ick in the capacities of pleasure, and that instant the
fingers that had grasped the iron rod, fail from the golden scepter. You
cannot charge me with any exaggeration in this matter; it is impossible
to state the truth too strongly, or as too universal. Forever you will
see the rude and simple nation at once more virtuous and more victorious
than one practiced in the arts. Watch how the Lydian is overthrown by
the Persian; the Persian by the Athenian; the Athenian by the Spartan;
then the whole of polished Greece by the rougher Roman; the Roman, in
his turn refined, only to be crushed by the Goth: and at the turning
point of the middle ages, the liberty of Europe first asserted, the
virtues of Christianity best practiced, and its doctrines best attested,
by a handful of mountain shepherds, without art, without literature,
almost without a language, yet remaining unconquered in the midst of the
Teutonic chivalry, and uncorrupted amidst the hierarchies of Rome.[60]

16. I was strangely struck by this great fact during the course of a
journey last summer among the northern vales of Switzerland. My mind had
been turned to the subject of the ultimate effects of Art on national
mind before I left England, and I went straight to the chief fields of
Swiss history: first to the center of her feudal power, Hapsburg, the
hawk's nest from which the Swiss Rodolph rose to found the Austrian
empire; and then to the heart of her republicanism, that little glen of
Morgarten, where first in the history of Europe the shepherd's staff
prevailed over the soldier's spear. And it was somewhat depressing to me
to find, as day by day I found more certainly, that this people which
first asserted the liberties of Europe, and first conceived the idea of
equitable laws, was in all the--shall I call them the slighter, or the
higher?--sensibilities of the human mind, utterly deficient; and not
only had remained from its earliest ages till now, without poetry,
without Art, and without music, except a mere modulated cry; but as far
as I could judge from the rude efforts of their early monuments, would
have been, at the time of their greatest national probity and power,
incapable of producing good poetry or Art under any circumstances of
education.

17. I say, this was a sad thing for me to find. And then, to mend the
matter, I went straight over into Italy, and came at once upon a
curious instance of the patronage of Art, of the character that usually