h,
and Gluck, and Marcello, and Mozart, must necessarily be silently carted
off to the dust heap of artistic baseness.

Thus the radical falsehood of the ethical system of aesthetics warps the
whole of Ruskin's view of the genius and evolution of art, of its
relations with national morality and political supremacy. But it does
more than this. It warps also Ruskin's view of art itself; its sophisms
force him to contradict, to stifle his own artistic instincts. For if,
as Ruskin has established, we are not permitted to love the beautiful
for its own sake, but only because it is supposed to represent a certain
moral excellence, that moral excellence must be the sole valuable
portion, and equally artistically valuable when separated from the
beautiful; while the beautiful must in itself be worthless, and
consequently dangerous. The absolutely ugly must, if it awaken virtuous
emotion, have a greater artistic value than the beautiful if it awaken
none; the macerated hermits, the lepers and cripples of the middle ages
must be artistically preferable to the healthy and beautiful athletes of
antiquity; compassion for the physically horrible is more virtuous than
the desire for the physically beautiful, therefore Ruskin would replace
the one by the other; forgetting, even as the middle ages forgot, that
the beautiful, the healthy, are the best and happiest for all of us;
that we are given sympathy with the physically evil only that we may
endure its contact long enough to transform it into the physically good:
that we compassionate disease only that we may cure it.

Thus this sophisticated sense of duty, which, applied to artistic
interests where it has no place, has merely caused injustice of all
sorts, and falsehood and unceasing contradiction: which has condemned
the artistically pure for its juxta-position with the morally impure:
which has preferred the inferior in art because it answered to the
definition of the superior in morals: which has placed Giotto above
Michel Angelo because the second could paint and the first only imagine:
which has condemned Greek art as long as it seemed beautiful and
acquitted it when it appeared ugly: which has legitimated colour art
with one verse of the bible and anathematised linear art with another:
which has so often rejected the excellent in art because it wanted the
excellent in conduct: which has come to the point of preferring that
disease and putrefaction which, in the physical worl