the history of all great nations; it is the one sentence always inscribed
on the steps of their thrones; the one concordant voice in which they
speak to us out of their dust.

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 Dandalo, 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 idea 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. But always, hitherto, after the great period,
has followed the day of luxury, and pursuit of the arts for pleasure
only. And all has so ended.

106. Thus far of Abbeville building. Now I have here asserted two
things,--first, the foundation of art in moral character; next, the
foundation of moral character in war. I must make both these assertions
clearer, and prove them.

First, of the foundation of art in moral character. Of course art-gift
and amiability of disposition are two different things; for a good man
is not necessarily a painter, nor does an eye for color necessarily imply
an honest mind. But great art implies the union of both powers; it is
the expression, by an art-gift, of a pure soul. If the gift is not
there, we can have no art at all; and if the soul--and a right soul too--
is not there, the art is bad, however dexterous.

107. But also, remember, that the art-gif