140. But, if the truth and beauty of art are thus beyond attainment by help of science, how much more its invention? I must defer what I have chiefly to say on this head till next lecture; but to-day I can illustrate, simply, the position of invention with respect to science in one very important group of inorganic forms—those of drapery.

141. If you throw at random over a rod a piece of drapery of any material which will fall into graceful folds, you will get a series of sinuous folds in catenary curves: and any given disposition of these will be nearly as agreeable as any other; though, if you throw the stuff on the rod a thousand times, it will not fall twice alike.

142. But suppose, instead of a straight rod, you take a beautiful nude statue, and throw the piece of linen over that. You may encumber and conceal its form altogether; you may entirely conceal portions of the limbs, and show others; or you may leave indications, under the thin veil, of the contours which are hidden; but in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred you will wish the drapery taken off again; you will feel that the folds are in some sort discrepant and harmful, and eagerly snatch them away. However passive the material, however softly accommodated to the limbs, the wrinklings will always look foreign to the form, like the drip of a heavy shower of rain falling off it, and will load themselves in the hollows uncomfortably. You will have to pull them about; to stretch them one way, loosen them in another, and supply the quantity of government which a living person would have given to the dress, before it becomes at all pleasing to you.

143. Doing your best, you will still not succeed to your mind, provided you have, indeed, a mind worth pleasing. No adjustment that you can make, on the quiet figure, will give any approximation to the look of drapery which has previously accommodated itself to the action which brought the figure into the position in which it stays. On a really living person, gracefully dressed, and who has paused from graceful motion, you will get, again and again, arrangements of fold which you can admire: but they will not remain to be copied, the first following movement alters all. If you had your photographic plate ready and could photograph—I don’t know if it has been tried—girls, like waves, as they move, you would get what was indeed lovely; and yet, when you compared even such results with fine sculpture, you would see that there was something wanting;—that, in the deepest sense, all was yet wanting.

144. Yet this is the most that the plurality of artists can do, or think of doing. They draw the nude figure with careful anatomy; they put their model or their lay figure into the required position; they arrange draperies on it to their mind, and paint them from the reality. All such work is absolutely valueless,—worse than valueless in the end of it, blinding us to the qualities of fine work.

In true design it is in this matter of drapery as in all else. There is not a fold too much, and all that are given aid the expression, whether of movement or character. Here is a bit of Greek sculpture, with many folds; here is a bit of Christian sculpture with few. From the many, not one could be removed without harm, and to the few, not one could be added. This alone is art, and no science will ever enable you to do this, but the poetic and fabric instincts only.

145. Nevertheless, however far above science, your work must comply with all the requirements of science. The first thing you have to ask is, Is it scientifically right? That is still nothing, but it is essential. In modern imitations of Gothic work the artists think it religious to be wrong, and that Heaven will be propitious only to saints whose stoles or petticoats stand or fall into incredible angles.

146. But this, which is the science of drapery, will never do more than guard you in your first attempts in the art of it. Nay, when once you have mastered the elements of such science, the most sickening of all work to you will be that in which the draperies are all right,—and nothing else is. In the present state of our schools one of the chief mean merits against which I shall have to warn you is the imitation of what milliners admire: nay, in many a piece of the best art I shall have to show you that the draperies are, to some extent, intentionally ill-done, lest you should look at them. Yet, through every complexity of desirableness, and counter-peril, hold to the constant and simple law I have always given you—that the best work must be right in the beginning, and lovely in the end.

147. Finally, observe that what is true respecting these simple forms of drapery is true of all other inorganic form. It must become organic under the artist’s hand by his invention. As there must not be a fold in a vestment too few or too many, there must not, in noble landscape, be a fold in a mountain, too few or too many. As you will never get from real linen cloth, by copying it ever so faithfully, the drapery of a noble statue, so you will never get from real mountains, copy them never so faithfully, the forms of noble landscape. Anything more beautiful than the photographs of the Valley of Chamouni, now in your print-sellers’ windows, cannot be conceived. For geographical and geological purposes they are worth anything; for art purposes, worth—a good deal less than zero. You may learn much from them, and will mislearn more. But in Turner’s “Valley of Chamouni” the mountains have not a fold too much, nor too little. There are no such mountains at Chamouni: they are the ghosts of eternal mountains, such as have been, and shall be, for evermore.

148. So now in sum, for I may have confused you by illustration,—

III. Having learned to represent actual appearances faithfully, if you have any human faculty of your own, visionary appearances will take place to you which will be nobler and more true than any actual or material appearances; and the realization of these is the function of every fine art, which is founded absolutely, therefore, in truth, and consists absolutely in imagination. And once more we may conclude with, but now using them in a deeper sense, the words of our master—“The best in this kind are but shadows.”

It is to be our task, gentlemen, to endeavour that they may be at least so much.

LECTURE VIII.
THE RELATION TO ART OF THE SCIENCES OF ORGANIC FORM.

149. I have next in order to speak of the relation of art to science, in dealing with its own principal subject—organic form, as the expression of life. And, as in my former lecture, I will tell you at once what I wish chiefly to enforce upon you.

Thirdly.—That in representing these appearances, she is more hindered than helped by the knowledge of things which do not externally appear; and therefore, that the study of anatomy generally, whether of plants, animals, or man, is an impediment to graphic art.

Fourthly.—That especially in the treatment and conception of the human form, the habit of contemplating its anatomical structure is not only a hindrance, but a degradation; and farther yet, that even the study of the external form of the human body, more exposed than it may be healthily and decently in daily life, has been essentially destructive to every school of art in which it has been practised.

150. These four statements I undertake, in the course of our future study, gradually to confirm to you. In a single lecture I, of course, have time to do little more than clearly state and explain them.

Secondly.—In representing, nay, in thinking of, and caring for, these beasts, man has to think of them essentially with their skins on them, and with their souls in them. He is to know how they are spotted, wrinkled, furred, and feathered: and what the look of them is, in the eyes; and what grasp, or cling, or trot, or pat, in their paws and claws. He is to take every sort of view of them, in fact, except one,—the Butcher’s view. He is never to think of them as bones and meat.

Thirdly.—In the representation of their appearance, the knowledge of bones and meat, of joint and muscle, is more a hindrance than a help.

Lastly.—With regard to the human form, such knowledge is a degradation as well as a hindrance; and even the study of the nude is injurious, beyond the limits of honour and decency in daily life.

Those are my four positions. I will not detain you by dwelling on the first two—that we should know every sort of beast, and know it with its skin on it, and its soul within it. What you feel to be a paradox—perhaps you think an incredible and insolent paradox—is my telling you that you will be hindered from doing this by the study of anatomy. I address myself, therefore, only to the last two points.

151. Among your standard engravings, I have put that of the picture by Titian, in the Strozzi Palace, of a little Strozzi maiden feeding her dog. I am going to put in the Rudimentary Series, where you can always get at it (R. 125), this much more delightful, though not in all points standard, picture by Reynolds, of an infant daughter of George the Third’s, with her Skye terrier.

But the custom of putting either the dog, or some inferior animal, to be either in contrast, or modest companionship, with the nobleness of human form and thought, is a piece of what may be called mental comparative anatomy, which has its beginning very far back in art indeed. One of quite the most interesting Greek vases in the British Museum is that of which the painting long went under the title of “Anacreon and his Dog.” It is a Greek lyric poet, singing with lifted head, in the action given to Orpheus and Philammon in their moments of highest inspiration; while, entirely unaffected by and superior to the music, there walks beside him a sharp-nosed and curly-tailed dog, painted in what the exclusive admirers of Greek art would, I suppose, call an ideal manner; that is to say, his tail is more like a display of fireworks than a tail; but the ideal evidently founded on the material existence of a charming, though supercilious, animal not unlike the one which is at present the chief solace of my labours in Oxford, Dr. Acland’s dog Bustle. I might go much farther back than this; but at all events, from the time of the golden dog of Pandareos, the fawn of Diana, and the eagle, owl, and peacock of the great Greek gods, you find a succession of animal types—centralized in the Middle Ages, of course, by the hound and the falcon—used in art either to symbolize, or contrast with, dignity in human persons. In modern portraiture, the custom has become vulgarized by the anxiety of everybody who sends their picture, or their children’s, to the Royal Academy, to have it demonstrated to the public by the exhibition of a pony, and a dog with a whip in its mouth, that they live, at the proper season, in a country house. But by the greater masters the thing is done always with a deep sense of the mystery of the comparative existences of living creatures, and of the methods of vice and virtue exhibited by them. Albert Dürer scarcely ever draws a scene in the life of the Virgin, without putting into the foreground some idle cherubs at play with rabbits or kittens; and sometimes lets his love of the grotesque get entirely the better of him, as in the engraving of the Madonna with the monkey. Veronese disturbs the interview of the queen of Sheba with Solomon, by the petulance of the queen of Sheba’s Blenheim spaniel, whom Solomon had not treated with sufficient respect; and when Veronese is introduced himself, with all his family, to the Madonna, I am sorry to say that his own pet dog turns its back to the Madonna, and walks out of the room.

152. But among all these symbolic playfulnesses of the higher masters, there is not one more perfect than this study by Reynolds of the infant English Princess with her wire-haired terrier. He has put out his whole strength to show the infinite differences, yet the blessed harmonies, between the human and the lower nature. First, having a blue-eyed,[G] soft baby to paint, he gives its full face, as round as may be, and rounds its eyes to complete openness, because somebody is coming whom it does not know. But it opens its eyes in quiet wonder, and is not disturbed, but behaves as a princess should. Beside this soft, serenely-minded baby, Reynolds has put the roughest and roughest-minded dog he could think of. Instead of the full round eyes, you have only the dark places in the hair where you know the terrier’s eyes must be—sharp enough, if you could see them—and very certainly seeing you, but not at all wondering at you, like the baby’s. For the terrier has instantly made up his mind about you; and above all, that you have no business there; and is growling and snarling in his fiercest manner, though without moving from his mistress’s side, or from under her arm. You have thus the full contrast between the grace and true charm of the child, who “thinketh no evil” of you, and the uncharitable narrowness of nature in the grown-up dog of the world, who thinks nothing but evil of you. But the dog’s virtue and faithfulness are not told less clearly; the baby evidently uses the creature just as much for a pillow as a playmate;—buries its arm in the rough hair of it with a loving confidence, half already converting itself to protection: and baby will take care of dog, and dog of baby, through all chances of time and fortune.

153. Now the exquisiteness with which the painter has applied all his skill in composition, all his dexterity in touch of pencil, and all his experience of the sources of expression, to complete the rendering of his comparison, cannot, in any of the finest subtleties of it, be explained; but the first steps of its science may be easily traced; and with little pains you may see how a simple and large mass of white is opposed to a rugged one of grey; how the child’s face is put in front light, that no shadow may detract from the brightness which makes her, as in Arabian legends, “a princess like to the full moon”—how, in this halo, the lips and eyes are brought out in deep and rich colour, while scarcely a gleam of reflection is allowed to disturb the quietness of the eyes;—(the terrier’s, you feel, would glitter enough, if you could see them, and flash back in shallow fire; but the princess’s eyes are thinking, and do not flash;)—how the quaint cap surrounds, with its not wholly painless formalism, the courtly and patient face, opposed to the rugged and undressed wild one; and how the easy grace of soft limb and rounded neck is cast, in repose, against the uneasily gathered up crouching of the short legs, and petulant shrug of the eager shoulders, in the ignobler creature.

154. Now, in his doing of all this, Sir Joshua was thinking of, and seeing, whatever was best in the creatures, within and without. Whatever was most perfectly doggish—perfectly childish—in soul and body. The absolute truth of outer aspect, and of inner mind, he seizes infallibly; but there is one part of the creatures which he never, for an instant, thinks of, or cares for,—their bones. Do you suppose that, from first to last, in painting such a picture, it would ever enter Sir Joshua’s mind to think what a dog’s skull would look like, beside a baby’s? The quite essential facts to him are those of which the skull gives no information—that the baby has a flattish pink nose, and the dog a bossy black one. You might dissect all the dead dogs in the water supply of London without finding out, what, as a painter, it is here your only business precisely to know,—what sort of shininess there is on the end of a terrier’s nose; and for the position and action of the creatures, all the four doctors together, who set Bustle’s leg for him the other day, when he jumped out of a two-pair-of-stairs window to bark at the volunteers, could not have told Sir Joshua how to make his crouching terrier look ready to snap, nor how to throw the child’s arm over its neck in complete, yet not languid, rest.

155. Sir Joshua, then, does not think of, or care for, anatomy, in this picture; but if he had, would it have done him harm? You may easily see that the child’s limbs are not drawn with the precision that Mantegna, Dürer, or Michael Angelo would have given them. Would some of their science not have bettered the picture?

In your Rudimentary Series, I have placed in sequence two of Dürer’s most celebrated plates (R. 65, R. 66), the coat of arms with the skull, and the Madonna crowned by angels; and that you may see precisely what qualities are, and are not, in this last, I have enlarged the head by photography, and placed it in your Reference Series (117). You will find the skull is perfectly understood, and exquisitely engraved, but the face, imperfectly understood and coarsely engraved. No man who has studied the skull as carefully as Dürer did, ever could engrave a face beautifully, for the perception of the bones continually thrusts itself upon him in wrong places, and in trying to conquer or modify it, he distorts the flesh. Where the features are marked, and full of character, he can quit himself of the impression; but in the rounded contour of women’s faces he is always forced to think of the skull; and even in his ordinary work often draws more of bones and hair, than face.

156. I could easily give you more definite, but very disagreeable, proofs of the evil of knowing the anatomy of the human face too intimately: but will rather give you further evidence by examining the skull and face of the creature who has taught us so much already,—the eagle.

Here is a slight sketch of the skull of the golden eagle. It may be interesting to you sometimes to make such drawings roughly for the sake of the points of mechanical arrangement—as here in the circular bones of the eye-socket; but don’t suppose that drawing these a million of times over will ever help you in the least to draw an eagle itself. On the contrary, it would almost to a certainty hinder you from noticing the essential point in an eagle’s head—the projection of the brow. All the main work of the eagle’s eye is, as we saw, in looking down. To keep the sunshine above from teasing it, the eye is put under a triangular penthouse, which is precisely the most characteristic thing in the bird’s whole aspect. Its hooked beak does not materially distinguish it from a cockatoo, but its hooded eye does. But that projection is not accounted for in the skull; and so little does the anatomist care about it, that you may hunt through the best modern works on ornithology, and you will find eagles drawn with all manner of dissections of skulls, claws, clavicles, sternums, and gizzards; but you won’t find so much as one poor falcon drawn with a falcon’s eye.

157. But there is another quite essential point in an eagle’s head, in comprehending which, again, the skull will not help us. The skull in the human creature fails in three essential points. It is eyeless, noseless, and lipless. It fails only in an eagle in the two points of eye and lip; for an eagle has no nose worth mentioning; his beak is only a prolongation of his jaws. But he has lips very much worth mentioning, and of which his skull gives no account. One misses them much from a human skull:—“Here hung those lips that I have kissed, I know not how oft,”—but from an eagle’s you miss them more, for he is distinct from other birds in having with his own eagle’s eye, a dog’s lips, or very nearly such; an entirely fleshy and ringent mouth, bluish pink, with a perpetual grin upon it.

So that if you look, not at his skull, but at him, attentively enough, you will precisely get Æschylus’s notion of him, essential in the Greek mind—πτηνὸς κύων δαφοινὸς αἰετός—and then, if you want to see the use of his beak or bill, as distinguished from a dog’s teeth, take a drawing from the falconry of the Middle Ages, and you will see how a piece of flesh becomes a rag to him, a thing to tear up,—διαρταμήσει σώματος μέγα ῥάκος. There you have it precisely, in a falcon I got out of Mr. Coxe’s favourite fourteenth century missal.

Now look through your natural history books from end to end; see if you can find one drawing, with all their anatomy, which shows you either the eagle’s eye, his lips, or this essential use of his beak, so as to enable you thoroughly to understand those two lines of Æschylus: then, look at this Greek eagle on a coin of Elis, R. 50, and this Pisan one, in marble, Edu. 131, and you will not doubt any more that it is better to look at the living birds, than to cut them to pieces.

158. Anatomy, then,—I will assume that you grant, for the moment, as I will assuredly prove to you eventually,—will not help us to draw the true appearances of things. But may it not add to our intelligent conception of their nature?

So far from doing this, the anatomical study which has, to our much degradation and misfortune, usurped the place, and taken the name, at once of art and of natural history, has produced the most singularly mischievous effect on the faculty of delineation with respect to different races of animals. In all recent books on natural history, you will find the ridiculous and ugly creatures clone well, the noble and beautiful creatures done, I do not say merely ill, but in no wise. You will find the law hold universally that apes, pigs, rats, weasels, foxes, and the like,—but especially apes,—are drawn admirably; but not a stag, not a lamb, not a horse, not a lion;—the nobler the creature, the more stupidly it is always drawn, not from feebleness of art power, but a far deadlier fault than that—a total want of sympathy with the noble qualities of any creature, and a loathsome delight in their disgusting qualities. And this law is so thoroughly carried out that the great French historian of the mammalia, St. Hilaire, chooses, as his single example of the highest of the race, the most nearly bestial type he can find, human, in the world. Let no girl ever look at the book, nor any youth who is willing to take my word; let those who doubt me, look at the example he has given of womankind.

159. But admit that this is only French anatomy, or ill-studied anatomy, and that, rightly studied, as Dr. Acland, for instance, would teach it us, it might do us some kind of good.

I must reserve for my lectures on the school of Florence any analysis of the effect of anatomical study on European art and character; you will find some notice of it in my lecture on Michael Angelo; and in the course of that analysis, it will be necessary for me to withdraw the statement made in the “Stones of Venice,” that anatomical science was helpful to great men, though harmful to mean ones. I am now certain that the greater the intellect, the more fatal are the forms of degradation to which it becomes liable in the course of anatomical studies; and that to Michael Angelo, of all men, the mischief was greatest, in destroying his religious passion and imagination, and leading him to make every spiritual conception subordinate to the display of his knowledge of the body. To-day, however, I only wish to give you my reasons for withdrawing anatomy from your course of study in these schools.

160. I do so, first, simply with reference to our time, convenience, and systematic method. It has become a habit with drawing-masters to confuse this particular science of anatomy with their own art of drawing, though they confuse no other science with that art. Admit that, in order to draw a tree, you should have a knowledge of botany: Do you expect me to teach you botany here? Whatever I want you to know of it I shall send you to your Professor of Botany and to the Botanic Gardens, to learn. I may, perhaps, give you a rough sketch of the lines of timber in a bough, but nothing more.

So again, admit that, to draw a stone, you need a knowledge of geology. I have told you that you do not, but admit it. Do you expect me to teach you, here, the relations between quartz and oxide of iron; or between the Silurian and Permian systems? If you care about them, go to Professor Phillips, and come back to me when you know them.

And, in like manner, admit that, to draw a man, you want the knowledge of his bones:—you do not; but admit that you do. Why should you expect me, here, to teach you the most difficult of all the sciences? If you want to know it, go to an hospital, and cut dead bodies to pieces till you are satisfied; then come to me, and I’ll make a shift to teach you to draw, even then—though your eyes and memory will be full of horrible things which Heaven never meant you so much as a glance at. But don’t expect me to help you in that ghastly work: any more than among the furnaces and retorts in Professor Maskelyne’s laboratory.

161. Let us take one more step in the logical sequence. You do not, I have told you, need either chemistry, botany, geology, or anatomy, to enable you to understand art, or produce it. But there is one science which you must be acquainted with. You must very intensely and thoroughly know—how to behave. You cannot so much as feel the difference between two casts of drapery, between two tendencies of line,—how much less between dignity and baseness of gesture,—but by your own dignity of character. But, though this is an essential science, and although I cannot teach you to lay one line beside another rightly, unless you have this science, you don’t expect me in these schools to teach you how to behave, if you happen not to know it before!

162. Well, here is one reason, and a sufficiently logical one, as you will find it on consideration, for the exclusion of anatomical study from all drawing schools. But there is a more cogent reason than this for its exclusion, especially from elementary drawing-schools. It may be sometimes desirable that a student should see, as I said, how very unlike a face a skull is; and at a leisure moment he may, without much harm, observe the equivocation between knees and ankles by which it is contrived that his legs, if properly made at the joints, will only bend backwards, but a crane’s forwards. But that a young boy, or girl, brought up fresh to the schools of art from the country, should be set to stare, against every particle of wholesome grain in their natures, at the Elgin marbles, and to draw them with dismal application, until they imagine they like them, makes the whole youthful temper rotten with affectation, and sickly with strained and ambitious fancy. It is still worse for young persons to be compelled to endure the horror of the dissecting-room, or to be made familiar with the conditions of actual bodily form, in a climate where the restraints of dress must for ever prevent the body from being perfect in contour, or regarded with entirely simple feeling.

163. I have now, perhaps too often for your patience, told you that you must always draw for the sake of your subject—never for the sake of your picture. What you wish to see in reality, that you should make an effort to show, in pictures and statues; what you do not wish to see in reality, you should not try to draw.

But there is, I suppose, a very general impression on the mind of persons interested in the arts, that because nations living in cold climates are necessarily unfamiliar with the sight of the naked body, therefore, art should take it upon herself to show it them; and that they will be elevated in thought, and made more simple and grave in temper, by seeing, at least in colour and marble, what the people of the south saw in its verity.

164. I have neither time nor inclination to enter at present into discussion of the various effects, on the morality of nations, of more or less frank showing of the nude form. There is no question that if shown at all, it should be shown fearlessly, and seen constantly; but I do not care at present to debate the question: neither will I delay you by any expression of my reasons for the rule I am about to give. Trust me, I have many; and I can assert to you as a positive and perpetual law, that so much of the nude body as in the daily life of the nation may be shown with modesty, and seen with reverence and delight,—so much, and no more, ought to be shown by the national arts, either of painting or sculpture. What, more than this, either art exhibits, will, assuredly, pervert taste, and, in all probability, morals.

165. It will, assuredly, pervert taste in this essential point, that the polite ranks of the nation will come to think the living creature and its dress exempt from the highest laws of taste; and that while a man or woman must, indeed, be seen dressed or undressed with dignity, in marble, they may be dressed or undressed, if not with indignity, at least, with less than dignity, in the ball-room, and the street. Now the law of all living art is that the man and woman must be more beautiful than their pictures, and their pictures as decorous as the living man or woman; and that real dress, and gesture, and behaviour, should be more graceful than any marble or colour can effect similitude of.

166. Thus the idea of a different dress in art and reality, of which that of art is to be the ideal one, perverts taste in dress; and the study of the nude which is rarely seen, as much perverts taste in art.

Of all pieces of art that I know, skilful in execution, and not criminal in intention;—without any exception, quite the most vulgar, and in the solemn sense of the word, most abominable, are the life studies which are said to be the best made in modern times,—those of Mulready, exhibited as models in the Kensington Museum.

167. How far the study of the seldom-seen nude leads to perversion of morals, I will not, to-day, inquire; but I beg you to observe that even among the people where it was most frank and pure, it unquestionably led to evil far greater than any good which demonstrably can be traced to it. Scarcely any of the moral power of Greece depended on her admiration of beauty, or strength in the body. The power of Greece depended on practice in military exercise, involving severe and continual ascetic discipline of the senses; on a perfect code of military heroism and patriotic honour; on the desire to live by the laws of an admittedly divine justice; and on the vivid conception of the presence of spiritual beings. The mere admiration of physical beauty in the body, and the arts which sought its expression, not only conduced greatly to the fall of Greece, but were the cause of errors and crimes in her greatest time, which must for ever sadden our happiest thoughts of her, and have rendered her example almost useless to the future.

168. I have named four causes of her power; discipline of senses; romantic ideal of heroic honour; respect for justice; and belief in God. There was a fifth—the most precious of all—the belief in the purity and force of life in man; and that true reverence for domestic affection, which, in the strangest way, being the essential strength of every nation under the sun, had yet been lost sight of as the chief element of Greek virtue, though the Iliad itself is nothing but the story of the punishment of the rape of Helen; and though every Greek hero called himself chiefly by his paternal name,—Tydides, rather than Diomed;—Pelides, rather than Achilles.

169. All of you who have ever read your Gospels carefully must have wondered, sometimes, what could be the meaning of those words,—“If any speak against the Son of Man it shall be forgiven; but if against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven, neither in this world nor in the next.”

The passage may have many meanings which I do not know; but one meaning I know positively, and I tell you so just as frankly as I would that I knew the meaning of a verse in Homer.

Those of you who still go to chapel say every day your creed; and, I suppose, too often, less and less every day believing it. Now, you may cease to believe two articles of it, and,—admitting Christianity to be true,—still be forgiven. But I can tell you—you must not cease to believe the third!

You begin by saying that you believe in an Almighty Father. Well, you may entirely lose the sense of that Fatherhood, and yet be forgiven.

You go on to say that you believe in a Saviour Son. You may entirely lose the sense of that Sonship, and yet be forgiven.

But the third article—disbelieve if you dare!

“I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life.”

Disbelieve that; and your own being is degraded into the state of dust driven by the wind; and the elements of dissolution have entered your very heart and soul.

All Nature, with one voice—with one glory,—is set to teach you reverence for the life communicated to you from the Father of Spirits. The song of birds, and their plumage; the scent of flowers, their colour, their very existence, are in direct connection with the mystery of that communicated life: and all the strength, and all the arts of men, are measured by, and founded upon, their reverence for the passion, and their guardianship of the purity, of Love.

170. Gentlemen,—the word by which I at this moment address you—by which it is the first of all your duties through life, to permit all men to address you with truth—that epithet of ‘gentle,’ as you well know, indicates the intense respect for race and fatherhood—for family dignity and chastity,—which was visibly the strength of Rome, as it had been, more disguisedly, the strength of Greece. But have you enough noticed that your Saxon word ‘kindness’ has exactly the same relation to ‘kin,’ and to the Chaucerian ‘kind,’ that ‘gentle’ has to ‘gentilis’?

Think out that matter a little, and you will find that—much as it looks like it—neither chemistry, nor anatomy, nor republicanism, are going to have it all their own way—in the making of either beasts, or gentlemen. They look sometimes, indeed, as if they had got as far as two of the Mosaic plagues, and manufactured frogs in the ditches, and lice on the land; but their highest boasters will not claim, yet, so much even as that poor victory.

171. My friends, let me very strongly recommend you to give up that hope of finding the principle of life in dead bodies; but to take all pains to keep the life pure and holy in the living bodies you have got; and, farther, not to seek your national amusement in the destruction of animals, nor your national safety in the destruction of men; but to look for all your joy to kindness, and for all your strength to domestic faith, and law of ancestral honour. Perhaps you will not now any more think it strange that in beginning your natural history studies in this place, I mean to teach you heraldry, but not anatomy. For, as you learn to read the shields, and remember the stories, of the great houses of England, and find how all the arts that glorified them were founded on the passions that inspired, you will learn assuredly, that the utmost secret of national power is in living with honour, and the utmost secrets of human art are in gentleness and truth.

LECTURE IX.
THE STORY OF THE HALCYON.

172. I must to-day briefly recapitulate the purport of the preceding lectures, as we are about now to enter on a new branch of our subject.

I stated, in the first two, that the wisdom of art and the wisdom of science consisted in their being each devoted unselfishly to the service of men; in the third, that art was only the shadow of our knowledge of facts; and that the reality was always to be acknowledged as more beautiful than the shadow. In the fourth lecture I endeavoured to show that the wise modesty of art and science lay in attaching due value to the power and knowledge of other people, when greater than our own; and in the fifth, that the wise self-sufficiency of art and science lay in a proper enjoyment of our own knowledge and power, after it was thus modestly esteemed. The sixth lecture stated that sight was a distinctly spiritual power, and that its kindness or tenderness was proportioned to its clearness. Lastly, in the seventh and eighth lectures, I asserted that this spiritual sight, concerned with external aspects of things, was the source of all necessary knowledge in art; and that the artist has no concern with invisible structures, organic or inorganic.

173. No concern with invisible structures. But much with invisible things; with passion, and with historical association. And in these two closing lectures, I hope partly to justify myself for pressing on your attention some matters as little hitherto thought of in drawing-schools, as the exact sciences have been highly, and, I believe, unjustly, esteemed;—mythology, namely, and heraldry.

I can but in part justify myself now. Your experience of the interest which may be found in these two despised sciences will be my best justification. But to-day (as we are about to begin our exercises in bird-drawing) I think it may interest you to review some of the fables connected with the natural history of a single bird, and to consider what effect the knowledge of such tradition is likely to have on our mode of regarding the animated creation in general.

174. Let us take an instance of the feeling towards birds which is especially characteristic of the English temper at this day, in its entire freedom from superstition.

“The little Egret in my possession is a most beautiful specimen: it was killed by a labourer with a stick, in Ake Carr, near Beverley, about 1840, and was brought to me, tied up in a pocket-handkerchief, covered with black wet mud and blood, in which state it was sent to Mr. Reed, of Doncaster, and restored by him in a most marvellous manner.”

175. Now, you will feel at once that, while the peasant was beating this bird into a piece of bloody flesh with his stick, he could not, in any true sense, see the bird; that he had no pleasure either in the sight of that, or of anything near it.

176. You would certainly have gone, at least, the third of the way towards educating him. Then the next thing to be contrived would be that he should be able to see a man rightly, as well as a bird; to understand and love what was good in a man, so that supposing his master was a good man, the sight of his master should be a joy to him. You would say that he was therein better educated than if he wanted to put a gun through a hedge and shoot his master.

Then the last part of education will be—whatever is meant by that beatitude of the pure in heart—seeing God rightly, of which I shall not speak to-day.

177. And in all these phases of education, the main point, you observe, is that it should be a beatitude: and that a man should learn “χαίρειν ὀρθῶς:” and this rejoicing is above all things to be in actual sight; you have the truth exactly in the saying of Dante when he is brought before Beatrice, in heaven, that his eyes “satisfied themselves for their ten years’ thirst.”

And I feel it distinctly my duty, though with solemn and true deference to the masters of education in this university, to say that I believe our modern methods of teaching, and especially the institution of severe and frequent examination, to be absolutely opposed to this great end; and that the result of competitive labour in youth is infallibly to make men know all they learn wrongly, and hate the habit of learning; so that instead of coming to Oxford to rejoice in their work, men look forward to the years they are to pass under her teaching as a deadly agony, from which they are fain to escape, and sometimes for their life, must escape, into any method of sanitary frivolity.

178. I go back to my peasant and his egret. You all think with some horror of this man, beating the bird to death, as a brutal person. He is so; but how far are we English gentlemen, as a body, raised above him? We are more delicately nurtured, and shrink from the notion of bruising the creature and spoiling its feathers. That is so far right, and well. But in all probability this countryman, rude and cruel though he might be, had some other object in the rest of his day than the killing of birds. And very earnestly I ask you, have English gentlemen, as a class, any other real object in their whole existence than killing birds? If they discern a duty, they will indeed do it to the death; but have the English aristocracy at this moment any clear notion of their duty? I believe solemnly, and without jest, their idea of their caste is that its life should be, distinctively from inferior human lives, spent in shooting.

And that is not an idea of caste with which England, at this epoch, can any longer be governed.

179. I have no time to-day to push my argument farther; but I have said enough, I think, to induce you to bear with me in the statement of my main theorem—that reading and writing are in no sense education, unless they contribute to this end of making us feel kindly towards all creatures; but that drawing, and especially physiologic drawing, is vital education of a most precious kind. Farther, that more good would be done by any English nobleman who would keep his estate lovely in its native wildness; and let every animal live upon it in peace that chose to come there, than will be done, as matters are going now, by the talk of all the Lords in Parliament as long as we live to listen to them; and I will even venture to tell you my hope, though I shall be dead long before its possible fulfilment, that one day the English people will, indeed, so far recognize what education means as to surround this university with the loveliest park in England, twenty miles square; that they will forbid, in that environment, every unclean, mechanical, and vulgar trade and manufacture, as any man would forbid them in his own garden;—that they will abolish every base and ugly building, and nest of vice and misery, as they would cast out a devil;—that the streams of the Isis and Cherwell will be kept pure and quiet among their fields and trees; and that, within this park, every English wild flower that can bloom in lowland will be suffered to grow in luxuriance, and every living creature that haunts wood and stream know that it has happy refuge.

And now to our immediate work.

180. The natural history of anything, or of any creature, divides itself properly into three branches.

We have secondly to examine and describe the thing, or creature, in its actual state, with utmost attainable veracity of observation.

Lastly, we have to examine under what laws of chemistry and physics the matter of which the thing is made has been collected and constructed.

Thus we have first to know the poetry of it—i.e., what it has been to man, or what man has made of it.

Secondly, the actual facts of its existence.

Thirdly, the physical causes of these facts, if we can discover them.

181. Now, it is customary, and may be generally advisable, to confine the term ‘natural history’ to the last two branches of knowledge only. I do not care what we call the first branch; but, in the accounts of animals that I prepare for my schools at Oxford, the main point with me will be the mythology of them; the second, their actual state and aspect, (second, this, because almost always hitherto only half known); and the anatomy and chemistry of their bodies, I shall very rarely, and partially, as I told you, examine at all: but I shall take the greatest pains to get at the creature’s habits of life; and know all its ingenuities, humours, delights, and intellectual powers. That is to say, what art it has, and what affection; and how these are prepared for in its external form.

182. I say, deliberately and energetically, ‘prepared for,’ in opposition to the idea, too prevalent in modern philosophy, of the form’s being fortuitously developed by repetition of impulse. It is of course true that the aspects and characters of stones, flowers, birds, beasts, and men, are inseparably connected with the conditions under which they are appointed to have existence; but the method of this connection is infinitely varied; so far from fortuitous, it appears grotesquely, often terrifically arbitrary; and neither stone, flower, beast, nor man can understand any single reason of the arbitrament, or comprehend why its Creator made it thus.

183. To take the simplest of instances,—which happens also to be one of the most important to you as artists,—it is appointed that vertebrated animals shall have no more than four legs, and that, if they require to fly, the two legs in front must become wings, it being against law that they should have more than these four members in ramification from the spine.

Can any law be conceived more arbitrary, or more apparently causeless? What strongly planted three-legged animals there might have been! what symmetrically radiant five-legged ones! what volatile six-winged ones! what circumspect seven-headed ones! Had Darwinism been true, we should long ago have split our heads in two with foolish thinking, or thrust out, from above our covetous hearts, a hundred desirous arms and clutching hands; and changed ourselves into Briarean Cephalopoda. But the law is around us, and within; unconquerable; granting, up to a certain limit, power over our bodies to circumstance and will; beyond that limit, inviolable, inscrutable, and, so far as we know, eternal.

184. For every lower animal, similar laws are established; under the grasp of these it is capable of change, in visibly permitted oscillation between certain points; beyond which, according to present experience, it cannot pass. The adaptation of the instruments it possesses in its members to the conditions of its life is always direct, and occasionally beautiful; but in the plurality of instances, partial, and involving painful supplementary effort. Some animals have to dig with their noses, some to build with their tails, some to spin with their stomachs: their dexterities are usually few—their awkwardnesses numberless;—a lion is continually puzzled how to hold a bone; and an eagle can scarcely pull the meat off one, without upsetting himself.

185. Respecting the origin of these variously awkward, imperfectly, or grotesquely developed phases of form and power, you need not at present inquire: in all probability the race of man is appointed to live in wonder, and in acknowledgment of ignorance; but if ever he is to know any of the secrets of his own or of brutal existence, it will assuredly be through discipline of virtue, not through inquisitiveness of science. I have just used the expression, “had Darwinism been true,” implying its fallacy more positively than is justifiable in the present state of our knowledge; but very positively I can say to you that I have never heard yet one logical argument in its favour, and I have heard, and read, many that were beneath contempt. For instance, by the time you have copied one or two of your exercises on the feather of the halcyon, you will be more interested in the construction and disposition of plume-filaments than heretofore; and you may, perhaps, refer, in hope of help, to Mr. Darwin’s account of the peacock’s feather. I went to it myself, hoping to learn some of the existing laws of life which regulate the local disposition of the colour. But none of these appear to be known; and I am informed only that peacocks have grown to be peacocks out of brown pheasants, because the young feminine brown pheasants like fine feathers. Whereupon I say to myself, “Then either there was a distinct species of brown pheasants originally born with a taste for fine feathers; and therefore with remarkable eyes in their heads,—which would be a much more wonderful distinction of species than being born with remarkable eyes in their tails,—or else all pheasants would have been peacocks by this time!” And I trouble myself no more about the Darwinian theory.

When you have drawn some of the actual patterns of plume and scale with attention, I believe you will see reason to think that spectra of organic species may be at least as distinct as those of metals or gases; but learn at all events what they are now, and never mind what they have been.

186. Nor need you care for methods of classification any more than for the origin of classes. Leave the physiologists to invent names, and dispute over them; your business is to know the creature, not the name of it momentarily fashionable in scientific circles. What practical service you can get from the order at present adopted, take, without contention; and as far as possible, use English words, or be sure you understand the Latin ones.

187. For instance, the order at present adopted in arranging the species of birds, is, as you know, founded only on their ways of using their feet.

188. This classification is unscholarly, because there are many snatchers and scratchers who perch as well as the sitters; and many of the swimmers sit, when ashore, more neatly than the sitters themselves; and are most grave insessors, in long rows, on rock or sand: also, ‘insessor’ does not mean properly a sitter, but a besieger; and it is awkward to call a bird a ‘Rasor.’ Still, the use of the feet is (on the whole) characteristic, and convenient for first rough arrangement; only, in general reference, it will be better to use plain English words than those stiff Latin ones, or their ugly translations. Linnæus, for all his classes except the stilt-walkers, used the name of the particular birds which were the best types of their class; he called the snatchers “hawks” (Accipitres), the swimmers, geese, (Anseres), the scratchers, fowls, (Gallinae), and the perchers, sparrows, (Passeres). He has no class of climbers; but he has one since omitted by Cuvier, “pies,” which, for certain mythological reasons presently to be noted, I will ask you to keep. This will give you seven orders, altogether, to be remembered; and for each of these we will take the name of its most representative bird. The hawk has best right undoubtedly to stand for the snatchers; we will have his adversary, the heron, for the stilt-walkers; you will find this very advisable, no less than convenient; because some of the beaks of the stilt-walkers turn down, and some turn up; but the heron’s is straight, and so he stands well as a pure middle type. Then, certainly, gulls will better represent the swimmers than geese; and pheasants are a prettier kind of scratchers than fowls. We will take parrots for the climbers, magpies for the pies, and sparrows for the perchers. Then take them in this order: Hawks, parrots, pies, sparrows, pheasants, gulls, herons; and you can then easily remember them. For you have hawks at one end, the herons at the other, and sparrows in the middle, with pies on one side and pheasants opposite, for which arrangement you will find there is good reason; then the parrots necessarily go beside the hawks, and the gulls beside the herons.

189. The bird whose mythic history I am about to read to you belongs essentially and characteristically to that order of pies, picæ, or painted birds, which the Greeks continually opposed in their thoughts and traditions to the singing birds, representing the one by the magpie, and the other by the nightingale. The myth of Autolycus and Philammon, and Pindar’s exquisite story of the infidelity of Coronis, are the centres of almost countless traditions, all full of meaning, dependent on the various ποικιλία, to eye and ear, of these opposed races of birds. The Greek idea of the Halcyon united both these sources of delight. I will read you what notices of it I find most interesting, not in order of date, but of brevity; the simplest first.

190. “And the King of Trachis, the child of the Morning Star, married Alcyone. And they perished, both of them, through their pride; for the king called his wife, Hera; and she her husband, Zeus: but Zeus made birds of them (αὐτους ἀπωρνέωσε), and he made the one a Halcyon, and the other a Sea-mew.”—Appollodorus, i. 7, 4.

“When the King of Trachis, the son of Hesperus, or of Lucifer, and Philonis, perished in shipwreck, his wife Alcyone, the daughter of Æolus and Ægiale, for love of him, threw herself into the sea;—who both, by the mercy of the gods, were turned into the birds called Halcyons. These birds, in the winter-time, build their nests, and lay their eggs, and hatch their young on the sea; and the sea is quiet in those days, which the sailors call the Halcyonia.”—Hyginus, Fab. LXV.

191. “Now the King of Trachis, the son of Lucifer, had to wife Halcyone. And he, wishing to consult the oracle of Apollo concerning the state of his kingdom, was forbidden to go, by Halcyone, nevertheless he went; and perished by shipwreck. And when his body was brought to his wife Halcyone, she threw herself into the sea. Afterwards, by the mercy of Thetis and Lucifer, they were both turned into the sea-birds called Halcyons. And you ought to know that Halcyone is the woman’s name, and is always a feminine noun; but the bird’s name is Halcyon, masculine and feminine, and so also its plural, Halcyones. Also those birds make their nests in the sea, in the middle of winter; in which days the calm is so deep that hardly anything in the sea can be moved. Thence, also, the days themselves are called Halcyonia.”—Servius, in Virg. Georg. i. 399.

192. “And the pairing of birds, as I said, is for the most part in spring time, and early summer; except the halcyon’s. For the halcyon has its young about the turn of days in winter, wherefore, when those days are fine, they are called ‘Halcyonine’ (ἀλκυόνειοι); seven, indeed, before the turn, and seven after it, as Simonides poetized, (ἐποίησεν).