t itself is only the result of
the moral character of generations. A bad woman may have a sweet voice;
but that sweetness of voice comes of the past morality of her race. That
she can sing with it at all, she owes to the determination of laws of
music by the morality of the past. Every act, every impulse, of virtue
and vice, affects in any creature, face, voice, nervous power, and vigor
and harmony of invention, at once. Perseverance in rightness of human
conduct renders, after a certain number of generations, human art
possible; every sin that clouds it, be it ever so little a one; and
persistent vicious living and following of pleasure render, after a
certain number of generations, all art impossible. Men are deceived by
the long-suffering of the laws of nature, and mistake, in a nation, the
reward of the virtue of its sires, for the issue of its own sins. The
time of their visitation will come, and that inevitably; for, it is
always true, that if the fathers have eaten sour grapes, the children's
teeth are set on edge. And for the individual, as soon as you have
learned to read, you may, as I said, know him to the heart's core,
through his art. Let his art-gift be never so great, and cultivated to
the height by the schools of a great race of men, and it is still but a
tapestry thrown over his own being and inner soul; and the bearing of it
will show, infallibly, whether it hangs on a man or on a skeleton. If
you are dim-eyed, you may not see the difference in the fall of the folds
at first, but learn how to look, and the folds themselves will become
transparent, and you shall see through them the death's shape, or the
divine one, making the tissue above it as a cloud of right, or as a
winding-sheet.

108. Then further, observe, I have said (and you will find it true, and
that to the uttermost) that, as all lovely art is rooted in virtue, so it
bares fruit of virtue, and is didactic in its own nature. It is often
didactic also in actually expressed thought, as Giotto's, Michael
Angelo's, Duerer's, and hundreds more; but that is not its special
function; it is didactic chiefly by being beautiful; but beautiful with
haunting thought, no less than with form, and full of myths that can be
read only with the heart.

For instance, at this moment there is open beside me as I write, a page
of Persian manuscript, wrought with wreathed azure and gold, and soft
green, and violet, and ruby and scarlet, into one field