ic
conqueror. The hero of the future is he who shall bravely and gracefully
subdue this Gorgon of fashion and of convention.

When you have chosen your own part, abide by it, and do not weakly try
and reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common
nor the common the heroic. Congratulate yourself if you have done
something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous
age.

And lastly, let us remember that art is the one thing which Death cannot
harm. The little house at Concord may be desolate, but the wisdom of New
England's Plato is not silenced nor the brilliancy of that Attic genius
dimmed: the lips of Longfellow are still musical for us though his dust
be turning into the flowers which he loved: and as it is with the greater
artists, poet and philosopher and songbird, so let it be with you.

LECTURE TO ART STUDENTS

Delivered to the Art students of the Royal Academy at their Club in
Golden Square, Westminster, on June 30, 1883. The text is taken from the
original manuscript.

In the lecture which it is my privilege to deliver before you to-night I
do not desire to give you any abstract definition of beauty at all. For,
we who are working in art cannot accept any theory of beauty in exchange
for beauty itself, and, so far from desiring to isolate it in a formula
appealing to the intellect, we, on the contrary, seek to materialise it
in a form that gives joy to the soul through the senses. We want to
create it, not to define it. The definition should follow the work: the
work should not adapt itself to the definition.

Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any
conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak
prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal at all you
must not strip it of vitality. You must find it in life and re-create it
in art.

While, then, on the one hand I do not desire to give you any philosophy
of beauty--for, what I want to-night is to investigate how we can create
art, not how we can talk of it--on the other hand, I do not wish to deal
with anything like a history of English art.

To begin with, such an expression as English art is a meaningless
expression. One might just as well talk of English mathematics. Art is
the science of beauty, and Mathematics the science of truth: there is no
national school of either. Indeed, a national school is a provincial
school, merely