Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/604

 the union and regeneration of your people, —and I would add of strengthening your human sympathies and your sense of order and proportion. By Sculpture and by Painting mankind is enabled to body forth and express its sense of what is highest—its ideal—of the Beautiful in the world around. No nation can rise high in civilization which does not cultivate this divine faculty —nor can any art be satisfactory which does not gather into itself and reproduce what is most refined and best in a people's life as in that of the individual artist. "The value of a work of art" says Veron, "depends entirely upon the degree of energy with which it manifests the intellectual character and æsthetic impressions of its author." Sculpture —the most sublime and most difficult of the arts —that which concentrates within itself more than any other power, passion, individuality and beauty—has been cultivated almost only in connection with religion, and even there how few of the forms which your sculptors have produced represent what is grand, beautiful or ennobling. In Painting, the faithful interpreter of nature in all her moods, you have done but little, although your power to become painters is shown by the promising productions of more than one living artist and in the great beauty of your textile designs and embroideries. In the early period of the history of your race you seem to have possessed a high sense of the Beautiful. Your ancestors were the worshippers of the Divine through the powers of nature. Otherwise you could not have produced the poets of your early literature. Will you not then train your eyes to see and your hearts to feel, that you may return, not to the broken idols of your youth as a nation, but to yield a more discerning and enlightened reverence to the beauties of the material world about you. If you do, believe me, you will find "books in the running brooks, sermons in stones and good in everything." And not only so, but the cultivation of these arts will bring your several peoples closer together—for art is an æsthetic language—and as a common language unites races different in stock, so will it bring you together who cultivate the same ideals. Whilst through that portion of it which relates to the portrayal of the beauties of nature —the sub-limity of your mountains, the grand progresses of your golden rivers, the smiling verdure of your fields of grain, the mysterious influences of your vales and groves—you may kindle to stronger flame your love of the beautiful country which gave you birth.

I have striven, feebly striven, to induce you in the life which now lies before you to cultivate every god-given faculty in your nature—to perfect your manhood—I had almost said your humanity. But "Humanity