to run with good tidings is
commendable, to run away with an old lady's purse is not. There is no
merit in shouting: but to speak up for truth and justice is well, to
deafen the world with charlatanry is damnable. Always it is the end in
view that gives value to action; and, ultimately, the end of all good
actions must be to create or encourage or make possible good states of
mind. Therefore, inciting people to good actions by means of edifying
images is a respectable trade and a roundabout means to good. Creating
works of art is as direct a means to good as a human being can practise.
Just in this fact lies the tremendous importance of art: there is no
more direct means to good.

To pronounce anything a work of art is, therefore, to make a momentous
moral judgment. It is to credit an object with being so direct and
powerful a means to good that we need not trouble ourselves about any
other of its possible consequences. But even were this not the case, the
habit of introducing moral considerations into judgments between
particular works of art would be inexcusable. Let the moralist make a
judgment about art as a whole, let him assign it what he considers its
proper place amongst means to good, but in aesthetic judgments, in
judgments between members of the same class, in judgments between works
of art considered as art, let him hold his tongue. If he esteem art
anything less than equal to the greatest means to good he mistakes. But
granting, for the sake of peace, its inferiority to some, I will yet
remind him that his moral judgments about the value of particular works
of art have nothing to do with their artistic value. The judge at Epsom
is not permitted to disqualify the winner of the Derby in favour of the
horse that finished last but one on the ground that the latter is just
the animal for the Archbishop of Canterbury's brougham.

Define art as you please, preferably in accordance with my ideas; assign
it what place you will in the moral system; and then discriminate
between works of art according to their excellence in that quality, or
those qualities, that you have laid down in your definition as essential
and peculiar to works of art. You may, of course, make ethical judgments
about particular works, not as works of art, but as members of some
other class, or as independent and unclassified parts of the universe.
You may hold that a particular picture by the President of the Royal
Academy is a greater means t