to enable you to understand invention will also convince you that the mind of man never invented a greater thing than the form of man, animated by faithful life.  Every attempt to refine or exalt such healthy humanity has weakened or caricatured it; or else consists only in giving it, to please our fancy, the wings of birds, or the eyes of antelopes.  Whatever is truly great in either Greek or Christian art, is also restrictedly human; and even the raptures of the redeemed souls who enter “celestemente ballando,"[188] the gate of Angelico’s Paradise, were seen first in the terrestrial, yet most pure, mirth of Florentine maidens.

I am aware that this cannot but at present appear gravely questionable to those of my audience who are strictly cognizant of the phases of Greek art; for they know that the moment of its decline is accurately marked, by its turning from abstract form to portraiture.  But the reason of this is simple.  The progressive course of Greek art was in subduing monstrous conceptions to natural ones; it did this by general laws; it reached absolute truth of generic human form, and if its ethical force had remained, would have advanced into healthy portraiture.  But at the moment of change the national life ended in Greece; and portraiture, there, meant insult to her religion, and flattery to her tyrants.  And her skill perished, not because she became true in sight, but because she became vile in heart....

But I have told you enough, it seems to me, at least to-day, of this function of art in recording fact; let me now finally, and with all distinctness possible to me, state to you its main business of all;—­its service in the actual uses of daily life.

You are surprised, perhaps, to hear me call this its main business.  That is indeed so, however.  The giving brightness to picture is much, but the giving brightness to life more.  And remember, were it as patterns only, you cannot, without the realities, have the pictures. You cannot have a landscape by Turner without a country for him to paint; you cannot have a portrait by Titian, without a man to be pourtrayed.  I need not prove that to you, I suppose, in these short terms; but in the outcome I can get no soul to believe that the beginning of art is in getting our country clean, and our people beautiful.  I have been ten years trying to get this very plain certainty—­I do not say believed—­but even thought of, as anything but a monstrous proposition.  To get your country clean, and your people lovely;—­I assure you that is a necessary work of art to begin with!  There has indeed been art in countries where people lived in dirt to serve God, but never in countries where they lived in dirt to serve the devil.  There has indeed been art where the people were not all lovely,—­where even their lips were thick—­and their skins black, because the sun had looked upon them;[189] but never in a country where the people were pale with miserable toil and