The Two Paths | Page 3

heap of gray stones,
choked up, rather than roofed over, with black peat and withered
heather; the only approach to an effort at decoration consists in the
placing of the clods of protective peat obliquely on its roof, so as to
give a diagonal arrangement of lines, looking somewhat as if the
surface had been scored over by a gigantic claymore.
And, at least among the northern hills of Scotland, elements of more
ancient architectural interest are equally absent. The solitary peel-
house is hardly discernible by the windings of the stream; the roofless
aisle of the priory is lost among the enclosures of the village; and the
capital city of the Highlands, Inverness, placed where it might ennoble
one of the sweetest landscapes, and by the shore of one of the loveliest
estuaries in the world;--placed between the crests of the Grampians and
the flowing of the Moray Firth, as if it were a jewel clasping the folds
of the mountains to the blue zone of the sea,--is only distinguishable
from a distance by one architectural feature, and exalts all the
surrounding landscape by no other associations than those which can be
connected with its modern castellated gaol.
While these conditions of Scottish scenery affected me very painfully,
it being the first time in my life that I had been in any country
possessing no valuable monuments or examples of art, they also forced
me into the consideration of one or two difficult questions respecting
the effect of art on the human mind; and they forced these questions
upon me eminently for this reason, that while I was wandering
disconsolately among the moors of the Grampians, where there was no
art to be found, news of peculiar interest was every day arriving from a
country where there was a great deal of art, and art of a delicate kind, to
be found. Among the models set before you in this institution, and in
the others established throughout the kingdom for the teaching of
design, there are, I suppose, none in their kind more admirable than the
decorated works of India. They are, indeed, in all materials capable of

colour, wool, marble, or metal, almost inimitable in their delicate
application of divided hue, and fine arrangement of fantastic line. Nor
is this power of theirs exerted by the people rarely, or without
enjoyment; the love of subtle design seems universal in the race, and is
developed in every implement that they shape, and every building that
they raise; it attaches itself with the same intensity, and with the same
success, to the service of superstition, of pleasure or of cruelty; and
enriches alike, with one profusion on enchanted iridescence, the dome
of the pagoda, the fringe of the girdle and the edge of the sword.
So then you have, in these two great populations, Indian and
Highland-- in the races of the jungle and of the moor--two national
capacities distinctly and accurately opposed. On the one side you have
a race rejoicing in art, and eminently and universally endowed with the
gift of it; on the other you have a people careless of art, and apparently
incapable of it, their utmost effort hitherto reaching no farther than to
the variation of the positions of the bars of colour in square chequers.
And we are thus urged naturally to enquire what is the effect on the
moral character, in each nation, of this vast difference in their pursuits
and apparent capacities? and whether those rude chequers of the tartan,
or the exquisitely fancied involutions of the Cashmere, fold habitually
over the noblest hearts? We have had our answer. Since the race of man
began its course of sin on this earth, nothing has ever been done by it so
significative of all bestial, and lower than bestial degradation, as the
acts the Indian race in the year that has just passed by. Cruelty as fierce
may indeed have been wreaked, and brutality as abominable been
practised before, but never under like circumstances; rage of prolonged
war, and resentment of prolonged oppression, have made men as cruel
before now; and gradual decline into barbarism, where no examples of
decency or civilization existed around them, has sunk, before now,
isolated populations to the lowest level of possible humanity. But
cruelty stretched to its fiercest against the gentle and unoffending, and
corruption festered to its loathsomest in the midst of the witnessing
presence of a disciplined civilization,-- these we could not have known
to be within the practicable compass of human guilt, but for the acts of
the Indian mutineer. And, as thus, on the one hand, you have an
extreme energy of baseness displayed by these lovers of art; on the
other,--as if to put the question into the narrowest compass--you have

had an extreme