stry a quite studied school of
pleasurable art in dress; and generally also in song, and simple
domestic architecture.

80. Again, I need not repeat to you here what I endeavoured to explain
in the first lecture in the book I called "The Two Paths," respecting
the arts of savage races: but I may now note briefly that such 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.

81. 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
develop 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) 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