marred the historic character and the beauty of our city, while I was
positively assured on the best authority that it was commercially
inexpedient. If Thirlmere can be spared, spare Thirlmere; but if it is
really needed to supply those masses with a necessary of life, the
loveliest lake by which poet or artist ever wandered could not be put to
a nobler use. I am glad in this to follow the Bishop of Manchester, who
is not made of coarse clay, though he cares for the health as well as
for the religion of his people. A schism between aesthetic Oxford and
industrial Lancashire would be a bad thing for both; and South
Kensington, which, while it teaches art, joins hands with industry,
surely does well. It is needless to debate before this audience the
question whether there is any essential antagonism between art or
esthetic culture, and the tendencies of an age of science. An accidental
antagonism there may be, an essential antagonism there cannot be. What
is science but truth, and why should not truth and beauty live together?
Is an artist a worse painter of the human body from being a good
anatomist? Then why should he be a worse painter of nature generally,
because he knows her secrets, or because they are being explored in his
time? Would he render moonlight better if he believed the moon was a
green cheese? Art and Science dwelt together well enough in the minds of
Leonardo da Vinci and Michael Angelo. In the large creative mind there
is room for both; though the smaller and merely perceptive mind being
fixed on one may sometimes not have room for the other. True, the
perfect concord of art and science, like that of religion and science,
may be still to come, and come, we hope, both concords will. One word
more before we distribute the prizes. A system of prizes is a system of
competition, and to competition some object. We can readily sympathise
with their objection. Work done from love of the subject, or from a
sense of duty, is better than work done for a prize, and, moreover, we
cherish the hope that co-operation, not competition, will be the
ultimate principle of industry, and the final state of man. But nothing
hinders that, in working for a prize as in working for your bread, you
may, at the same time, be working from sense of duty and love of the
subject, and though co-operation may be our final state, competition is
our present. Here the competition is at least fair. There can hardly be
any doubt that the prize system often calls into activity powers of
doing good work which would otherwise have lain dormant, and if it does
this it is useful to the community, though the individual needs to be on
his guard against its drawbacks in himself. In reading the Life of Lord
Althorp the other day I was struck with the fact, for a fact, I think,
it evidently was, that England had owed one of her worthiest and most
useful statesmen to a college competition, which aroused him to a sense
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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