The Eagle's Nest

LECTURE IV.

THE POWER OF MODESTY IN SCIENCE AND ART

65. I believe, gentlemen, that some of you must have been surprised,—and, if I succeeded in making my last lecture clearly intelligible, many ought to have been surprised,—at the limitations I asked you to admit with respect to the idea of science, and the position which I asked you to assign to it. We are so much, by the chances of our time, accustomed to think of science as a process of discovery, that I am sure some of you must have been gravely disconcerted by my requesting, and will to-day be more disconcerted by my firmly recommending, you to use the word, and reserve the thought, of science, for the acquaintance with things long since discovered, and established as true. We have the misfortune to live in an epoch of transition from irrational dulness to irrational excitement; and while once it was the highest courage of science to question anything, it is now an agony to her to leave anything unquestioned. So that, unawares, we come to measure the dignity of a scientific person by the newness of his assertions, and the dexterity of his methods in debate; entirely forgetting that science cannot become perfect, as an occupation of intellect, while anything remains to be discovered; nor wholesome as an instrument of education, while anything is permitted to be debated.

66. It appears, doubtless, a vain idea to you that an end should ever be put to discovery; but remember, such impossibility merely signifies that mortal science must remain imperfect. Nevertheless, in many directions, the limit to practically useful discovery is rapidly being approached; and you, as students, would do well to suppose that it has been already attained. To take the science of ornithology, for instance: I suppose you would have very little hope of shooting a bird in England, which should be strange to any master of the science, or of shooting one anywhere, which would not fall under some species already described. And although at the risk of life, and by the devotion of many years to observation, some of you might hope to bring home to our museum a titmouse with a spot on its tail which had never before been seen, I strongly advise you not to allow your studies to be disturbed by so dazzling a hope, nor your life exclusively devoted even to so important an object. In astronomy, the fields of the sky have not yet, indeed, been ransacked by the most costly instruments; and it may be in store for some of you to announce the existence, or even to analyse the materials, of some luminous point which may be seen two or three times in the course of a century, by any one who will journey to India for the purpose; and, when there, is favoured by the weather. But, for all practical purposes, the stars already named and numbered are as many as we require to hear of; and if you thoroughly know the visible motions, and clearly conceive the known relations, even of those which can be seen by the naked eye, you will have as much astronomy as is necessary, either for the occupation of thought or the direction of navigation.

67. But, if you were discontented with the limit I proposed for your sciences, much more, I imagine, you were doubtful of the ranks I assigned to them. It is not, I know, in your modern system, the general practice to put chemistry, the science of atoms, lowest, and theology, the science of Deity, highest: nay, many of us have ceased to think of theology as a science at all, but rather as a speculative pursuit, in subject, separate from science; and in temper, opposed to her.

Yet it can scarcely be necessary for me to point out to you, in so many terms, that what we call theology, if true, is a science; and if false, is not theology; or that the distinction even between natural science and theology is illogical: for you might distinguish indeed between natural and unnatural science, but not between natural and spiritual, unless you had determined first that a spirit had no nature. You will find the facts to be, that entirely true knowledge is both possible and necessary—first of facts relating to matter, and then of the forces and passions that act on or in matter;—that, of all these forces, the noblest we can know is the energy which either imagines, or perceives, the existence of a living power greater than its own; and that the study of the relations which exist between this energy, and the resultant action of men, are as much subjects of pure science as the curve of a projectile. The effect, for instance, upon your temper, intellect, and conduct during the day, of your going to chapel with or without belief in the efficacy of prayer, is just as much a subject of definite science, as the effect of your breakfast on the coats of your stomach. Which is the higher knowledge, I have, with confidence, told you; and am not afraid of any test to which you may submit my assertion.

68. Assuming such limitation, then, and such rank, for our knowledge; assuming, also, what I have now, perhaps to your weariness, told you, that graphic art is the shadow, or image, of knowledge,—I wish to point out to you to-day the function, with respect to both, of the virtue called by the Greeks ‘σωφροσύνη’ ‘safeness of mind,’ corresponding to the ‘salus’ or ‘sanitas’ mentis, of the Latins; ‘health of heart’ is, perhaps, the best English; if we receive the words ‘mens,’ ‘μῆνις,’ or ‘φρήν,’ as expressing the passionate soul of the human being, distinguished from the intellectual; the ‘mens sana’ being possible to all of us, though the contemplative range of height her wisdom may be above our capacities; so that to each of us Heaven only permits the ambition of being σοφός, but commands the resolution to be σώφρων.

69. And, without discussing the use of the word by different writers, I will tell you that the dearest and safest idea of the mental state itself is to be gained from the representations of it by the words of ancient Christian religion, and even from what you may think its superstitions. Without any discussion also as to the personal existence or traditional character of evil spirits, you will find it a practical fact, that external temptations and inevitable trials of temper, have power against you which your health and virtue depend on your resisting; that, if not resisted, the evil energy of them will pass into your own heart, φρήν, or μῆνις; and that the ordinary and vulgarized phrase “the Devil, or betraying Spirit, is in him” is the most scientifically accurate which you can apply to any person so influenced. You will find also that, in the compass of literature, the casting out of, or cleansing from, such a state is best symbolized for you by the image of one who had been wandering wild and naked among tombs, sitting still, clothed, and in his right mind, and that in whatever literal or figurative sense you receive the Biblical statement of what followed, this is absolutely certain, that the herd of swine hastening to their destruction, in perfect sympathy with each other’s fury, is the most accurate symbol ever given, in literature, of consummate human ἀφροσύνη.

(The conditions of insanity,5 delighting in scenes of death, which affect at the present time the arts of revolutionary Europe, were illustrated in the sequel of this lecture: but I neither choose to take any permanent notice of the examples I referred to, nor to publish any part of what I said, until I can enter more perfectly into the analysis of the elements of evil passion which always distorted and polluted even the highest arts of Greek and Christian loyal religion; and now occupy in deadly entireness, the chambers of imagination, devastated, and left desolate of joy, by impiety, and disobedience.

In relation to the gloom of gray colour characteristic especially of the modern French revolutionary school, I entered into some examination of the conditions of real temperance and reserve in colour, showing that it consisted not in refusing colour, but in governing it; and that the most pure and bright colours might be thus perfectly governed, while the most dull were probably also the most violent and intemperate. But it would be useless to print this part of the lecture without the colour-illustrations used.

Passing to the consideration of intemperance and immodesty in the choice even of landscape subjects, I referred thus for contrast, to the quietude of Turner’s “Greta and Tees.”)

70. If you wish to feel the reserve of this drawing, look, first, into the shops at their display of common chromo-lithotints; see how they are made up of Matterhorns, Monte Rosas, blue glaciers, green lakes, white towers, magnificent banditti, romantic peasantry, or always-successful sportsmen or fishermen in Highland costume; and then see what Turner is content with. No Matterhorns are needful, or even particularly pleasing to him. A bank, some eight or ten feet high, of Yorkshire shale is enough. He would not thank you for giving him all the giant forests of California:—would not be so much interested in them nor half so happy among them, as he is here with a switch of oak sapling, which the Greta has pulled down among the stones, and teased awhile, and which, now that the water is lower, tries to get up again, out of its way.

He does not want any towers or towns. Here you are to be contented with three square windows of a country gentleman’s house. He does not want resplendent banditti. Behold! here is a brown cow and a white one: what would you have more? And this scarcely-falling rapid of the Tees—here pausing to circle round a pool, and there laughing as it trips over a ledge of rock, six or seven inches high, is more to him—infinitely more—than would be the whole colossal drainage of Lake Erie into Lake Ontario, which Carlyle has justly taken for a type of the Niagara of our national precipitous ἀφροσύνη.

71. I need not point out to you the true temperance of colour in this drawing—how slightly green the trees are, how softly blue the sky.

Now I put a chromo-lithotint beside it.

Well, why is that good, this bad? Simply because if you think, and work, and discipline yourselves nobly, you will come to like the Greta and Tees; if not, you will come to like this. The one is what a strong man likes; the other what a weak one likes: that is modest, full of true αἰδὼς, noble restraint, noble reverence;—this has no αἰδὼς, no fear, no measure;—not even purpose, except, by accumulation of whatever it can see or snatch, to move the vile apathy of the public ἀφροσύνη into sensation.

72. The apathy of ἀφροσύνη—note the expression! You might think that it was σωφροσύνη, which was apathetic, and that intemperance was full of passion. No; the exact contrary is the fact. It is death in ourselves which seeks the exaggerated external stimulus. I must return for a moment to the art of modern France.

The most complete rest and refreshment I can get, when I am overworked, in London (for if I try to rest in the fields, I find them turned into villas in the course of the week before) is in seeing a French play. But the French act so perfectly that I am obliged to make sure beforehand that all is to end well, or it is as bad as being helplessly present at some real misery.

I was beguiled the other day, by seeing it announced as a “Comédie,” into going to see “Frou-Frou.” Most of you probably know that the three first of its five acts are comedy, or at least playful drama, and that it plunges down, in the two last, to the sorrowfullest catastrophe of all conceivable—though too frequent in daily life—in which irretrievable grief is brought about by the passion of a moment, and the ruin of all that she loves, caused by the heroic error of an entirely good and unselfish person. The sight of it made me thoroughly ill, and I was not myself again for a week.

But, some time afterwards, I was speaking of it to a lady who knew French character well; and asked her how it was possible for a people so quick in feeling to endure the action before them of a sorrow so poignant. She said, “It is because they have not sympathy enough: they are interested only by the external scene, and are, in truth, at present, dull, not quick in feeling. My own French maid went the other evening to see that very play: when she came home, and I asked her what she thought of it, she said ‘it was charming, and she had amused herself immensely.’ ‘Amused! but is not the story very sad?’ ‘Oh, yes, mademoiselle, it is bien triste, but it is charming; and then, how pretty Frou-Frou looks in her silk dress!’”

73. Gentlemen, the French maid’s mode of regarding the tragedy is, if you think of it, a most true image of the way in which fashionable society regards the world-suffering, in the midst of which, so long as it can amuse itself, all seems to it well. If the ball-room is bright, and the dresses pretty, what matter how much horror is beneath or around? Nay, this apathy checks us in our highest spheres of thought, and chills our most solemn purposes. You know that I never join in the common outcries against Ritualism; yet it is too painfully manifest to me that the English Church itself has withdrawn her eyes from the tragedy of all churches, to perk herself up anew with casement and vestment, and say of herself, complacently, in her sacred ποικιλία, “How pretty Frou-Frou is, in her silk dress!”

74. We recognize, however, without difficulty, the peril of insatiableness and immodesty in the pleasures of Art. Less recognized, but therefore more perilous, the insatiableness and immodesty of Science tempt us through our very virtues. The fatallest furies of scientific ἀφροσύνη are consistent with the most noble powers of self-restraint and self-sacrifice. It is not the lower passions, but the loftier hopes and most honourable desires which become deadliest when the charm of them is exalted by the vanity of science. The patience of the wisest of Greek heroes never fails, when the trial is by danger or pain; but do you recollect that, before his trial by the song of the Sirens, the sea becomes calm? And in the few words which Homer has told you of their song, you have not perhaps yet with enough care observed that the form of temptation is precisely that to which a man victorious over every fleshly trial would be likely to yield. The promise is not that his body shall be gratified, but that his soul shall rise into rapture; he is not urged, as by the subtlety of Comus, to disdain the precepts of wisdom, but invited, on the contrary, to learn,—as you are all now invited by the ἀφροσύνη of your age,—better wisdom from the wise.

“For we know all” (they say) “that was done in Troy according to the will of the gods, and we know everything that is upon the all-nourishing earth.”

All heavenly and earthly knowledge, you see. I will read you Pope’s expansion of the verses; for Pope never alters idly, but always illustrates when he expands.

(You hear, they begin by flattery).

Is it not singular that so long ago the danger of this novelty of wisdom should have been completely discerned? Is it not stranger still that three thousand years have passed by, and we have not yet been able to learn the lesson, but are still eager to add to our knowledge, rather than to use it; and every day more passionate in discovering,—more violent in competition,—are every day more cold in admiration, and more dull in reverence?

75. But, gentlemen, Homer’s Ulysses, bound to the mast, survives. Dante’s Ulysses is bound to the mast in another fashion. He, notwithstanding the protection of Athena, and after all his victories over fate, is still restless under the temptation to seek new wisdom. He goes forth past the Pillars of Hercules, cheers his crew amidst the uncompassed solitudes of the Atlantic, and perishes in sudden Charybdis of the infinite sea. In hell, the restless flame in which he is wrapt continually, among the advisers of evil, is seen, from the rocks above, like the firefly’s flitting to and fro; and the waving garment of torture, which quivers as he speaks, and aspires as he moves, condemns him to be led in eternal temptation, and to be delivered from evil nevermore.