For to cultivate sympathy you must be among living things and thinking about them, and to cultivate admiration you must be among beautiful things and looking at them.  ’The steel of Toledo and the silk of Genoa did but give strength to oppression and lustre to pride,’ as Mr. Ruskin says; let it be for you to create an art that is made by the hands of the people for the joy of the people, to please the hearts of the people, too; an art that will be your expression of your delight in life.  There is nothing ’in common life too mean, in common things too trivial to be ennobled by your touch’; nothing in life that art cannot sanctify.

You have heard, I think, a few of you, of two flowers connected with the aesthetic movement in England, and said (I assure you, erroneously) to be the food of some aesthetic young men.  Well, let me tell you that the reason we love the lily and the sunflower, in spite of what Mr. Gilbert may tell you, is not for any vegetable fashion at all.  It is because these two lovely flowers are in England the two most perfect models of design, the most naturally adapted for decorative art—­the gaudy leonine beauty of the one and the precious loveliness of the other giving to the artist the most entire and perfect joy.  And so with you:  let there be no flower in your meadows that does not wreathe its tendrils around your pillows, no little leaf in your Titan forests that does not lend its form to design, no curving spray of wild rose or brier that does not live for ever in carven arch or window or marble, no bird in your air that is not giving the iridescent wonder of its colour, the exquisite curves of its wings in flight, to make more precious the preciousness of simple adornment.  For the voices that have their dwelling in sea and mountain are not the chosen music of liberty only.  Other messages are there in the wonder of wind-swept heights and the majesty of silent deep—­messages that, if you will listen to them, will give you the wonder of all new imagination, the treasure of all new beauty.

We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life.  Well, the secret of life is in art.

HOUSE DECORATION

A lecture delivered in America during Wilde’s tour in 1882.  It was announced as a lecture on ’The Practical Application of the Principles of the AEsthetic Theory to Exterior and Interior House Decoration, With Observations upon Dress and Personal Ornaments.’  The earliest date on which it is known to have been given is May 11, 1882.

In my last lecture I gave you something of the history of Art in England.  I sought to trace the influence of the French Revolution upon its development.  I said something of the song of Keats and the school of the pre-Raphaelites.  But I do not want to shelter the movement, which I have called the English Renaissance, under any palladium however noble, or any name however revered.  The roots of it have, indeed, to be sought for in things that have long passed away, and not, as some suppose, in the fancy of a few young men—­although I am not altogether sure that there is anything much better than the fancy of a few young men.