The Queen of the Air Part 4

73. But with the early serpent-wors.h.i.+p there was a.s.sociated another, that of the groves, of which you will also find the evidence exhaustively collected in Mr. Fergussen's work. This tree-wors.h.i.+p may have taken a dark form when a.s.sociated with the Draconian one; or opposed, as in Judea, to a purer faith; but in itself, I believe, it was always healthy, and though it retains little definite hieroglyphic power in subsequent religion, it becomes, instead of symbolic, real; the flowers and trees are themselves beheld and beloved with a half-wors.h.i.+pping delight, which is always n.o.ble 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 a.s.sociated even with the pa.s.sionless growth of the leaf out of the ground; while the distinctions of species seem appointed with more definite ethical address to the intelligence of man as their material products become more useful to him.

74. I can easily show this, and, at the same time, make clear the relation to other plants of the flowers which especially belong to Athena, by examining the natural myths in the groups of the plants which would be used at any country dinner, over which Athena would, in her simplest household authority, cheerfully rule here in England. Suppose Horace's favorite dish of beans, with the bacon; potatoes; some savory stuffing of onions and herbs, with the meat; celery, and a radish or two, with the cheese; nuts and apples for desert, and brown bread.

75. The beans are, from earliest time, the most important and interesting of the seeds of the great tribe of plants from which came the Latin and French name for all kitchen vegetables,--things that are gathered with the hand--podded seeds that cannot be reaped, or beaten, or shaken down, but must be gathered green. "Leguminous" plants, all of them having flowers like b.u.t.terflies, seeds in (frequently pendent) pods, --"laetum siliqua qua.s.sante legumen"--smooth and tender leaves, divided into many minor ones; strange adjuncts of tendril, for climbing (and sometimes of thorn); exquisitely sweet, yet pure scents of blossom, and almost always harmless, if not serviceable seeds. It is of all tribes of plants the most definite, its blossoms being entirely limited in their parts, and not pa.s.sing 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 cl.u.s.tered clover and sweet trefoil tracery; the most entirely serviceable and human of all orders of plants.

76. Next, in the potato, we have the scarcely innocent underground stem of one of a tribe set aside for evil; having the deadly nightshade for its queen, and including the henbane, the witch's mandrake, and the worst natural curse of modern civilization--tobacco.* And the strange thing about this tribe is, that though thus set aside for evil, they are not a group distinctly separate from those that are happier in function. There is nothing in other tribes of plants like the form of the bean blossom; but there is another family of forms and structure closely connected with this venomous one. Examine the purple and yellow bloom of the common hedge nightshade; you will find it constructed exactly like some of the forms of the cyclamen; and, getting this clue, you will find at last the whole poisonous and terrible group to be--sisters of the primulas!

* It is not easy to estimate the demoralizing effect on the youth of Europe of the cigar, in enabling them to pa.s.s their time happily in idleness.

The nightshades are, in fact, primroses with a curse upon them; and a sign set in their petals, by which the deadly and condemned flowers may always be known from the innocent ones,--that the stamens of the nightshades are between the lobes, and of the primulas, opposite the lobes, of the corolla.

77. Next, side by side, in the celery and radish, you have the two great groups of unbelled and cruciferous plants; alike in conditions of rank among herbs: both flowering in cl.u.s.ters; but the unbelled group, flat, the crucifers, in spires: both of them mean and poor in the blossom, and losing what beauty they have by too close crowding; both of them having the most curious influence on human character in the temperate zones of the earth, from the days of the parsley crown, and hemlock drink, and mocked Euripidean chervil, until now; but chiefly among the northern nations, being especially plants that are of some humble beauty, and (the crucifers) of endless use, when they are chosen and cultivated; but that run to wild waste, and are the signs of neglected ground, in their rank or ragged leaves and meagre stalks, and pursed or podded seed cl.u.s.ters.

Capable, even under cultivation, of no perfect beauty, thought reaching some subdued delightfulness in the lady's smock and the wallflower; for the most part they have every floral quality meanly, and in vain,--they are white without purity; golden, without preciousness; redundant, without richness; divided, without fineness; ma.s.sive, without strength; and slender, without grace. Yet think over that useful vulgarity of theirs; and of the relations of German and English peasant character to its food of kraut and cabbage (as of Arab character to its food of palm-fruit), and you will begin to feel what purposes of the forming spirit are in these distinctions of species.

78. Next we take the nuts and apples,--the nuts representing one of the groups of catkined trees, whose blossoms are only tufts and dust; and the other, the rose tribe, in which fruit and flower alike have been the types to the highest races of men, of all pa.s.sionate temptation, or pure delight, from the coveting of Eve to the crowing of the Madonna, above the

"Rosa sempiterna, Che si dilata, rigrada, e ridole Odor di lode al Sol."

We have no time now for these, we must go on to the humblest group of all, yet the most wonderful, that of the gra.s.s which has given us our bread; and from that we will go back to the herbs.

79. The vast family of plants which, under rain, make the earth green for man, and, under suns.h.i.+ne, 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 gra.s.ses, sedges, and rushes. The gra.s.ses are essentially a clothing for healthy and pure ground, watered by occasional rain, but in itself dry, and fit for all cultivated pasture and corn. They are distinctively plants with round and jointed stems, which have long green flexible leaves, and heads of seed, independently emerging from them. The sedges are essentially the clothing of waste and more or less poor or uncultivated soils, coa.r.s.e in their structure, frequently triangular in stem--hence called "acute" by Virgil--and with their heads of seed not extricated from their leaves.

Now, in both the sedges and gra.s.ses, the blossom has a common structure, though undeveloped in the sedges, but composed always of groups of double husks, which have mostly a spinous process in the centre, sometimes projecting into a long awn or beard; this central process being characteristic also of the ordinary leaves of mosses, as if a moss were a kind of ear of corn made permanently green on the ground, and with a new and distinct fructification. But the rushes differ wholly from the sedge and gra.s.s in their blossom structure. It is not a dual cl.u.s.ter, but a twice threefold one, so far separate from the gra.s.ses, 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 Drosidae, or dew-plants, it will enable me to say what I have to say of them much more shortly and clearly.

80. These Drosidae, then, are plants delighting in interrupted moisture-- or at certain seasons--into dry ground. They are not among water-plants, but the signs of water resting among dry places. Many of the true water-plants have triple blossoms, with a small triple calyx holding them; in the Drosidae the floral spirit pa.s.ses into the calyx also, and the entire flower becomes a six-rayed star, bursting out of the stem laterally, as if it were the first of flowers and had made its way to the light by force through the unwilling green. They are often required to retain moisture or nourishment for the future blossom through long times of drought; and this they do in bulbs under ground, of which some become a rude and simple, but most wholesome, food for man.

81. So, now, observe, you are to divide the whole family of the herbs of the field into three great groups,--Drosidae, Carices,* Gramineae,-- dew-plants, sedges, and gra.s.ses. 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 perfect stars, like the star of Bethlehem, or, when they are affected by the strange reflex of the serpent nature which forms the l.a.b.i.ate group of all flowers, closing into forms of exquisitely fantastic symmetry in the gladiolus. Put by their side their Nereid sisters, the water-lilies, and you have them in the origin of the loveliest forms of ornamental design, and the most powerful floral myths yet recognized among human spirits, born by the streams of Ganges, Nile, Arno, and Avon.

* I think Carex will be found ultimately better than Cyperus for the generic name, being the Vergilian word, and representing a larger sub-species.

82. For consider a little what each of those five tribes* has been to the spirit of man. First, in their n.o.bleness, the lilies gave the lily of the Annunciation; the asphodels, the flower of the Elysian fields; the irids, the fleur-de-lys of chivalry; and the amaryllids, Christ's lily of the field; while the rush, trodden always under foot, became the emblem of humility. Then take each of the tribes, and consider the extent of their lower influence. Perdita's "The crown imperial, lilies of all kinds," are the first tribe, which, giving the type of perfect purity in the Madonna's lily, have, by their lovely form, influenced the entire decorative design of Italian sacred art; while ornament design of war was continually enriched by the curves of the triple petals of the Florentine "giglio," and French fleur-de-lys; so that it is impossible to count their influence for good in the middle ages, partly as a symbol of womanly character, and partly of the utmost brightness and refinement of chivalry in the city which was the flower of cities.

* Take this rough distinction of the four tribes: lilies, superior ovary, white seeds; asphodels, superior ovary, black seeds; irids, inferior ovary, style (typically) rising into central crest; amaryllids, inferior ovary, stamens (typically) joined in central cup. Then the rushes are a dark group, through which they stoop to the gra.s.ses.

Afterwards, the group of the turban-lilies, or tulips, did some mischief (their splendid stains having made them the favorite caprice of florists); but they may be pardoned all such guilt for the pleasure they have given in cottage gardens, and are yet to give, when lowly life may again be possible among us; and the crimson bars of the tulips in their trim beds, with their likeness in crimson bars of morning above them, and its dew glittering heavy, globed in their glossy cups, may be loved better than the gray nettles of the ash heap, under gray sky, unveined by vermilion or by gold.

83. The next great group, of the asphodels, divides itself also into two princ.i.p.al families: one, in which the flowers are like stars, and cl.u.s.tered characteristically in b.a.l.l.s, though opening sometimes into looser heads; and the other, in which the flowers are in long bells, opening suddenly at the lips, and cl.u.s.tered in spires on a long stem, or drooping from it, when bent by their weight.

The star-group, of the squills, garlics, and onions, has always caused me great wonder. I cannot understand why its beauty, and serviceableness, should have been a.s.sociated 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 cla.s.ses.

The belled group, of the hyacinth and convallaria, is as delicate as the other is coa.r.s.e; the unspeakable azure light along the ground of the wood hyacinth in English spring; the grape hyacinth, which is in south France, as if a cl.u.s.ter 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 nouris.h.i.+ng 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 compa.s.s 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 Amaryllis lutea, the "lily of the field" (I suspect also that the flower whose name we translate "violet" was in truth an iris) represented to the Greek the first coming of the breath of life on the renewed herbage; and became in his thoughts the true embroidery of the saffron robe of Athena. Later in the year, the dianthus (which, though belonging to an entirely different race of plants, has yet a strange look of being made out of the gra.s.ses by turning the sheath-membrane at the root of their leaves into a flower) seems to scatter, in mult.i.tudinous families, its crimson stars far and wide. But the golden lily and crocus, together with the asphodel, retain always the old Greek's fondest thoughts,--they are only "golden" flowers that are to burn on the trees, and float on the streams of paradise.

85. I have but one tribe of plants more to note at our country feast-- the savory herbs; but must go a little out of my way to come at them rightly. All flowers whose petals are fastened together, and most of those whose petals are loose, are best thought of first as a kind of cup or tube opening at the mouth. Sometimes the opening is gradual, as in the convolvulus or campanula; oftener there is a distinct change of direction between the tube and expanding lip, as in the primrose; or even a contraction under the lip, making the tube into a narrow-necked phial or vase, as in the heaths; but the general idea of a tube expanding into a quatrefoil, cinquefoil, or sixfoil, will embrace most of the forms.

86. Now, it is easy to conceive that flowers of this kind, growing in close cl.u.s.ters, may, in process of time, have extended their outside petals rather than the interior ones (as the outer flowers of the cl.u.s.ters of many umbellifers actually do), and thus elongated and variously distorted forms have established themselves; then if the stalk is attached to the side instead of the base of the tube, its base becomes a spur, and thus all the grotesque forms of the mints, violets, and larkspurs, gradually might be composed. But, however this may be, there is one great tribe of plants separate from the rest, and of which the influence seems shed upon the rest, in different degrees; and these would give the impression, not so much of having been developed by change, as of being stamped with a character of their own, more or less serpentine or dragon-like. And I think you will find it convenient to call these generally Draconidae; disregarding their present ugly botanical name which I do not care even to write once--you may take for their princ.i.p.al types the foxglove, snapdragon, and calceolaria; and you will find they all agree in a tendency to decorate themselves by spots, and with bosses or swollen places in their leaves, as if they had been touched by poison.

The spot of the foxglove is especially strange, because it draws the color out of the tissue all around it, as if it had been stung, and as if the central color was really an inflamed spot, with paleness round. Then also they carry to its extreme the decoration by bulging or pouting out the petal,--often beautifully used by other flowers in a minor degree, like the beating out of bosses in hollow silver, as in the kalmia, beaten out apparently in each petal by the stamens instead of a hammer; or the borage, pouting towards; but the snapdragons and calceolarias carry it to its extreme.

87. Then the spirit of these Draconidae seems to pa.s.s 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 b.u.t.tercup, 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 gla.s.s, and stained or darkening irregularly into red. And then at last the serpent charm changes the ranunculus into monkshood, and makes it poisonous. It enters into the forget-me-not, and the star of heavenly turquoise is corrupted into the viper's bugloss, darkened with the same strange red as the larkspur, and fretted into a fringe of thorn; it enters, together with a strange insect-spirit, into the asphodels, and (though with a greater interval between the groups) they change to spotted 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 aesculapian 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 into the herbage at their feet, and touches it; and behold, instantly, a vast group of herbs for healing,--all draconid in form,--spotted and crested, and from their lip-like corollas named "l.a.b.i.atae;" full of various balm, and warm strength for healing, yet all of them without splendid honor or perfect beauty, "ground ives,"

richest when crushed under the foot; the best sweetness and gentle brightness of the robes of the field,--thyme, and marjoram, and Euphrasy.

88. And observe, again and again, with respect to all these divisions and powers of plants: it does not matter in the least by what concurrences of circ.u.mstance or necessity they may gradually have been developed; the concurrence of circ.u.mstance is itself the supreme and inexplicable fact. We always come at last to a formative cause, which directs the circ.u.mstance, and mode of meeting it. If you ask an ordinary botanist the reason of the form of the leaf, he will tell you that it is a "developed tubercle," and that its ultimate form "is owing to the directions of its vascular threads." But what directs its vascular threads? "They are seeking for something they want," he will probably answer. What made them want that? What made them seek for it thus?

Seek for it, in five fibres or in three? Seek for it, in serration, or in sweeping curves? Seek for it, in servile tendrils, or impetuous spray? Seek for it, in woolen wrinkles rough with stings, or in glossy surfaces, green with pure strength, and winterless delight?

89. There is no answer. But the sum of all is, that over the entire surface of the earth, and its waters, as influenced by the power of the air under solar light, there is developed a series of changing forms, in clouds, plants, and animals, all of which have reference in their action, or nature, to the human intelligence that perceives them; and on which, in their aspects of horror and beauty, and their qualities of good and evil, there is engraved a series of myths, or words of the forming power, which, according to the true pa.s.sion and energy of the human race, they have been enabled to read into religion. And this forming power has been by all nations partly confused with the breath or air through which it acts, and partly understood as a creative wisdom, proceeding from the Supreme Deity; but entering into and inspiring all intelligences that work in harmony with Him. And whatever intellectual results may be in modern days obtained by regarding this effluence only as a motion of vibration, every formative human art hitherto, and the best states of human happiness and order, may have depended on the apprehension of its mystery (which is certain,) and of its personality, which is probable.

90. Of its influence on the formative arts, I have a few words to say separately: my present business is only to interpret, as we are now sufficiently enabled to do, the external symbols of the myth under which it was represented by the Greeks as a G.o.ddess of counsel, taken first into that breast of their supreme Deity, then created out of his thoughts, and abiding closely beside him; always sharing and consummating his power.

91. And in doing this we have first to note the meaning of the princ.i.p.al epithet applied to Athena, "Glaukopis," "with eyes full of light," the first syllable being connected, by its root, with words signifying sight, not with words signifying color. As far as I can trace the color perception of the Greeks, I find it all founded primarily on the degree of connection between color and light; the most important fact to them in the color of red being its connection with fire and suns.h.i.+ne; so that "purple" is, in its original sense, "fire-color," and the scarlet or orange, of dawn, more than any other fire-color. I was long puzzled by Homer's calling the sea purple; and misled into thinking he meant the color of cloud shadows on green sea; whereas he really means the gleaming blaze of the waves under wide light. Aristotle's idea (partly true) is that light, subdued by blackness, becomes red; and blackness, heated or lighted, also becomes red. Thus, a color may be called purple because it is light subdued (and so death is called "purple" or "shadowy" death); or else it may be called purple as being shade kindled with fire, and thus said of the lighted sea; or even of the sun itself, when it is thought of as a red luminary opposed to the whiteness of the moon: "purpureos inter soles, et candida lunae sidera;" or of golden hair: "pro purpureo p?nam solvens scelerata capillo;" while both ideas are modified by the influence of an earlier form of the word, which has nothing to do with fire at all, but only with mixing or staining; and then, to make the whole group of thoughts inextricably complex, yet rich and subtle in proportion to their intricacy, the various rose and crimson colors of the murex dye,--the crimson and purple of the poppy, and fruit of the palm,-- and the a.s.sociation of all these with the hue of blood,--partly direct, partly through a confusion between the word signifying "slaughter" and "palm-fruit color," mingle themselves in, and renew the whole nature of the old word; so that, in later literature, it means a different color, or emotion of color, in almost every place where it occurs; and cast forever around the reflection of all that has been dipped in its dyes.

92. So that the world is really a liquid prism, and stream of opal. And then, last of all, to keep the whole history of it in the fantastic course of a dream, warped here and there into wild grotesque, we moderns, who have preferred to rule over coal-mines instead of the sea (and so have turned the everlasting lamp of Athena into a Davy's safety-lamp in the hand of Britannia, and Athenian heavenly lightning into British subterranean "damp"), have actually got our purple out of coal instead of the sea! And thus, grotesquely, we have had enforced on us the doubt that held the old word between blackness and fire, and have completed the shadow, and the fear of it, by giving it a name from battle, "Magenta."

93. There is precisely a similar confusion between light and color in the word used for the blue of the eyes of Athena--a n.o.ble confusion, however, brought about by the intensity of the Greek sense that the heaven is light, more than it is blue. I was not thinking of this when I wrote in speaking of pictorial chiaroscuro, "The sky is not blue color merely: it is blue fire and cannot be painted" (Mod. P. iv. p. 36); but it was this that the Greeks chiefly felt of it, and so "Glaukopis"

chiefly means gray-eyed: gray standing for a pale or luminous blue; but it only means "owl-eyed" in thought of the roundness and expansion, not from the color; this breath and brightness being, again, in their moral sense typical of the breadth, intensity, and singleness of the sight in prudence ("if thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light"). Then the actual power of the bird to see in twilight enters into the type, and perhaps its general fineness of sense. "Before the human form was adopted, her (Athena's) proper symbol was the owl, a bird which seems to surpa.s.s all other creatures in acuteness of organic perception, its eye being calculated to observe objects which to all others are enveloped in darkness, its ear to hear sounds distinctly, and its nostrils to discriminate effluvia with such nicety that it has been deemed prophetic, from discovering the putridity of death even in the first stages of disease."*

* Payne Knight in his "Inquiry into the Symbolical Language of Ancient Art," not trustworthy, being little more than a ma.s.s of conjectural memoranda, but the heap is suggestive, if well sifted.

I cannot find anywhere an account of the first known occurrence of the type; but, in the early ones on Attic coins, the wide round eyes are clearly the princ.i.p.al things to be made manifest.

94. There is yet, however, another color of great importance in the conception of Athena--the dark blue of her aegis. Just as the blue or gray of her eyes was conceived more as light than color, so her aegis was dark blue, because the Greeks thought of this tint more as shade than color, and, while they used various materials in ornamentation, lapislazuli, carbonate of copper, or, perhaps, smalt, with real enjoyment of the blue tint, it was yet in their minds as distinctly representative of darkness as scarlet was of light, and, therefore, anything dark,* but especially the color of heavy thunder-cloud, was described by the same term. The physical power of this darkness of the aegis, fringed with lightning, is given quite simply when Jupiter himself uses it to overshadow Ida and the Plain of Troy, and withdraws it at the prayer of Ajax for light; and again when he grants it to be worn for a time by Apollo, who is hidden by its cloud when he strikes down Patroclus; but its spiritual power is chiefly expressed by a word signifying deeper shadow,--the gloom of Erebus, or of our evening, which, when spoken of the aegis, signifies, not merely the indignation of Athena, but the entire hiding or withdrawal of her help, and beyond even this, her deadliest of all hostility,--the darkness by which she herself deceives and beguiles to final ruin those to whom she is wholly adverse; this contradiction of her own glory being the uttermost judgment upon human falsehood. Thus it is she who provokes Pandarus to the treachery which purposed to fulfil the rape of Helen by the murder of her husband in time of truce; and then the Greek king, holding his wounded brother's hand, prophesies against Troy the darkness of the aegis which shall be over all, and for ever.**

* In the breastplate and s.h.i.+eld of Atrides the serpents and bosses are all of this dark color, yet the serpents are said to be like rainbows; but through all this splendor and opposition of hue, I feel distinctly that the literal "splendor," with its relative shade, are prevalent in the conception; and that there is always a tendency to look through the hue to its cause. And in this feeling about color the Greeks are separated from the eastern nations, and from the best designers of Christian times. I cannot find that they take pleasure in color for its own sake; it may be in something more than color, or better; but it is not in the hue itself. When Homer describes cloud breaking from a mountain summit, the crags become visible in light, not color; he feels only their flas.h.i.+ng out in bright edges and trenchant shadows; above, the "infinite," "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 color on their vases to dim red (or yellow) with black and white, is greatly connected with their sepulchral use, and with all the melancholy of Greek tragic thought; and in this gloom the failure of color-perception is partly n.o.ble, partly base: n.o.ble, in its earnestness, which raises the design of Greek vases as far above the designing of mere colorist nations like the Chinese, as men's thoughts are above children's; and yet it is partly base and earthly, and inherently defective in one human faculty; and I believe it was one cause of the peris.h.i.+ng of their art so swiftly, for indeed there is no decline so sudden, or down to such utter loss and ludicrous depravity, as the fall of Greek design on its vases from the fifth to the third century B.C. On the other hand, the pure colored-gift, when employed for pleasure only, degrades in another direction; so that among the Indians, Chinese, and j.a.panese, all intellectual progress in art has been for ages rendered impossible by the prevalence of that faculty; and yet it is, as I have said again and again, the spiritual power of art; and its true brightness is the essential characteristic of all healthy schools.

** 'eremnen Aigida pasi'.--Il. iv. 166.

95. This, then, finally, was the perfect color-conception of Athena: the flesh, snow-white (the hands, feet, and face of marble, even when the statue was hewn roughly in wood); the eyes of keen pale blue, often in statues represented by jewels; the long robe to the feet, crocus-colored; and the aegis thrown over it of thunderous purple; the helmet golden (Il.

v. 744.), and I suppose its crest also, as that of Achilles.

If you think carefully of the meaning and character which is now enough ill.u.s.trated for you in each of these colors, and remember that the crocus-color and the purple were both of them developments, in opposite directions, of the great central idea of fire-color, or scarlet, you will see that this form of the creative spirit of the earth is conceived as robed in the blue, and purple, and scarlet, the white, and the gold, which have been recognized for the sacred chords of colors, from the day when the cloud descended on a Rock more mighty than Ida.

96. I have spoken throughout, hitherto, of the conception of Athena, as it is traceable in the Greek mind; not as it was rendered by Greek art.

It is matter of extreme difficulty, requiring a sympathy at once affectionate and cautious, and a knowledge reaching the earliest springs of the religion of many lands, to discern through the imperfection, and, alas! more dimly yet, through the triumphs of formative art, what kind of thoughts they were that appointed for it the tasks of its childhood, and watched by the awakening of its strength.

The religions pa.s.sion is nearly always vividest when the art is weakest; and the technical skill only reaches its deliberate splendor when the ecstacy which gave it birth has pa.s.sed away forever. It is as vain an attempt to reason out the visionary power or guiding influence of Athena in the Greek heart, from anything we now read, or possess, of the work of Phidias, as it would be for the disciples of some new religion to infer the spirit of Christianity from t.i.tian's "a.s.sumption." The effective vitality of the religious conception can be traced only through the efforts of trembling hands, and strange pleasures of untaught eyes; and the beauty of the dream can no more be found in the first symbols by which it is expressed, than a child's idea of fairy-land can be gathered from its pencil scrawl, or a girl's love for her broken doll explained by the defaced features. On the other hand, the Athena of Phidias was, in very fact, not so much the deity, as the darling of the Athenian people.

Her magnificence represented their pride and fondness, more than their piety; and the great artist, in lavis.h.i.+ng upon her dignities which might be ended abruptly by the pillage they provoked, resigned, apparently without regret, the awe of her ancient memory; and (with only the careless remonstrance of a workman too strong to be proud) even the perfectness of his own art. Rejoicing in the protection of their G.o.ddess, 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.