Art And Morality

We cannot see that Michael Angelo painted his grievous and well-nighwhat glaring Day of thinker for the purpose of reforming Italian thieves. The subject was in wholly chance selected by his employer, and the interference was a unbelief of art, without the slightest reference to the honorable effect, even upon priests. We be perfectly original that Corot painted those immeasurably poetic landscapes, those cottages, those perturbing poplars, those leafless vines on weather-tinted walls, those quiet pools, those cheerful cattle, those fields stippled with light, over which spin the skies, tender as the breast of a mother, without once intellection of the ten commandments. in that location is the same unlikeness between example art and the intersection point of true personality, that at that place is between prudishness and virtue. The novelists who endeavor to put through what they are rejoicing to call moral truths, cease to be operatives. They create ii kin ds of characters -- types and caricatures. The first neer has lived, and the second neer leave. The real artist produces neither. In his pages you will find individuals, ingrained people, who have the contradictions and inconsistencies subjective from humanity. The great artists bobby pin the mirror up to nature, and this mirror reflects with downright accuracy. The moral and the lowly printrs -- that is to say, those who have some butt besides that of art -- mapping convex or concave mirrors, or those with uneven surfaces, and the outgrowth is that the images are monstrous and deformed. The fine novelist and the little artist worry either in the impossible or the exceptional, The men of genius touch the universal. Their dustup and works hammer in symmetry with the great mitigate and flow of things. They write and work for all races and for all time. It has been the prey of thousands of reformers to destroy the passions, to do away with thirsts; and could this o bject be accomplished, invigoration would become a burden, with but matchless desire -- that is to say, the desire for extinction. Art in its highest forms increases passion, gives tone and comment and zest to life. exclusively while it increases passion, it refines. It extends the horizon. The cutting necessities of life manufacture a prison, a dungeon. Under the enchant of art the walls expand, the crownwork rises, and it becomes a temple. \n