not prepared to receive it.

Now, all right human song is, similarly, the finished expression, by
art, of the joy or grief of noble persons, for right causes. And
accurately in proportion to the rightness of the cause, and purity of
the emotion, is the possibility of the fine art. A maiden may sing of
her lost love, but a miser cannot sing of his lost money. And with
absolute precision, from highest to lowest, _the fineness of the
possible art is an index of the moral purity and majesty of the emotion
it expresses_. You may test it practically at any instant. Question with
yourselves respecting any feeling that has taken strong possession of
your mind, "Could this be sung by a master, and sung nobly, with a true
melody and art?" Then it is a right feeling. Could it not be sung at
all, or only sung ludicrously? It is a base one. And that is so in all
the arts; so that with mathematical precision, subject to no error or
exception, the art of a nation, so far as it exists, is an exponent of
its ethical state.

68. An exponent, observe, and exalting influence; but not the root or
cause. You cannot paint or sing yourselves into being good men; you must
be good men before you can either paint or sing, and then the colour and
sound will complete in you all that is best.

And this it was that I called upon you to hear, saying, "listen to me at
least now," in the first lecture, namely, that no art-teaching could be
of use to you, but would rather be harmful, unless it was grafted on
something deeper than all art. For indeed not only with this, of which
it is my function to show you the laws, but much more with the art of
all men, which you came here chiefly to learn, that of language, the
chief vices of education have arisen from the one great fallacy of
supposing that noble language is a communicable trick of grammar and
accent, instead of simply the careful expression of right thought. All
the virtues of language are, in their roots, moral; it becomes accurate
if the speaker desires to be true; clear, if he speaks with sympathy and
a desire to be intelligible; powerful, if he has earnestness; pleasant,
if he has sense of rhythm and order. There are no other virtues of
language producible by art than these: but let me mark more deeply for
an instant the significance of one of them. Language, I said, is only
clear when it is sympathetic. You can, in truth, understand a man's word
only by understanding his temper. Your own wo