Note 75 — Chapter II

“I hope, indeed, to enable them” (the members of his class) “to read, above all, the minds of semi-barbarous nations in the only language by which their feelings were capable of expression; and those whose temper inclines them to take a pleasure in mythic symbols, will not probably be induced to quit the profound fields of investigation which early art will open to them, and which belong to it alone. For this is a general law, that supposing the intellect of the workman the same, the more imitatively complete his art, the less he will mean by it, and the ruder the symbol, the deeper the intention.”—Ruskin’s “Oxford Lectures on Art,” 1870, p. 19.