103.  You will use this faculty of judgment more or less, whether you theoretically admit the principle or not.  Take that floral gable;* you don’t suppose the man who built Stonehenge could have built that, or that the man who built that, would have built Stonehenge?  Do you think an old Roman would have liked such a piece of filigree work? or that Michael Angelo would have spent his time in twisting these stems of roses in and out?  Or, of modern handicraftsmen, do you think a burglar, or a brute, or a pickpocket could have carved it?  Could Bill Sykes have done it? or the Dodger, dexterous with finger and tool?  You will find in the end, that no man could have done it but exactly the man who did it; and by looking close at it, you may, if you know your letters, read precisely the manner of man he was.

* The elaborate pendiment above the central porch at the west end of Rouen Cathedral, pierced into a transparent web of tracery, and enriched with a border of “twisted eglantine.”

104.  Now I must insist on this matter, for a grave reason.  Of all facts concerning art, this is the one most necessary to be known, that, while manufacture is the work of hands only, art is the work of the whole spirit of man; and as that spirit is, so is the deed of it; and by whatever power of vice or virtue any art is produced, the same vice or virtue it reproduces and teaches.  That which is born of evil begets evil; and that which is born of valor and honor, teaches valor and honor.  All art is either infection or education.  It must be one or other of these.

105.  This, I repeat, of all truths respecting art, is the one of which understanding is the most precious, and denial the most deadly.  And I assert it the more, because it has of late been repeatedly, expressly, and with contumely, denied, and that by high authority; and I hold it one of the most sorrowful facts connected with the decline of the arts among us, that English gentlemen, of high standing as scholars and artists, should have been blinded into the acceptance, and betrayed into the assertion of a fallacy which only authority such as theirs could have rendered for an instant credible.  For the contrary of it is written in 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