sarily a painter, nor does an eye for colour 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.

But also, remember, that the art-gift itself is only the result of the
moral character of generations. A bad woman may have a sweet voice;
but that sweetness of voice comes of the past morality of her race.
That she can sing with it at all, she owes to the determination of
laws of music by the morality of the past. Every act, every impulse,
of virtue and vice, affects in any creature, face, voice, nervous
power, and vigour and harmony of invention, at once. Perseverance in
rightness of human conduct, renders, after a certain number of
generations, human art possible; every sin clouds it, be it ever so
little a one; and persistent vicious living and following of pleasure
render, after a certain number of generations, all art impossible. Men
are deceived by the long-suffering of the laws of nature; and mistake,
in a nation, the reward of the virtue of its sires for the issue of
its own sins. The time of their visitation will come, and that
inevitably; for, it is always true, that if the fathers have eaten sour
grapes, the children's teeth are set on edge.[201] And for the
individual, as soon as you have learned to read, you may, as I have
said, know him to the heart's core, through his art. Let his art-gift
be never so great, and cultivated to the height by the schools of a
great race of men; and it is still but a tapestry thrown over his own
being and inner soul; and the bearing of it will show, infallibly,
whether it hangs on a man, or on a skeleton. If you are dim-eyed, you
may not see the difference in the fall of the folds at first, but
learn how to look, and the folds themselves will become transparent,
and you shall see through them the death's shape, or the divine one,
making the tissue above it as a cloud of light, or as a winding-sheet.

Then farther, observe, I have said (and you will find it true, and
that to the uttermost) that, as all lovely art is rooted in virtue, so
it bears fruit of virtue, and is didactic in its own nature. It is
often didactic also in actually expressed thought, as Giotto's,
Michael Angelo's, Duerer's, and hundreds more; but that is not its
special function,--it is di