especially a symbol
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
86 The Queen of the Air,
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 to-night
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 the principle of life ; while in the religions of lower
races, little else than these corrupted forms of devo-
tion 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 orna-
ment, employed in Christian dress, or architecture,
which cannot be traced back to the serpent's coil ;
Athena in the Earth. 87
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
with venomous stain : and the track of it, on the
leaf a glittering slime, and in the sand a useless
furrow.
T2. 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
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
88 The Qtieen of the Air.
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 asso-
ciated with the earliest conception of Athena. In the
type of the dove with the olive branch, the concep-
tion of the spirit of Athena in renewed life pre-
vailing 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 favourite 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
Athena in the Earth. 89
cherubim, and has had the most singular influence on
the Christian reHgion by giving its wings to render
the conception of angels mysterious and untenable,
and check rational endeavour 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.
'j^. 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. Fergusson'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 sub-
sequent 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
90 The Qitee7i of the Air.
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
favourite dish of beans, with the bacon ; potatoes ;
some savoury stuffing of onions and herbs with the
meat ; celery, and a radish or two, with the cheese ;
nuts. and apples for dessert, 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 (fre-
quently pendent) pods, — "Isetum 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
Athena in the Eai^th. 91
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.
^6. 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 with forms and structure closely con-
nected with this venomous one. Examine the purple
and yellow bloom of the common hedge night-
shade ; you will find it constructed exactly like some
of the forms of the cyclamen ; and, getting this clue,
* 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.
• 92 The Queen of the Air.
you will find at^last the whole poisonous and terrible
group to be — sisters of the primulas !
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.
JJ. Next, side by side, in the celery and radish,
you have the two great groups of umbelled and cruci-
ferous plants ; alike in conditions of rank among
herbs : both flowering in clusters ; but the umbelled
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, though
Athena m the Earth. 93
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 precious-
ness ; 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 Eng-
lish 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.
'jZ. 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 crowning of the Madonna, above the
" Rosa sempitema,
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.
94 The Queen of the Air.
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 uncultivable soils, coarse in their structure,
frequently triangular in stem — hence called " acute "
by Virgil — and with their heads of seed not extri-
cated 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 per-
manently green on the ground, and with a new and
distinct fructification. But the rushes difler wholly
Athena i7i the Earth. 95
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 Drosidse, or dew-plants, it will enable me
to say what I have to say of them much more shortly
and clearly.
80. These Drosidse, then, are plants delighting in
interrupted moisture — moisture which comes either
partially or at certain seasons — into dry ground.
They are not 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 Drosidse, 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 nour-
ishment 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
96 The Qtieen of the Air.
family of the herbs of the field into three great
groups — Drosidae, Carices,* Gramineae — dew-plants,
sedges, and grasses. Then, the Drosidae 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 Drosidae, 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 per-
fect 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 in them 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.
82. For consider a little what each of those five
* I think Carex will be found ultimately better than Cyperus for the
generic name, being the Virgilian word, and representing a larger sub-
species.
Athena in the Earth, 97
tribes * has been to the spirit of man. First, in their
nobleness : the Lihes gave the hly 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 orna-
ment 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.
Afterwards, the group of the turban-lilies, or tulips,
did some mischief, (their splendid stains having made
them the favourite caprice of florists ;) but they may
be pardoned all such guilt for the pleasure they have
♦ 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.
98 The Queen of the Air.
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 character-
istically 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 under-
stand 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
Athena hi the Earth. 99
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 com-
pass 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 primulaceae
are not an extended tribe, while the crocus, narcissus,
and AmaryUis lutea, the " lily of the field " (I sus-
pect 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
loo The Queen of the Air.
look of having been made out of the grasses by
turning the sheath-membrane at the root of their
leaves into a flower,) seems to scatter, in multitudi-
nous 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 savoury 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. Some-
times the opening is gradual, as in the convolvulus or
campanula ; oftener there is a distinct change of direc-
tion 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 mgst
of the forms.
Z6. 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
Athena in the Earth. loi
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 lark-
spurs, 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,
Draconidce ; 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 colour out of the tissue all round it, as if it had
been stung, and as if the central colour was really an
inflamed spot, with paleness round. Then also they
carry to its extreme the decoration by bulging or
pouting 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 appa-
I02 The Queen of the Air.
rently in each petal by the stamens instead of a
hartimer ; or the borage, pouting inwards ; but the
snapdragons and calceolarias carry it to its extreme.
Zj. Then the spirit of these Draconidae 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 into spotted orchideae : 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
Athena m the Em^th. 103
^sculapian as well as an evil serpentry among the
Draconidae, and the fairest of them, the " erba della
Madonna " of Venice, (Linaria Cymbalaria,) descends
from the ruins it delights in to 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
" labiatae ; " full of various balm, and warm strength for
healing, yet all of them without splendid honour or
perfect beauty, " ground ivies," richest when crushed
under the foot ; the best sweetness and gentle bright-
ness of the robes of the field, — thyme, and marjoram,
and Euphrasy.
Sd). 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 circum-
stance 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 cir-
cumstance, and mode of meeting it. If you ask an
ordinary botanist the reason of the form of a l^af, he
will tell you it is a " developed tubercle," and that its
ultimate form " is owing to the directions of its vas-
cular threads." But what directs its vascular threads ?
"They are seeking for something they want," he
will probably answer. What made them want that }
I04 The Qtieeri of the Air.
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 woollen 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 form-
ing power has been by all nations partly confused
with the breath or air through which it acts, and
partly understood as a creative wisdom, proceed-
ing 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 or vibration, every formative human
art hitherto, and the best states of human happiness
Athena in the Earth. 105
and order, 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 the breast of their
supreme Deity, then created out of his thoughts, and
abiding closely beside him ; always sharing and con-
summating 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 colour. As far as I can
trace the colour perception of the Greeks, I find it all
founded primarily on the degree of connection between
colour and light ; the most important fact to them in
the colour of red being its connection with fire and
sunshine ; so that " purple " is, in its original sense,
" fire-colour," and the scarlet, or orange, of dawn, more
than any other fire-colour. I was long puzzled by
Homer's calling the sea purple ; and misled into think-
ing he meant the colour of cloud shadows on green
sea ; whereas he really means the gleaming blaze of
io6 The Queen of the Air.
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 colour 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 lunae sidera ;"
or of golden hair : " pro purpureo poenam 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 colours 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 colour,"
mingle themselves in, and renew the whole nature
of the old word ; so that, in later literature, it means
a different colour, or emotion of colour, in almost every
place where it occurs ; and casts for ever around the
reflection of all that has been dipped in its dyes.
Athena in the Earth. 107
92. So that the word 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 colour 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 that it is blue. I was not
thinking of this when I wrote, in speaking of pictorial
chiaroscuro, " The sky is not blue colour 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 stand-
ing for a pale or luminous blue ; but it only means
*' owl-eyed " in thought of the roundness and expan-
sion, not from the colour ; this breadth and bright-
io8 The Qiieeji of the Air.
ness 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 per-
haps 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 crea-
tures 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 dis-
tinctly, 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." *
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 colour of great
importance in the conception of Athena — the dark
blue of her aegis. Just as the blue or gray of her
eyes was conceived as more light than colour, so
her aegis was dark blue, because the Greeks thought
♦ Payne Knight, in his ** Inquiry into the Symbolical Language of
Ancient Art," not trustworthy, being little more than a mass of con-
jectural memoranda, but the heap is suggestive, if well sifted.
Athena in the Earth. 109
of this tint more as shade than colour, and, while
they used various materials in ornamentation, lapis-
lazuli, 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,*
* In the breastplate and shield of Atrides the serpents and bosses
are all of this dark colour, yet the serpents are said to be like rainbows ;
but through all this splendour and opposition of hue, I feel distinctly
that the literal " splendour," 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 colour the Greeks are separated.
from the eastern nations, and from the best designers of Christian times.
I cannot find that they take pleasure in colour for its own sake ; it may
be in something more than colour, or better ; but it is not in the hue
itself. When Homer describes cloud breaking from a mountain summit,
the crags became visible in light, not in colour ; he feels only their
flashing out in bright edges and trenchant shadows: above, the "in-
finite," "unspeakable " aether 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 colour 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 colour-per-
ception is partly noble, partly base : noble, in its earnestness, which
raises the design of Greek vases as far above the designing of mere
colourist nations like the Chinese, as men's thoughts are above children's ;
and yet it is partly base and earthly j 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
no The Queen of the Air.
but especially the colour of heavy thunder-cloud,
was described by the same term. The physical
power of this darkness of the segis, 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 tq 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 aegis, signifies not merely the
indignation of Athena, but the entire hiding or with-
drawal 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
vases from the fifth to the third century, b. c. On the other hand, the
pure colour-gift, when employed for pleasure only, degrades in another
direction ; so that among the Indians, Chinese, and Japanese, all intel-
lectual 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.
Athena in the Earth. 1 1 1
of truce ; and then the Greek King, holding his
wounded brother's hand, prophesies against Troy
the darkness of the segis which shall be over all,
and for ever.*
95. This, then, finally, was the perfect colour-con-
ception 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-coloured ; and the eegis thrown
over it of thunderous purple ; the helmet golden,
{II. V. 744), and I suppose its crest also, as that
of Achilles.
If you think carefully of the meaning and cha-
racter which is now enough illustrated for you in each
of these colours ; and remember that the crocus-colour
and the purple were both of them developments, in
opposite directions, of the great central idea of fire-
colour, 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 chord of
colours, 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
* tpfjuvjjv Aiyida iraai. — II. iv. 166.
112 The Queen of the Air.
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 religious passion is nearly always vividest
when the art is weakest ; and the technical skill only
reaches its deliberate splendour when the ecstasy
which gave it birth has passed away for ever. 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 fairyland 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
Athena iii the Earth. 113
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, re-
signed, apparently without regret, the awe of her
ancient memory ; and (with only the careless remon-
strance of a workman too strong to be proud,) even the
perfectness of his own art. Rejoicing in the protec-
tion 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 any-
wise 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 con-
tinually increasing security, the vestiges of the
Myth of Athena ; and to reanimate its almost evan-
escent shade, by connecting it with the now recog-
nized facts of existent nature, which it, more or less
1 14 The Queen of the Air.
dimly, reflected and foretold. I gather these facts
together in brief sum.
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
A thena in the Earth. 1 1 5
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
of 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, fiUing
their hearts with food and gladness ; — a God who had
1 i6 The Queen of the Air.
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.
lOO. 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 seek, 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 t Or is our own
land also to be left by its angered Spirit ; — left
among those, where sunshine vainly sweet, and pas-
sionate folly of storm, waste themselves in the silent
places of knowledge that has passed away, and of
tongues that have ceased 1
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 pre-
sence of help, and of peace, for all men who know
that they Live, and remember that they Die.
( 117 )
III.
ATHENA ERGANE.*
{Athena ift the Heart)}
Various Notes relating to the Conception of Athena as the Directress of
the Imaginatioii and Will.
loi. 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 labour.
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, his-
torical, 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
* *' Athena the worker, or having rule over work." The name was
first given to her by the Athenians.
ii8 The Queen of the Air,
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 through
many years of endeavour 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
unmistakeable words. And, 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 architec-
ture 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.
A thena in the Heai^t. ^19
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 him-
self 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
I20 The Qtceeii of the Air.
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 g6od or bad, so is the maker of it.
103. 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, woidd have built Stone-
henge.'* 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 1 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 bnt
exactly the ma?t who did it ; and by looking close at
it, you may, if you know your letters, read precisely
the manner of man he was.
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
* The elaborate pediment 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."
Athena in the Heart. 121
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.
105. This, I repeat, of all truths respecting art,
is the one of which understanding is the most pre-
cious, 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 sor-
rowful 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 con-
trary 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
122 The Queen of the Ai7'.
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 Dandolo, 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 ideal 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, — unmistakeably, — 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.
Athena in the Heart. 12
106. Thus far of Abbeville building. Now I have
lere 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.
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 vigour and harmony of invention, at once* Per-
severance 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
124 The Queen of the Air.
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
light, or as a winding-sheet.
1 08. 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, Durer's, and hundreds more ; but that is not
Athena 171 the Heart. 125
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 wave-
less waters, veiled with a sweet misty veil of Athena's
weaving : a faint light of morning, peaceful exceed-
ingly, and almost colourless, shed from behind the
Voirons, increases into soft amber along the slope of
tlie Saleve, 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 colour in that low amber
126 The Queen of the Air.
light upon the hill-side 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 manu-
script 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 gray of dawn — in the
one white flower among the rocks — in these — and no
more than these 1
no. 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
Athena in the Heart. 127
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 Hved 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.
1 1 1. 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 Tightness 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
128 The Queen of the Air.
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 ist January,
1828. I was born on the 8th of February, 1819;
and all 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 munnuring, dancing song.
Those trees that stand waving upon the rock's side,
And men, that, like spectres, among them glide.
And waterfalls that are heard from far,
And come in sight wlien very near.
And the water-wheel that turns slowly round,
Grinding the corn that— requires to be ground, —
Athena in the Heart. 129
(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, p. 182.
114. This then is the nature of the connection of
morals with 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 on
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
9
130 The Queen of the Air.
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 torpedos 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 pre-
sent heroism is the culmination of centuries of inbred
and traditional valour, 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 farther, 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 scien-
tific 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
Athena in the Heart,
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 habit-
able earth. We shall be allowed to live by small
pedlar's business, and ironmongery — 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 labour 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 fire-balls.
117. But there is yet a farther reason for the
dependence of the arts on war. The vice and in-
justice 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.
132 The Queen of the Air.
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 ^/i-arms Ares. She contends, her-
self, 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 con-
verting 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 deso-
lation, 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 Irse.
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 law, she avenges for ever ; — the lost hour can
never be redeemed, and the accomplished wrong
never atoned for. The best that can be done after-
wards, 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
Athena in the Heart. 133
she is apt, in her haste, to put away the sinner as
well, when the black aegis 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 decide practically between good and evil,
and can neither honour 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 farther : 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
134 The Qtieen of the Air.
will answer for the course of the lance, and the colours
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 pos-
sessions are to be increased at the same time, the
I
Athena in the Heart. 135
first object of thought is always to be the multi-
plication 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 humours. 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 con-
gregation 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 was easy to help
one another on the opposi.te 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 mad-
ness 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
1 36 The Queen of the Air.
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 object of all true
policy and true economy : " utmost multitude of
good men on every given space of ground " — impe-
ratively 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. 1
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 there-
fore 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
Athena in the Heart. 137
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 build 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 only 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 to be a fixed sum,
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 grain of food it con-
sumes, and inch of roof it allows to fall to ruin, makes
138 The Qiceen of the Air.
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 humours of the possessors of property ; but
the nation is in the one case gradually getting richer ;
and will feel the pressure of poverty steadily every-
where relaxing, whatever the humours 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
had 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
Athena in the Heart. 139
important function of money, as a title-deed, on the
non-violation of which all national soundness of com-
merce and peace of life depend, has been never
rightly distinguished by economists from the quite
unimportant function of money as a means of ex-
change. You can exchange goods, — at some incon-
venience, indeed, but still you can 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 every-
body'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 for ever 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
140 The Queen of the Air.
money as the labour and material of it are worth ?
If this be a truism, it is one that needs proclaim-
ing 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, now-a-days, are a form of potsherd.
Athena in the Heart. 141
provided for the solace of a self-complacent Job,
voluntarily 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
142 The Queen of the Air.
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 intel-
ligence 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
Athena in the Heart. 143
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 that 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 no more be
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 spent itself in frantic exer-
tions 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 in-
struments of reformation are employment and reward ;
— not punishment. Aid the willing, honour the vir-
tuous, and compel the idle into occupation, and there
will be no need for the compelling of any into the
great and last indolence of death.
144 ^^^^ Queen of the Ai7\
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 ^//^desirous 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 thorough-
fares in their capital city, and the multiplication of
crimes more ghastly than ever yet disgraced a no-
minal 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 sable, to harvest.
130. The general principles by which employ-
ment 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 me-
chanical power ; it is the first principle of economy
Athena in the Heart. ' 145
to use all available vital power first, then the inex-
pensive natural forces, and only at last to 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
labour healthily possible to him, feed and clothe him-
self, then it is better to use an inexpensive machine —
as a windmill or watermill — than a costly one Hke 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 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
* In order fully to utilize this natural power, we only require
machinery to turn the variable into a constant velocity — no insur-
mountable difficulty.
10
146 The Queen of the Air.
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
labourer." Why, what is " employment " but the
putting out of vital force instead of mechanical force }
We are continually in search of means of strength, —
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. Petroleum
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 every-
thing which does not spoil by keeping may most
Athena in the Heart. 147
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.
131. (2nd.) 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. Labour
considered as a discipline has hitherto been thought
of only for criminals ; but the real and noblest func-
tion of labour is to prevent crime, and not to be
i?^formatory, 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 pro-
duction of useful articles only, that is to say, of food,
of simple clothing, of lodging, or of the means of con-
veying, 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
148 The Queen of the Air.
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 navvies 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
meantime, 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
Athena in the Heart, 149
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 labourers 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 that 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
labour which would not only maintain themselves,
but be serviceable to the commonwealth. The ques-
tion 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 t or
150 The Queen of the Air.
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 service-
able members of society ?
I find by me a violent little fragment of unde-
livered 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 they are no servants of ours ">.
that we pay them no wages t that no cash out of our
pockets is spent over that beer-stained counter !
Whose cash is it then they are spending t 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
I
Athena in the Heart, 151
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 con-
gratulate 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 the
vagabonds of our people chiefly practise. It is home
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 "i 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
152 The Queen of the Air,
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 farther, that this idol were not of silent and
quiet bronze only ; — but an ingenious mechanism,
wound up every morning, to run itself down in auto-
matic 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 the venomous
idol spreads is not merely death — but sin t
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
A thena in the Heart. 153
men could be consistently organized, might ultimately-
become numerous ; these following divisions of occu-
pation may at once be suggested : —
1. Road-making. — Good roads to be made, where-
ever needed, and kept in repair ; and the annual loss
on unfrequented roads, in spoiled horses, strained
wheels, and time, done away with.
2. 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.
3. Harhour-making. — The deficiencies of safe or
convenient harbourage in our smaller ports to be
remedied ; other harbours built at dangerous points
of coast, and a discipHned 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.
4. Porterage. — All heavy goods, not requiring
speed in transit, to be carried (under preventive 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.
154 T^^^^ Queen of the Air,
5. 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.
6. Dressmaki7ig. — 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 impro-
vidence, to wear cast clothes, or be without sufficiency
of clothing.
7. Works of Art. — Schools to be established on
thoroughly sound principles of manufacture, and use
of materials, and with simple 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 establish-
ments, 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 two last departments, and some subordinate
branches of the others, would include the service of
women and children.
Athena in the Heart. 155
I give now, for such farther illustration 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, retouch-
ing them afterwards 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 Durer'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,
156 The Queen of the Air,
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 Nurem-
berger'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
Athena in the Heart, 157
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
inbeing — to know themselves, that is, in a gauger's
manner, round, and up and down — surface and con-
tents ; 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 indurasse, puote aver vita. " *
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 neces-
sary business is not inlook, but outlook, and especially
* Pur gator io, i. 103,
158 The Queen of the Air.
upXofoV : it is only her sister, Shamefacedness, who is
known by the drooping lashes — Modesty, quite other-
wise, by her large eyes full of wonder ; for she never
contemns herself, nor is ashamed of herself, but for-
gets herself — at least until she has done something
worth memory. It is easy to peep and potter about
one's own deficiencies in a quite immodest discon-
tent ; 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, 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's
being followed in this reverent feeling, is vitally
manifest in the associative conditions 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
Athena in the Heart. 159
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 im-
modest men is all jointless, and astir with wormy
ambition ; putridly dissolute, and for ever on the
crawl : so that if it come together for a time, it can
only be by metamorphosis through flash of volcanic
fire out of the vale of Siddim, vitrifying the clay of it,
and fastening the slime, only to end in wilder scatter-
ing ; 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 licence, according to its own
pleasure (it being therefore rightly called ''msolent''
that is, " custom-breaking," violating some usual and
appointed order to attain for itself greater forward-
ness or power), so it is the habit of all modesty to
love the constancy and " sole7nm\.y^' or, literally,
" accustomedness," of law, seeking first what are the
i6o The Qtieen of the Air.
solemn, appointed, inviolable customs and general
orders of nature, and of the Master of nature, touch-
ing 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," not " 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 x)ne'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 path 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.
Athena in the Heart. i6i
Among the foremost men whose power has had
to assert itself, though with conquest, yet with count-
less loss, through peculiarly English disadvantages
of circumstance, are assuredly to be ranked together,
both for honour and for mourning, Thomas Bewick
and George Cruikshank. There is, however, less cause
for regret in the instance of Bewick. We may under-
stand that it was well for us once to see what an
entirely powerful painter's genius, and an entirely
keen and true man's temper, could achieve, to-
gether, unhelped, but also unharmed, among the
black banks 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
II
1 62 The Queen of the Air.
wars of Troy, or side by side with Durer's " Knight
and Death."
1 39. 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 destruc-
tion 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 instru-
ment.
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
Athena in the Heart. 163
" 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 re-
presented 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 Halle
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-Hke, — 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 colour than is usual in his work) could
have rendered some image of that listening.
164 The Queen of the Air.
141. But if the reader can give due vitality in his
fancy to these two scenes, he will have in them repre-
sentative 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
immodest, unmeasured, and (in evil sense) unman-
nered, execution with the fist ; and the entirely modest,
measured, and (in the noblest sense) mannered, or
moral'd, execution with the finger ; — between the im-
patient 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,
Athena in the Heart. 165
(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 understand-
ing of which, and of the difference between the disci-
pline 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
1 66 The Queen of the Air.
at her spinning-wheel, the peasant-labourer's " to the
oaks and rills," — domestic music, feebly yet sensi-
tively 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, for ever sancti-
fying noble thought with separately distinguished
loveliness of belonging sound, — all these families and
gradations 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 con-
tinually deeper harmony of ^^ puissant words and mur-
murs made to bless," until we reach
" The undisturbed song of pure consent,
Aye sung before the sapphire-coloured throne."
142. And so far as the sister arts can be conceived
to have place or office, their virtues are subject to a
Athe7ia in the Heart. 167
law absolutely the same as that of music, only ex-
tending its authority into more various conditions,
owing to the introduction of a distinctly representa-
tive 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 mea-
sures, 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 unre-
sisting 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 pro-
claiming 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
^puo-fij TTEpovjj of Aglaia's cestus, we must try to find
out something true. For no quality of Art has been
1 68 The Queen of the Air.
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 hesitates, nor if it is
unmanageable, nor if it is in the common sense of the
word "free." So far from being free, it must be
under a control as absolute and accurate 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 what-
soever. All freedom is error. Every line you lay
down is either right or wrong : it may be timidly and
Athena in the Heart. 169
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 firstrate 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 nor yield, a fine
artist's line is measurable in its purposed 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 imper-
170 The Queen of the Air,
fectly 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 execu-
tion 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 licence 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
Athena in the Heart. 171
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 me-
chanical 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 con-
vince 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 net-work ; the
ant her treasury and accounts. All these are com-
172 The Queen of the Air.
paratively 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 yet take him out with me,
will be, hour by hour, wearily disappointed ; or, worse,
darkened at once into a leaden despair by an authori-
tative " 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
Athena in the Heart. 173
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 ?
1 50. 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 sorrowfuUest 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, irrespec-
tively 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 i^ — 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 1
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 } "
174 The Queen of the Air.
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 for ever. Never more to all eternity
can you be as you might have been, had you not done
that — chosen that. You have " formed your charac-
ter," 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 had
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, till 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 1 Shall I not know the world best by
trying the wrong of it, and repenting } Have I not.
Athena i7i the Heart. 175
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 in-
dividuality 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
176 The Queen of the Air.
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 neighbour
particle, and shift for itself. You call it " corrup-
tion " 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 busi-
ness 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 our freedom of
thought 1 " 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/;r<?-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
Athena in the Hem-t. I'j'j
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 expres-
sion, with a great nation, would become like that in a
well-educated company, in which there is indeed
freedom of speech, but not of clamour ; 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 commonly 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 extant, it is
impossible to say what measure is owing to restraint,
and what to licence, where the right is balanced
between them. I was not a little provoked one day,
12
lyS The Queen of the Air.
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 for ever trampled down and
destroyed, not by one duke, but by tens of thousands
of ignorant tyrants.
155. So, a Dean and Chapter may, perhaps, un-
justifiably 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 for ever. 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.
Athena in the Heart. 179
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 prac-
tical 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 what-
ever 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 rever-
ence, 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 its streets.
A wise nation obeys the one, restrains the other, and
cherishes all.
i8o The Queen of the Air.
157. The best examples of the results of wise
normal discipline 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 fortifica-
tions, 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, laboured 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
Athena in the Heart. i8i
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 colourist, while Leonardo was
only a fine draughtsman in black, staining the chiaro-
scuro drawing, like a coloured 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 tradi-
tion 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, un-
1 82 The Queen of the Air.
erringly 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 with-
out 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 remain-
ing 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 instruc-
tion 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.
Athena in the Heart. 183
There is no one to judge them, or to command him :
only some of the EngHsh upper classes hire him to
paint their houses and parks, and destroy the draw-
ings afterwards by the most wanton neglect. Tired
of labouring 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 idiosyn-
cracies 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 idiosyncracy had become solitude, or con-
tention, 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,
184 The Queen of the Air.
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 licence for the most part
perish in miserable effort ; * a few struggle into per-
* As I correct this sheet for press, my Pall Mall Gazette of last
Saturday, April 17th, 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 laboured 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, how-
ever, assisted by the French Ambassador, and last Saturday he (the
witness) saw deceased, who was much depressed in spirits, as he ex-
pected 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 in to 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 shewed 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."
Athena in the Heart. 185
niclous 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.
160. Thus far the notes on 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 imagi-
nation 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 Lambeth^
March i$th, 1869.
161. Among the photographs 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
t86 The Qticen of the Air.
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 Hke a man's face, but the Hon's skin is not Hke
a Hon'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 faces 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 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 ina7ts face
as like a man's face as it can. Hold to that. All
kinds of nonsense are talked to you, now-a-days,
ingeniously and irrelevantly about art. Therefore,
for the most part of the day, shut your ears, and
keep your eyes open : and understand primarily,
Athe7ia in the Heart. 187
what you may, I fancy, understand easily, 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 farther
understand, safely, that there 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 its 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 any-
thing liken Now, you will find on any Greek vase
something meant for a foot, or a hand, which is not
i88 The Qtieeii of the Air.
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 red 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 con-
tradiction,— ^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 farther
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, be-
cause 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
Athena in the Heart. 189
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 the
much nonsense against which you are to keep your
ears shut, that which is talked to you of the Greek
ideal of beauty, is among 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 some-
thing subtle in Mercuries ; but the Mercury of ^Enus
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 Syracuse is, however, calm and refined ; and the
Apollo of Clazomenae 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 may take the Venus of Melos as a standard of
IQO The Queen of the Air.
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.
1 68. 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 aj^e 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
* Compare above, § lor.
Athefia m the Heart. 191
art, that its laws of self-restraint are very marvellous ;
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 whole-
some 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 fiddlestrings, which constitute the ideal
life of a modern artist
Also observe, there is entire masterhood of its
business up to the required point. A Greek does not
reach after other people's strength, nor out-reach 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 comes of these, and all the grace 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 be always sure its
masses are well placed, and their placing has been
192 The Queen of the Air.
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 froni 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 pur-
pose 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 reticula-
tion 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 asinoriim. 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.
Athena in the Heart. 193
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 incon-
venience after that, and poor success, after all. Too
much trouble, in cutting the die into fine fringes and
jags ; inconvenience after that, — because fringes and
jags would spoil the surface of a coin ; poor success
after all, — 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, loses no skill, and says to you, " Here are
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,
1 think, exemplary enough to justify our torment/ng
you a little with Greek Art. But it has one merit
more than these, the greatest of all. It always means
13
194 T^^^^ Queen of the Air.
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
send 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 X.ion,
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 some-
where. The slothful man says, there is a lion in the
Athena in the Heart. 195
path. He says well. The quite ^///slothful man says
the same, and knows it too. But they differ in their
farther reading of the text. The slothful man says
/ 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 life, what was once
dreadful is your armour, 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 favour, I should think, with the British
Lion. Greek art is never frightened at anything, it is
always cool.
196 The Queefi of the Air.
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 can-
not 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. Pen-
siveness ; amazement ; often deepest grief and deso-
lateness. 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.
I "jG. 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
■ Athe^ia in the Heart. 197
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. Chris-
tianity has neither superseded, 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 an
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
colour 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 built 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.
198 The Queen of the Air.
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 colour 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,
Athena m the Heart. 199
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 favour
of Hercules and of the Muses ; and to those who
shall best deserve them, the crown of Parsley first,
and then of the Laurel.
THE END.
1^4 If
LONDON :
PRINTED BY SMITH, ELDER AND CO.,
OLD BAILEV, EC.
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