All such nations first manifest themselves as a pure and beautiful
animal race, with intense energy and imagination. They live lives of
hardship by choice, and by grand instinct of manly discipline: they
become fierce and irresistible soldiers; the nation is always its own
army, and their king, or chief head of government, is always their
first soldier. Pharaoh, or David, or Leonidas, or Valerius, or
Barbarossa, or Coeur de Lion, or St. Louis, or Dandolo, or Frederick
the Great:--Egyptian, Jew, Greek, Roman, German, English, French,
Venetian,--that is inviolable law for them all; their king must be
their first soldier, or they cannot be in progressive power. Then,
after their great military period, comes the domestic period; in
which, without betraying the discipline of war, they add to their
great soldiership the delights and possessions of a delicate and
tender home-life: and then, for all nations, is the time of their
perfect art, which is the fruit, the evidence, the reward of their
national ideal of character, developed by the finished care of the
occupations of peace. That is the history of all true art that ever
was, or can be: palpably the history of it,--unmistakably,--written on
the forehead of it in letters of light,--in tongues of fire, by which
the seal of virtue is branded as deep as ever iron burnt into a
convict's flesh the seal of crime.
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