power.  Then, after their great military period, comes the domestic period; in which, without betraying the discipline of war, they add to their great soldiership the delights and possessions of a delicate and tender home-life:  and then, for all nations, is the time of their perfect art, which is the fruit, the evidence, the reward of their national ideal of character, developed by the finished care of the occupations of peace.  That is the history of all true art that ever was, or can be:  palpably the history of it,—­unmistakably,—­written on the forehead of it in letters of light,—­in tongues of fire, by which the seal of virtue is branded as deep as ever iron burnt into a convict’s flesh the seal of crime.  But always, hitherto, after the great period, has followed the day of luxury, and pursuit of the arts for pleasure only.  And all has so ended.

Thus far of Abbeville building.  Now I have here asserted two things,—­first, the foundation of art in moral character; next, the foundation of moral character in war.  I must make both these assertions clearer, and prove them.

First, of the foundation of art in moral character.  Of course art-gift and amiability of disposition are two different things.  A good man is not necessarily 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.