Now, however checked by lightness of temperament, the instinctive love
of landscape in us has this deep root, which, in your minds, I will
pray you to disencumber from whatever may oppress or mortify it, and to
strive to feel with all the strength of your youth that a nation is
only worthy of the soil and the scenes that it has inherited, when,
by all its acts and arts, it is making them more lovely for its
children....
But if either our work, or our inquiries, are to be indeed successful
in their own field, they must be connected with others of a sterner
character. Now listen to me, if I have in these past details lost or
burdened your attention; for this is what I have chiefly to say to you.
The art of any country _is the exponent of its social and political
virtues_. I will show you that it is so in some detail, in the second
of my subsequent course of lectures; meantime accept this as one of the
things, and the most important of all things, I can positively declare
to you. The art, or general productive and formative energy, of any
country, is an exact exponent of its ethical life. You can have noble
art only from noble persons, associated under laws fitted to their time
and circumstances. And the best skill that any teacher of art could
spend here in your help, would not end in enabling you even so much as
rightly to draw the water-lilies in the Cherwell (and though it did,
the work when done would not be worth the lilies themselves) unless
both he and you were seeking, as I trust we shall together seek, in the
laws which regulate the finest industries, the clue to the laws which
regulate all industries, and in better obedience to which we shall
actually have henceforward to live: not merely in compliance with our
own sense of what is right, but under the weight of quite literal
necessity.
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