esthetically bad, but morally
good. Beauty is pure, complete, egotistic: it has no other value than
its being beautiful. This is a bitter thing to say, a cruel confession
on the part of one whose love and whose chief interest is the beautiful,
to make to himself: this that his beloved and much studied Beautiful,
which is his happiness and his study, has no moral value: that above
this superb and fascinating thing, there are things which are better,
nobler, more necessary, and for whose sake, in case of conflict, this
adored quality must be trampled under foot. A bitter confession; but the
truth is the truth, and must be admitted; to ourselves first of all. It
is, as we have said, one of the wicked anomalies of this world that the
true, the existing, is at variance with that which we should wish to
exist: we cannot replace with impunity the ugly, the cruel, the mean
truth by the charming, the generous fancy; if we do so, we must be
prepared to break with all truth, or to compromise with all falsehood:
we shall create an evil a hundredfold worse than the one we wished to
avoid. We are afraid of a truth which jars upon our sense of the morally
desirable: we invent and accept a lie, plausible and noble; and behold!
in a moment we are surrounded by a logical work of falsehood, which must
be for ever torn and for ever patched up if any portion of truth is to
enter.

Such has been the case with John Ruskin; he shrank from owning to
himself what we have just recognized, with reluctance, indeed, and
sorrow, that the beautiful to whose study and creation he was so
irresistibly drawn, had no moral value; that in the great battle between
good and evil, beauty remained neutral, passive, serenely egotistic.
It was necessary for him that beauty should be more than passively
innocent: he must make it actively holy. Only a moral meaning could make
art noble; and as, in the deep-rooted convictions of Ruskin, art was
noble, a moral meaning must be found. The whole of the philosophy of art
must be remodelled upon an ethical basis; a moral value must everywhere
sanction the artistic attraction. And thus Ruskin came to construct a
strange system of falsehood, in which moral motives applied to purely
physical actions, moral meanings given to the merely aesthetically
significant, moral consequences drawn from absolutely unethical
decisions; even the merest coincidences in historical and artistic
phenomena, nay, even in the mere growth of vario