The Queen of the Air by John Ruskin (top 100 books to read .txt) 📕

partly confused with the breath or air through which it acts, and partly understood as a creative wisdom, proceeding from the Supreme Deity; but entering into and inspiring all intelligences that work in harmony with Him. And whatever intellectual results may be in modern days obtained by regarding this effluence only as a motion of vibration, every formative human art hitherto, and the best states of human happiness and order, may have depended on the apprehension of its mystery (which is certain,) and of its personality, which is probable. Of its influence on the formative arts, I have a few words to say separately: my present business is only to interpret, as we are now sufficiently enabled to do, the external symbols of the myth under which it was represented by the Greeks as a goddess of counsel, taken first into that breast of their supreme Deity, then created out of his thoughts, and abiding closely beside him; always sharing and consummating his power. And in doing this we have first to note the meaning of the principal epithet applied to Athena, "Glaukopis," "with eyes full of light," the first syllable being connected, by its root, with words signifying sight, not with words signifying color. As far as I can trace the color perception of the Greeks, I find it all founded primarily on the degree of connection between color and light; the most important fact to them in the color of red being its connection with fire and sunshine; so that "purple" is, in its original sense, "fire-color," and the scarlet or orange, of dawn, more than any other fire-color. I was long puzzled by Homer's calling the sea purple; and misled into thinking he meant the color of cloud shadows on green sea; whereas he really means the gleaming blaze of the waves under wide light. Aristotle's idea (partly true) is that light, subdued by blackness, becomes red; and blackness, heated or lighted, also becomes red. Thus, a color may be called purple because it is light subdued (and so death is called "purple" or "shadowy" death); or else it may be called purple as being shade kindled with fire, and thus said of the lighted sea; or even of the sun itself, when it is thought of as a red luminary opposed to the whiteness of the moon: "purpureos inter soles, et candida lunæ sidera;" or of golden hair: "pro purpureo pœnam solvens scelerata capillo;" while both ideas are modified by the influence of an earlier form of the word, which has nothing to do with fire at all, but only with mixing or staining; and then, to make the whole group of thoughts inextricably complex, yet rich and subtle in proportion to their intricacy, the various rose and crimson colors of the murex dye,--the crimson and purple of the poppy, and fruit of the palm,-- and the association of all these with the hue of blood,--partly direct, partly through a confusion between the word signifying "slaughter" and "palm-fruit color," mingle themselves in, and renew the whole nature of the old word; so that, in later literature, it means a different color, or emotion of color, in almost every place where it occurs; and cast forever around the reflection of all that has been dipped in its dyes. So that the world is really a liquid prism, and stream of opal. And then, last of all, to keep the whole history of it in the fantastic course of a dream, warped here and there into wild grotesque, we moderns, who have preferred to rule over coal-mines instead of the sea (and so have turned the everlasting lamp of Athena into a Davy's safety-lamp in the hand of Britannia, and Athenian heavenly lightning into British subterranean "damp"), have actually got our purple out of coal instead of the sea! And thus, grotesquely, we have had enforced on us the doubt that held the old word between blackness and fire, and have completed the shadow, and the fear of it, by giving it a name from battle, "Magenta." There is precisely a similar confusion between light and color in the word used for the blue of the eyes of Athena--a noble confusion, however, brought about by the intensity of the Greek sense that the heaven is light, more than it is blue. I was not thinking of this when I wrote in speaking of pictorial chiaroscuro, "The sky is not blue color merely: it is blue fire and cannot be painted" (Mod. P. iv. p. 36); but it was this that the Greeks chiefly felt of it, and so "Glaukopis" chiefly means gray-eyed: gray standing for a pale or luminous blue; but it only means "owl-eyed" in thought of the roundness and expansion, not from the color; this breath and brightness being, again, in their moral sense typical of the breadth, intensity, and singleness of the sight in prudence ("if thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light"). Then the actual power of the bird to see in twilight enters into the type, and perhaps its general fineness of sense. "Before the human form was adopted, her (Athena's) proper symbol was the owl, a bird which seems to surpass all other creatures in acuteness of organic perception, its eye being calculated to observe objects which to all others are enveloped in darkness, its ear to hear sounds distinctly, and its nostrils to discriminate effluvia with such nicety that it has been deemed prophetic, from discovering the putridity of death even in the first stages of disease."*

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

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

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

* In the breastplate and shield of Atrides the serpents and bosses are all of this dark color, yet the serpents are said to be like rainbows; but through all this splendor and opposition of hue, I feel distinctly that the literal "splendor," with its relative shade, are prevalent in the conception; and that there is always a tendency to look through the hue to its cause. And in this feeling about color the Greeks are separated from the eastern nations, and from the best designers of Christian times. I cannot find that they take pleasure in color for its own sake; it may be in something more than color, or better; but it is not in the hue itself. When Homer describes cloud breaking from a mountain summit, the crags become visible in light, not color; he feels only their flashing out in bright edges and trenchant shadows; above, the "infinite," "unspeakable" æther is torn open--but not the blue of it. He has scarcely any abstract pleasure in blue, or green, or gold; but only in their shade or flame.

I have yet to trace the causes of this (which will be a long task, belonging to art questions, not to mythological ones); but it is, I believe, much connected with the brooding of the shadow of death over the Greeks without any clear hope of immortality. The restriction of the color on their vases to dim red (or yellow) with black and white, is greatly connected with their sepulchral use, and with all the melancholy of Greek tragic thought; and in this gloom the failure of color-perception is partly noble, partly base: noble, in its earnestness, which raises the design of Greek vases as far above the designing of mere colorist nations like the Chinese, as men's thoughts are above children's; and yet it is partly base and earthly, and inherently defective in one human faculty; and I believe it was one cause of the perishing of their art so swiftly, for indeed there is no decline so sudden, or down to such utter loss and ludicrous depravity, as the fall of Greek design on its vases from the fifth to the third century B.C. On the other hand, the pure colored-gift, when employed for pleasure only, degrades in another direction; so that among the Indians, Chinese, and Japanese, all intellectual progress in art has been for ages rendered impossible by the prevalence of that faculty; and yet it is, as I have said again and again, the spiritual power of art; and its true brightness is the essential characteristic of all healthy schools. ** 'eremnen Aigida pasi'.--Il. iv. 166.

This, then, finally, was the perfect color-conception of Athena: the flesh, snow-white (the hands, feet, and face of marble, even when the statue was hewn roughly in wood); the eyes of keen pale blue, often in statues represented by jewels; the long robe to the feet, crocus-colored; and the ægis thrown over it of thunderous purple; the helmet golden (Il. v. 744.), and I suppose its crest also, as that of Achilles.

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

I have spoken throughout, hitherto, of the conception of Athena, as it is traceable in the Greek mind; not as it was rendered by Greek art. It is matter of extreme difficulty, requiring a sympathy at once affectionate and cautious, and a knowledge reaching the earliest springs of the religion of many lands, to discern through the imperfection, and, alas! more dimly yet, through the triumphs of formative art, what kind of thoughts they were that appointed for it the tasks of its childhood, and watched by the awakening of its strength.

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