t because he
knows that evil is evil, whether it take the shape of angels or
devils? And is not the parent's example worthy of the artist's
imitation? What advantage has a man over a child? Is there any
preservative peculiar to manhood that it alone may see and touch sin,
and yet be not defiled? Verily, there is none! All mere battles,
assassinations, immolations, horrible deaths, and terrible situations
used by the artist solely to excite,--every passion degrading to
man's perfect nature,--should certainly be rejected, and that
unhesitatingly.

_Sophon._--Suffer me to extend the just conclusions of Christian.
Art--true art--fine art--cannot be either coarse or low.
Innocent-like, no taint will cling to it, and a smock frock is as
pure as "virginal-chaste robes." And,--sensualism, indecency, and
brutality, excepted--sin is not sin, if not in the act; and, in
satire, with the same exceptions, even sin in the act is tolerated
when used to point forcibly a moral crime, or to warn society of a
crying shame which it can remedy.

_Kalon._ But, my dear Sophon,--and you, Christian,--you do not
condemn the oak because of its apples; and, like them, the sin in the
poem, picture, or statue, may be a wormy accretion grafted from
without. The spectator often makes sin where the artist intended
none. For instance, in the nude,--where perhaps, the poet, painter,
or sculptor, imagines he has embodied only the purest and chastest
ideas and forms, the sensualist sees--what he wills to see; and,
serpent-like, previous to devouring his prey, he covers it with his
saliva.

_Christian._ The Circean poison, whether drunk from the clearest
crystal or the coarsest clay, alike intoxicates and makes beasts of
men. Be assured that every nude figure or nudity introduced in a
poem, picture, or piece of sculpture, merely on physical grounds, and
only for effect, is vicious. And, where it is boldly introduced and
forms the central idea, it ought never to have a sense of its
condition: it is not nudity that is sinful, but the figure's
knowledge of its nudity,(too surely communicated by it to the
spectator,) that makes it so. Eve and Adam before their fall were not
more utterly shameless than the artist ought to make his inventions.
The Turk believes that, at the judgment-day, every artist will be
compelled to furnish, from his own soul, soul for every one of his
creations. This thought is a noble one, and should thoroughly awake
poet, painter, an