He went abroad for a third attempt to write and illustrate his History of Swiss Towns.  He spent part of May on the Upper Rhine between Basle and Schaffhausen, June and half of July on the St. Gothard route and at Bellinzona.  In reflecting over the sources of Swiss character, as connected with the question of the nature of art and its origin in morality, he was struck with the fact that all the virtues of the Swiss did not make them artistic.  Compared with most nations they were as children in painting, music and poetry.  And, indeed, they ranked with the early phases of many great nations—­the period of pristine simplicity “uncorrupted by the arts.”

From Bellinzona he went to Turin on his way to the Vaudois Valleys, where he meant to compare the Waldensian Protestants with the Swiss.  Accidentally he saw Paul Veronese’s “Queen of Sheba” and other Venetian pictures; and so fell to comparing a period of fully ripened art with one of artlessness; discovering that the mature art, while it appeared at the same time with decay in morals, did not spring from that decay, but was rooted in the virtues of the earlier age.  He grasped a clue to the puzzle, in the generalisation that Art is the product of human happiness; it is contrary to asceticism; it is the expression of pleasure.  But when the turning point of national progress is once reached, and art is regarded as the laborious incitement to pleasure,—­no longer the spontaneous blossom and fruit of it,—­the decay sets in for art as for morality.  Art, in short, is created by pleasure, not for pleasure.  The standard of thought, the attitude of mind, of the Waldensians, he now perceived to be quite impossible for himself.  He could not look upon every one outside their fold as heathens and publicans; he could not believe that the pictures of Paul Veronese were works of iniquity, nor that the motives of great deeds in earlier ages were lying superstitions.  He took courage to own to himself and others that it was no longer any use trying to identify his point of view with that of Protestantism.  He saw both Protestants and Roman Catholics, in the perspective of history, converging into a primitive, far distant, ideal unity of Christianity, in which he still believed; but he could take neither side, after this.

The first statement of the new point of view was, as we said, the Inaugural Lecture of the Cambridge School of Art.  The next important utterance was at Manchester, February 22nd, 1859, where he spoke on the “Unity of Art,” by which he meant—­not the fraternity of handicrafts with painting, as the term is used nowadays—­but that, in whatever branch of Art, the spirit of Truth or Sincerity is the same.  In this lecture there is a very important passage showing how he had at last got upon firm ground in the question of art and morality:  “I do NOT say in the least that in order to be a good painter you must be a good man; but I do say that in order to be a good natural painter there