The Queen of the Air: Being a Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm

133. And you think that is no affair of yours? and that every family ought to watch over and subdue its own living plague? Put it to yourselves this way, then: suppose you knew every one of those families kept an idol in an inner room—a big-bellied bronze figure, to which daily sacrifice and oblation was made; at whose feet so much beer and brandy was poured out every morning on the ground; and before which, every night, good meat, enough for two men's keep, was set, and left, till it was putrid, and then carried out and thrown on the dunghill; you would put an end to that form of idolatry with your best diligence, I suppose. You would understand then that the beer, and brandy, and meat, were wasted; and that the burden imposed by each household on itself lay heavily through them on the whole community? But, suppose further, that this idol were not of silent and quiet bronze only, but an ingenious mechanism, wound up every morning, to run itself down into automatic blasphemies; that it struck and tore with its hands the people who set food before it; that it was anointed with poisonous unguents, and infected the air for miles round. You would interfere with the idolatry then, straightway? Will you not interfere with it now, when the infection that they venomous idol spreads is not merely death, but sin?

134. So far the old lecture. Returning to cool English, the end of the matter is, that, sooner or later, we shall have to register our people; and to know how they live; and to make sure, if they are capable of work, that right work is given them to do.

The different classes of work for which bodies of men could be consistently organized, might ultimately become numerous; these following divisions of occupation may all at once be suggested:

I. Road-making.—Good roads to be made, wherever needed, and kept in repair; and the annual loss on unfrequented roads, in spoiled horses, strained wheels, and time, done away with.

II. Bringing in of waste land.—All waste lands not necessary for public health, to be made accessible and gradually reclaimed; chiefly our wide and waste seashores. Not our mountains nor moorland. Our life depends on them, more than on the best arable we have.

III. Harbor-making.—The deficiencies of safe or convenient harborage in our smaller ports to be remedied; other harbors built at dangerous points of coast, and a disciplined body of men always kept in connection with the pilot and life-boat services. There is room for every order of intelligence in this work, and for a large body of superior officers.

IV. Porterage.—All heavy goods, not requiring speed in transit, to be carried (under preventative duty on transit, by railroad) by canal-boats, employing men for draught; and the merchant-shipping service extended by sea; so that no ships may be wrecked for want of hands, while there are idle ones in mischief on shore.

V. Repair of buildings.—A body of men in various trades to be kept at the disposal of the authorities in every large town, for repair of buildings, especially the houses of the poorer orders, who, if no such provision were made, could not employ workmen on their own houses, but would simply live with rent walls and roofs.

VI. Dressmaking.—Substantial dress, of standard material and kind, strong shoes, and stout bedding, to be manufactured for the poor, so as to render it unnecessary for them, unless by extremity of improvidence, to wear cast clothes, or be without sufficiency of clothing.

VII. Works of Art.—Schools to be established on thoroughly sound principles of manufacture, and use of materials, and with sample and, for given periods, unalterable modes of work; first, in pottery, and embracing gradually metal work, sculpture, and decorative painting; the two points insisted upon, in distinction from ordinary commercial establishments, being perfectness of material to the utmost attainable degree; and the production of everything by hand-work, for the special purpose of developing personal power and skill in the workman.

The last two departments, and some subordinate branches of others, would include the service of women and children.

I give now, for such further illustrations as they contain of the points I desire most to insist upon with respect both to education and employment, a portion of the series of notes published some time ago in the "Art Journal," on the opposition of Modesty and Liberty, and the unescapable law of wise restraint. I am sorry that they are written obscurely—and it may be thought affectedly; but the fact is, I have always had three different ways of writing: one, with the single view of making myself understood, in which I necessarily omit a great deal of what comes into my head; another, in which I say what I think ought to be said, in what I suppose to be the best words I can find for it (which is in reality an affected style—be it good or bad); and my third way of writing is to say all that comes into my head for my own pleasure, in the first words that come, retouching them afterward into (approximate) grammar. These notes for the "Art Journal" were so written; and I like them myself, of course; but ask the reader's pardon for their confusedness.

135. "Sir, it cannot be better done."

We will insist, with the reader's permission, on this comfortful saying of Albert Dürer's in order to find out, if we may, what Modesty is; which it will be well for painters, readers, and especially critics, to know, before going farther. What it is; or, rather, who she is, her fingers being among the deftest in laying the ground-threads of Aglaia's cestus.

For this same opinion of Albert's is entertained by many other people respecting their own doings—a very prevalent opinion, indeed, I find it; and the answer itself, though rarely made with the Nuremberger's crushing decision, is nevertheless often enough intimated, with delicacy, by artists of all countries, in their various dialects. Neither can it always be held an entirely modest one, as it assuredly was in the man who would sometimes estimate a piece of his unconquerable work at only the worth of a plate of fruit, or a flask of wine—would have taken even one "fig for it," kindly offered; or given it royally for nothing, to show his hand to a fellow-king of his own, or any other craft—as Gainsborough gave the "Boy at the Stile" for a solo on the violin. An entirely modest saying, I repeat, in him—not always in us. For Modesty is "the measuring virtue," the virtue of modes or limits. She is, indeed, said to be only the third or youngest of the children of the cardinal virtue, Temperance; and apt to be despised, being more given to arithmetic, and other vulgar studies (Cinderella-like), than her elder sisters; but she is useful in the household, and arrives at great results with her yard-measure and slate-pencil—a pretty little Marchande des Modes, cutting her dress always according to the silk (if this be the proper feminine reading of "coat according to the cloth"), so that, consulting with her carefully of a morning, men get to know not only their income, but their in being—to know themselves, that is, in a gauger's manner, round, and up and down—surface and contents; what is in them and what may be got out of them; and in fine, their entire canon of weight and capacity. That yard-measure of Modesty's, lent to those who will use it, is a curious musical reed, and will go round and round waists that are slender enough, with latent melody in every joint of it, the dark root only being soundless, moist from the wave wherein

     "Null' altra pianta che facesse fronda        O che 'n durasse, vi puote aver vita."29

But when the little sister herself takes it in hand, to measure things outside of us with, the joints shoot out in an amazing manner: the four-square walls even of celestial cities being measurable enough by that reed; and the way pointed to them, though only to be followed, or even seen, in the dim starlight shed down from worlds amidst which there is no name of Measure any more, though the reality of it always. For, indeed, to all true modesty the necessary business is not inlook, but outlook, and especially uplook: it is only her sister Shamefacedness, who is known by the drooping lashes—Modesty, quite otherwise, by her large eyes full of wonder; for she never contemns herself, nor is ashamed of herself, but forgets herself—at least until she has done something worth memory. It is easy to peep and potter about one's own deficiencies in a quiet immodest discontent; but Modesty is so pleased with other people's doings, that she has no leisure to lament her own: and thus, knowing the fresh feeling of contentment, unstained with thought of self, she does not fear being pleased, when there is cause, with her own rightness, as with another's, as with another's, saying calmly, "Be it mine or yours, or whose else's it may, it is no matter; this also is well." But the right to say such a thing depends on continual reverence and manifold sense of failure. If you have known yourself to have failed, you may trust, when it comes, the strange consciousness of success; if you have faithfully loved the noble work of others, you need not fear to speak with respect of things duly done, of your own.

136. But the principal good that comes of art being followed in this reverent feeling is of it. Men who know their place can take it and keep it, be it low or high, contentedly and firmly, neither yielding nor grasping; and the harmony of hand and thought follows, rendering all great deeds of art possible—deeds in which the souls of men meet like the jewels in the windows of Aladdin's palace, the little gems and the large all equally pure, needing no cement but the fitting of facets; while the associative work of immodest men is all jointless, and astir with wormy ambition; putridly dissolute, and forever on the crawl: so that if it come together for a time, it can only be by metamorphosis through a flash of volcanic fire out of the vale of Siddim, vitrifying the clay of it, and fastening the slime, only to end in wilder scattering; according to the fate of those oldest, mightiest, immodestest of builders, of whom it is told in scorn, "They had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar."

137. The first function of Modesty, then, being this recognition of place, her second is the recognition of law, and delight in it, for the sake of law itself, whether her part be to assert it, or obey. For as it belongs to all immodesty to defy or deny law, and assert privilege and license, according to its own pleasure (it being therefore rightly called "insolent," that is, "custom-breaking," violating some usual and appointed order to attain for itself greater forwardness or power), so it is the habit of all modesty to love the constancy and "solemnity," or, literally, "accustomedness," of law, seeking first what are the solemn, appointed, inviolable customs and general orders of nature, and of the Master of nature, touching the matter in hand; and striving to put itself, as habitually and inviolably, in compliance with them. Out of which habit, once established, arises what is rightly called "conscience," nor "science" merely, but "with-science," a science "with us," such as only modest creatures can have—with or within them—and within all creation besides, every member of it, strong or weak, witnessing together, and joining in the happy consciousness that each one's work is good; the bee also being profoundly of that opinion; and the lark; and the swallow, in that noisy, but modestly upside-down, Babel of hers, under the eaves, with its unvolcanic slime for mortar; and the two ants who are asking of each other at the turn of that little ant's-foot-worn bath through the moss "lor via e lor fortuna;" and the builders also, who built yonder pile of cloud-marble in the west, and the gilder who gilded it, and is gone down behind it.

138. But I think we shall better understand what we ought of the nature of Modesty, and of her opposite, by taking a simple instance of both, in the practice of that art of music which the wisest have agreed in thinking the first element of education; only I must ask the reader's patience with me through a parenthesis.

Among the foremost men whose power has had to assert itself, though with conquest, yet with countless loss, through peculiarly English disadvantages of circumstance, are assuredly to be ranked together, both for honor, and for mourning, Thomas Bewick and George Cruikshank. There is, however, less cause for regret in the instance of Bewick. We may understand that it was well for us once to see what an entirely keen and true man's temper, could achieve, together, unhelped, but also unharmed, among the black bans and wolds of Tyne. But the genius of Cruikshank has been cast away in an utterly ghastly and lamentable manner: his superb line-work, worthy of any class of subject, and his powers of conception and composition, of which I cannot venture to estimate the range in their degraded application, having been condemned, by his fate, to be spent either in rude jesting, or in vain war with conditions of vice too low alike for record or rebuke, among the dregs of the British populace. Yet perhaps I am wrong in regretting even this: it may be an appointed lesson for futurity, that the art of the best English etcher in the nineteenth century, spent on illustrations of the lives of burglars and drunkards, should one day be seen in museums beneath Greek vases fretted with drawings of the wars of Troy, or side by side with Dürer's "Knight and Death."

139. Be that as it may, I am at present glad to be able to refer to one of these perpetuations, by his strong hand, of such human character as our faultless British constitution occasionally produces in out-of-the-way corners. It is among his illustrations of the Irish Rebellion, and represents the pillage and destruction of a gentleman's house by the mob. They have made a heap in the drawing-room of the furniture and books, to set first fire to; and are tearing up the floor for its more easily kindled planks, the less busily-disposed meanwhile hacking round in rage, with axes, and smashing what they can with butt-ends of guns. I do not care to follow with words the ghastly truth of the picture into its detail; but the most expressive incident of the whole, and the one immediately to my purpose, is this, that one fellow has sat himself at the piano, on which, hitting down fiercely with his clenched fists, he plays, grinning, such tune as may be so producible, to which melody two of his companions, flourishing knotted sticks, dance, after their manner, on the top of the instrument.

140. I think we have in this conception as perfect an instance as we require of the lowest supposable phase of immodest or licentious art in music; the "inner consciousness of good" being dim, even in the musician and his audience, and wholly unsympathized with, and unacknowledged by the Delphian, Vestal, and all other prophetic and cosmic powers. This represented scene came into my mind suddenly one evening, a few weeks ago, in contrast with another which I was watching in its reality; namely, a group of gentle school-girls, leaning over Mr. Charles Hallê, as he was playing a variation on "Home, Sweet Home." They had sustained with unwonted courage the glance of subdued indignation with which, having just closed a rippling melody of Sebastian Bach's (much like what one might fancy the singing of nightingales would be if they fed on honey instead of flies), he turned to the slight, popular air. But they had their own associations with it, and besought for, and obtained it, and pressed close, at first, in vain, to see what no glance could follow, the traversing of the fingers. They soon thought no more of seeing. The wet eyes, round-open, and the little scarlet upper lips, lifted, and drawn slightly together, in passionate glow of utter wonder, became picture-like, porcelain-like, in motionless joy, as the sweet multitude of low notes fell, in their timely infinities, like summer rain. Only La Robbia himself (nor even he, unless with tenderer use of color than is usual in his work) could have rendered some image of that listening.

141. But if the reader can give due vitality in his fancy to these two scenes, he will have in them representative types, clear enough for all future purpose, of the several agencies of debased and perfect art. And the interval may easily and continuously be filled by mediate gradations. Between the entirely immodeset, unmeasured, and (in evil sense) unmannered, execution with the fist; and the entirely modest, measured, and (in the noblest sense) mannered, or moral'd execution with the finger; between the impatient and unpractised doing, containing in itself the witness of lasting impatience and idleness through all previous life, and the patient and practised doing, containing in itself the witness of self-restraint and unwearied toil through all previous life; between the expressed subject and sentiment of home violation, and the expressed subject and sentiment of home love; between the sympathy of audience, given in irreverent and contemptuous rage, joyless as the rabidness of a dog, and the sympathy of audience given in an almost appalled humility of intense, rapturous, and yet entirely reasoning and reasonable pleasure; between these two limits of octave, the reader will find he can class, according to its modesty, usefulness and grace, or becomingness, all other musical art. For although purity of purpose and fineness of execution by no means go together, degree to degree (since fine, and indeed all but the finest, work is often spent in the most wanton purpose —as in all our modern opera—and the rudest execution is again often joined with purest purpose, as in a mother's song to her child), still the entire accomplishment of music is only in the union of both. For the difference between that "all but" finest and "finest" is an infinite one; and besides this, however the power of the performer, once attained, may be afterwards misdirected, in slavery to popular passion or childishness, and spend itself, at its sweetest, in idle melodies, cold and ephemeral (like Michael Angelo's snow statue in the other art), or else in vicious difficulty and miserable noise—crackling of thorns under the pot of public sensuality—still, the attainment of this power, and the maintenance of it, involve always in the executant some virtue or courage of high kind; the understanding of which, and of the difference between the discipline which develops it and the disorderly efforts of the amateur, it will be one of our first businesses to estimate rightly. And though not indeed by degree to degree, yet in essential relation (as of winds to waves, the one being always the true cause of the other, though they are not necessarily of equal force at the same time,) we shall find vice in its varieties, with art-failure,—and virtue in its varieties, with art-success,—fall and rise together; the peasant-girl's song at her spinning-wheel, the peasant laborer's "to the oaks and rills,"—domestic music, feebly yet sensitively skilful,—music for the multitude, of beneficent or of traitorous power,—dance-melodies, pure and orderly, or foul and frantic,—march-music, blatant in mere fever of animal pugnacity, or majestic with force of national duty and memory,– song-music, reckless, sensual, sickly, slovenly, forgetful even of the foolish words it effaces with foolish noise,—or thoughtful, sacred, healthful, artful, forever sanctifying noble thought with separately distinguished loveliness of belonging sound,—all these families and graduations of good or evil, however mingled, follow, in so far as they are good, one constant law of virtue (or "life-strength," which is the literal meaning of the word, and its intended one, in wise men's mouths), and in so far as they are evil, are evil by outlawry and unvirtue, or death-weakness. Then, passing wholly beyond the domain of death, we may still imagine the ascendant nobleness of the art, through all the concordant life of incorrupt creatures, and a continually deeper harmony of "puissant words and murmurs made to bless," until we reach

     "The undisturbed song of pure consent,     Aye sung before the sapphire-colored throne."

142. And so far as the sister arts can be conceived to have place or office, their virtues are subject to a law absolutely the same as that of music, only extending its authority into more various conditions, owing to the introduction of a distinctly representative and historical power, which acts under logical as well as mathematical restrictions, and is capable of endlessly changeful fault, fallacy, and defeat, as well as of endlessly manifold victory.

143. Next to Modesty, and her delight in measures, let us reflect a little on the character of her adversary, the Goddess of Liberty, and her delight in absence of measures, or in false ones. It is true that there are liberties and liberties. Yonder torrent, crystal-clear, and arrow-swift, with its spray leaping into the air like white troops of fawns, is free enough. Lost, presently, amidst bankless, boundless marsh —soaking in slow shallowness, as it will, hither and thither, listless among the poisonous reeds and unresisting slime—it is free also. We may choose which liberty we like,—the restraint of voiceful rock, or the dumb and edgeless shore of darkened sand. Of that evil liberty which men are now glorifying and proclaiming as essence of gospel to all the earth, and will presently, I suppose, proclaim also to the stars, with invitation to them out of their courses,—and of its opposite continence, which is the clasp and 'chrusee perone' of Aglaia's cestus, we must try to find out something true. For no quality of Art has been more powerful in its influence on public mind; none is more frequently the subject of popular praise, or the end of vulgar effort, than what we call "Freedom." It is necessary to determine the justice or injustice of this popular praise.

144. I said, a little while ago, that the practical teaching of the masters of Art was summed by the O of Giotto. "You may judge my masterhood of craft," Giotto tells us, "by seeing that I can draw a circle unerringly." And we may safely believe him, understanding him to mean that, though more may be necessary to an artist than such a power, at least this power is necessary. The qualities of hand and eye needful to do this are the first conditions of artistic craft.

145. Try to draw a circle yourself with the "free" hand, and with a single line. You cannot do it if your hand trembles, nor if it is in the common sense of the word "free." So far from being free, it must be as if it were fastened to an inflexible bar of steel. And yet it must move, under this necessary control, with perfect, untormented serenity of ease.

146. That is the condition of all good work whatsoever. All freedom is error. Every line you lay down is either right or wrong; it may be timidly and awkwardly wrong, or fearlessly and impudently wrong. The aspect of the impudent wrongness is pleasurable to vulgar persons, and is what they commonly call "free" execution; the timid, tottering, hesitating wrongness is rarely so attractive; yet sometimes, if accompanied with good qualities, and right aims in other directions, it becomes in a manner charming, like the inarticulateness of a child; but, whatever the charm or manner of the error, there is but one question ultimately to be asked respecting every line you draw, Is it right or wrong? If right, it most assuredly is not a "free" line, but an intensely continent, restrained, and considered line; and the action of the hand in laying it is just as decisive, and just as "free," as the hand of a first-rate surgeon in a critical incision. A great operator told me that his hand could check itself within about the two-hundredth of an inch, in penetrating a membrane; and this, of course, without the help of sight, by sensation only. With help of sight, and in action on a substance which does not quiver or yield, a fine artist's line is measurable in its proposed direction to considerably less than the thousandth of an inch.

A wide freedom, truly!

147. The conditions of popular art which most foster the common ideas about freedom, are merely results of irregularly energetic effort by men imperfectly educated; these conditions being variously mingled with cruder mannerisms resulting from timidity, or actual imperfection of body. Northern hands and eyes are, of course, never so subtle as Southern; and in very cold countries, artistic execution is palsied. The effort to break through this timidity, or to refine the bluntness, may lead to a licentious impetuosity, or an ostentatious minuteness. Every man's manner has this kind of relation to some defect in his physical powers or modes of thought; so that in the greatest work there is no manner visible. It is at first uninteresting from its quietness; the majesty of restrained power only dawns gradually upon us, as we walk towards its horizon.