arts are
the result of an intellectual activity which has found no room to
expand, and which the tyranny of nature or of man has condemned to
disease through arrested growth. And where neither Christianity, nor
any other religion conveying some moral help, has reached, the animal
energy of such races necessarily flames into ghastly conditions of
evil, and the grotesque or frightful forms assumed by their art are
precisely indicative of their distorted moral nature.

But the truly great nations nearly always begin from a race possessing
this imaginative power; and for some time their progress is very slow,
and their state not one of innocence, but of feverish and faultful
animal energy. This is gradually subdued and exalted into bright human
life; the art instinct purifying itself with the rest of the nature,
until social perfectness is nearly reached; and then comes the period
when conscience and intellect are so highly developed, that new forms
of error begin in the inability to fulfil the demands of the one, or
to answer the doubts of the other. Then the wholeness of the people is
lost; all kinds of hypocrisies and oppositions of science develope
themselves; their faith is questioned on one side, and compromised
with on the other; wealth commonly increases at the same period to a
destructive extent; luxury follows; and the ruin of the nation is then
certain: while the arts, all this time, are simply, as I said at first,
the exponents of each phase of its moral state, and no more control it
in its political career than the gleam of the firefly guides its
oscillation. It is true that their most splendid results are usually
obtained in the swiftness of the power which is hurrying to the
precipice; but to lay the charge of the catastrophe to the art by
which it is illumined, is to find a cause for the cataract in the hues
of its iris. It is true that the colossal vices belonging to periods
of great national wealth (for wealth, you will find, is the real root
of all evil)[186] can turn every good gift and skill of nature or of
man to evil purpose. If, in such times, fair pictures have been
misused, how much more fair realities? And if Miranda is immoral to
Caliban is that Miranda's fault?

[183] As Slade Professor, Ruskin held a three years' appointment at
Oxford.

[184] This story comes from Pliny, _Natural History_, 35. 36; the
two rival painters alternately showing their skill by the drawing
of lines of