and truth to nature depends entirely
upon the intellectual culture of the person to whom art is addressed. If
you are in Australia, you may get credit for being a good artist--I
mean among the natives--if you can draw a kangaroo after a fashion. But,
among men of higher civilisation, the intellectual knowledge we possess
brings its criticism into our appreciation of works of art, and we are
obliged to satisfy it, as well as the mere sense of beauty in colour and
in outline. And so, the higher the culture and information of those
whom art addresses, the more exact and precise must be what we call its
"truth to nature."

If we turn to literature, the same thing is true, and you find works
of literature which may be said to be pure art. A little song of
Shakespeare or of Goethe is pure art; it is exquisitely beautiful,
although its intellectual content may be nothing. A series of pictures
is made to pass before your mind by the meaning of words, and the effect
is a melody of ideas. Nevertheless, the great mass of the literature
we esteem is valued, not merely because of having artistic form, but
because of its intellectual content; and the value is the higher the
more precise, distinct, and true is that intellectual content. And,
if you will let me for a moment speak of the very highest forms of
literature, do we not regard them as highest simply because the more we
know the truer they seem, and the more competent we are to appreciate
beauty the more beautiful they are? No man ever understands Shakespeare
until he is old, though the youngest may admire him, the reason being
that he satisfies the artistic instinct of the youngest and harmonises
with the ripest and richest experience of the oldest.

I have said this much to draw your attention to what, in my mind, lies
at the root of all this matter, and at the understanding of one another
by the men of science on the one hand, and the men of literature, and
history, and art, on the other. It is not a question whether one order
of study or another should predominate. It is a question of what
topics of education you shall select which will combine all the needful
elements in such due proportion as to give the greatest amount of
food, support, and encouragement to those faculties which enable us to
appreciate truth, and to profit by those sources of innocent happiness
which are open to us, and, at the same time, to avoid that which is bad,
and coarse, and ugly, and keep clear