IV. CONCLUSION 201

in that its learning is more substantial and extended, and its temper more humble; but its errors, with respect to the cultivation of art, are precisely the same,-nay, as far as regards execution, even more aggravated. We require, at present, from our general workmen, more perfect finish than was demanded in the most skilful Renaissance periods, except in their very finest productions; and our leading principles in teaching, and in the patronage which necessarily gives tone to teaching, are, that the goodness of work consists primarily in firmness of handling and accuracy of science, that is to say, in hand-work and head-work; whereas heart-work, which is the one work we want, is not only independent of both, but often, in great degree, inconsistent with either.

§ 6. Here, therefore, let me finally and firmly enunciate the great principle to which all that has hitherto been stated is subservient:-that art is valuable or otherwise, only as it expresses the personality, activity, and living perception of a good and great human soul;¹ that it may express and contain this with little help from execution, and less from science; and that if it have not this, if it show not the vigour, perception, and invention of a mighty human spirit, it is worthless. Worthless, I mean, as art; it may be precious in some other way, but, as art, it is nugatory. Once let this be well understood among us, and magnificent consequences will soon follow. Let me repeat it in other terms, so that I may not be misunderstood. All art is great, and good, and true, only so far as it is distinctively the work of manhood in its entire and highest sense; that is to say, not the work of limbs and fingers, but of the soul, aided, according to her necessities, by the inferior powers; and therefore distinguished in essence from all products of those inferior powers unhelped by the soul.² For as a photograph is not a work of art,

¹ [So in Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. x. § 22, “greatness in art is ... the expression of a mind of a God-made great man;” in Two Paths, § 45, “great art is nothing else than the type of strong and noble life;” and in the lecture on The Flamboyant Architecture of the Valley of the Somme (1869), Ruskin says, “Great art is the expression in form of the mind of a great man.”]

² [Compare the aphorism in Two Paths, § 53: “Fine art is that in which the hand and head and the heart of man go together.”]

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