erfect in proportion as amidst the most violent storms of
passion it respects the liberty of the soul. There is a fine art of
passion, but an impassioned fine art is a contradiction in terms, for the
infallible effect of the beautiful is emancipation from the passions.
The idea of an instructive fine art (didactic art) or improving (moral)
art is no less contradictory, for nothing agrees less with the idea of
the beautiful than to give a determinate tendency to the mind.

However, from the fact that a work produces effects only by its
substance, it must not always be inferred that there is a want of form in
this work; this conclusion may quite as well testify to a want of form in
the observer. If his mind is too stretched or too relaxed, if it is only
accustomed to receive things either by the senses or the intelligence,
even in the most perfect combination, it will only stop to look at the
parts, and it will only see matter in the most beautiful form. Only
sensible of the coarse elements, he must first destroy the aesthetic
organization of a work to find enjoyment in it, and carefully disinter
the details which genius has caused to vanish, with infinite art, in the
harmony of the whole. The interest he takes in the work is either solely
moral or exclusively physical; the only thing wanting to it is to be
exactly what it ought to be--aesthetical. The readers of this class
enjoy a serious and pathetic poem as they do a sermon: a simple and
playful work, as an inebriating draught; and if on the one hand they have
so little taste as to demand edification from a tragedy or from an epos,
even such as the "Messias," on the other hand they will be infallibly
scandalized by a piece after the fashion of Anacreon and Catullus.

LETTER XXIII.

I take up the thread of my researches, which I broke off only to apply
the principles I laid down to practical art and the appreciation of its
works.

The transition from the passivity of sensuousness to the activity of
thought and of will can be effected only by the intermediary state of
aesthetic liberty; and though in itself this state decides nothing
respecting our opinions and our sentiments, and therefore it leaves our
intellectual and moral value entirely problematical, it is, however, the
necessary condition without which we should never attain to an opinion or
a sentiment. In a word, there is no other way to make a reasonable being
out of a sensuous man than by making him