Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/602

 and Design, by promoting the establishment of such classes in the leading schools in your neighbourhood, by offering prizes, by encouraging the reading of books and journals treating of such subjects, and by illustrating by experiment, so far as your means admit, the knowledge you have acquired. Have you learnt a cheaper and more effective way of raising water? Test the mode by experiment. Have you seen a tree produce more fruit by special cultivation? Try the system. Do you know that certain sanitary regulations ensure the health of a household? Prove your faith by adopting these regulations. This experimental attitude of mind, spreading through the people,— will work changes in their economic and industrial proclivities, which will not only ensure vast increase and greater variety in India's productiveness of raw material, but also wonderfully develop her power of converting by the labour of her own people these products into manufactured articles of commerce.

I have spoken of the arts connected with the industrial side of life. I would now ask you not to ignore or undervalue the cultivation of the Beautiful in art, which is needful to the completeness of the human being. Remember that the Beautiful is very near akin to the Good—so near that one people, intellectually the foremost of races, had the same word to express both ideas—or rather they recognized in them but one idea, for they felt that the Beautiful must include the Good, and regarded the cultivation of what is beautiful as the cultivation of what is highest in the moral nature also. Of this Beautiful that part which comes to you through the sense of hearing you may cultivate in literature, especially in Poetry, and in Music; the other part is that which comes to you through the sense of sight in Architecture, Sculpture and Painting. Of the cultivation of the Beautiful through Literature I have already spoken. Bear with me whilst I urge on you to cultivate the other branches. The history of a people may be read in their arts as clearly as in their language. And no people can reach a high standard of culture, or fully develop the social and unselfish elements of its character, the aesthetic side of whose nature is left uncared for. In your history what do we find? The Beautiful has been cultivated chiefly through Poetry, through Architecture and Music in a lesser degree, but hardly at all through Sculpture and Painting. Take them in order. Architecture should appeal most directly to your sympathies. For what is it but the art of making the building in which you have to live and work, or to transact your public affairs, or to pray, as convenient and as beautiful as in