legerdemain. Now, when powers
of fancy, stimulated by this triumphant precision of manual dexterity,
descend uninterruptedly from generation to generation, you have at last,
what is not so much a trained artist, as a new species of animal, with
whose instinctive gifts you have no chance of contending. And thus all
our imitations of other people's work are futile. We must learn first to
make honest English wares, and afterwards to decorate them as may please
the then approving Graces.

14. Secondly--and this is an incapacity of a graver kind, yet having its
own good in it also--we shall never be successful in the highest fields
of ideal or theological art.

For there is one strange, but quite essential, character in us: ever
since the Conquest, if not earlier:--a delight in the forms of burlesque
which are connected in some degree with the foulness of evil. I think
the most perfect type of a true English mind in its best possible
temper, is that of Chaucer; and you will find that, while it is for the
most part full of thoughts of beauty, pure and wild like that of an
April morning, there are even in the midst of this, sometimes
momentarily jesting passages which stoop to play with evil--while the
power of listening to and enjoying the jesting of entirely gross
persons, whatever the feeling may be which permits it, afterwards
degenerates into forms of humour which render some of quite the
greatest, wisest, and most moral of English writers now almost useless
for our youth. And yet you will find that whenever Englishmen are wholly
without this instinct, their genius is comparatively weak and
restricted.

15. Now, the first necessity for the doing of any great work in ideal
art, is the looking upon all foulness with horror, as a contemptible
though dreadful enemy. You may easily understand what I mean, by
comparing the feelings with which Dante regards any form of obscenity or
of base jest, with the temper in which the same things are regarded by
Shakespeare. And this strange earthly instinct of ours, coupled as it
is, in our good men, with great simplicity and common sense, renders
them shrewd and perfect observers and delineators of actual nature, low
or high; but precludes them from that specialty of art which is properly
called sublime. If ever we try anything in the manner of Michael Angelo
or of Dante, we catch a fall, even in literature, as Milton in the
battle of the angels, spoiled from Hesiod; while in art,