Page:The Obligations of the Universities Towards Art.djvu/25

 spheres: this will depend upon his natural endowments and upon his opportunities. My life-long observation satisfies me that in accordance with the elevation of his aims will be the richness and the infinite mystery of the artist's power of expression. All past great Art was born of religious thought, and thus acquired its strength; although in its prime, from the developing enthusiasm of the chastened worker's mind, it was often wisely employed in an extended field.

It has happened in this country, in certain generations, that men with the natural faculty for Art have had no opportunity for expression, except through the channels of literature: the spirit thus revealed has ever been distinct and individual, and different from that of any other people.

We shall see that the literature of a nation is exactly what its graphic and plastic art is, and by this rule it might have been predicted what its painters and sculptors would have done during the ages in which they were checked by the troubles of civil wars and religious persecutions; for the poets of this England of ours, having sounded unalloyed words of large-hearted and true affection, sifted from all false sentiment, honest and unaffected even when they have been unrestrained or licentious, have incidentally, by this very individuality of imagination, demonstrated that the misfortunes which for so long time manacled the sculptors' and painters' art, have caused England to lose a high and special means of doing her part in the refining of the still untamed world.

Pictorial art is the handwriting of a nation, the