And
it is sufficient warning against what some might dread as the probable
effect of such a conviction on your own minds, namely, that you might
permit yourselves in the weaknesses which you imagined to be allied to
genius, when they took the form of personal temptations;--it is
surely, I say, sufficient warning against so mean a folly, to discern,
as you may with little pains, that, of all human existences, the lives
of men of that distorted and tainted nobility of intellect are
probably the most miserable.
I pass to the second, and for us the more practically important
question, What is the effect of noble art upon other men; what has it
done for national morality in time past: and what effect is the
extended knowledge or possession of it likely to have upon us now?
And here we are at once met by the facts, which are as gloomy as
indisputable, that, while many peasant populations, among whom
scarcely the rudest practice of art has ever been attempted, have
lived in comparative innocence, honour, and happiness, the worst
foulness and cruelty of savage tribes have been frequently associated
with fine ingenuities of decorative design; also, that no people has
ever attained the higher stages of art skill, except at a period of
its civilization which was sullied by frequent, violent, and even
monstrous crime; and, lastly, that the attaining of perfection in art
power, has been hitherto, in every nation, the accurate signal of the
beginning of its ruin.
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