o good than one by the glory of the New
English Art Club, and that a penny bun is better than either. In such a
case you will be making a moral and not an aesthetic judgment. Therefore
it will be right to take into account the area of the canvases, the
thickness of the frames, and the potential value of each as fuel or
shelter against the rigours of our climate. In casting up accounts you
should not neglect their possible effects on the middle-aged people who
visit Burlington House and the Suffolk Street Gallery; nor must you
forget the consciences of those who handle the Chantry funds, or of
those whom high prices provoke to emulation. You will be making a moral
and not an aesthetic judgment; and if you have concluded that neither
picture is a work of art, though you may be wasting your time, you will
not be making yourself ridiculous. But when you treat a picture as a
work of art, you have, unconsciously perhaps, made a far more important
moral judgment. You have assigned it to a class of objects so powerful
and direct as means to spiritual exaltation that all minor merits are
inconsiderable. Paradoxical as it may seem, the only relevant qualities
in a work of art, judged as art, are artistic qualities: judged as a
means to good, no other qualities are worth considering; for there are
no qualities of greater moral value than artistic qualities, since there
is no greater means to good than art.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 5: "An Essay in Aesthetics," by Roger Fry: _The New
Quarterly_, No. 6, vol. ii.]

[Footnote 6: McTaggart: _Some Dogmas of Religion_.]

[Footnote 7: I am aware that there are men of science who preserve an
open mind as to the reality of the physical universe, and recognise that
what is known as "the scientific hypothesis" leaves out of account just
those things that seem to us most real. Doubtless these are the true men
of science; they are not the common ones.]

[Footnote 8: I should not have expected the wars of so-called religion
or the Puritan revolution to have awakened in men a sense of the
emotional significance of the universe, and I should be a good deal
surprised if Sir Edward Carson's agitation were to produce in the
North-East of Ireland a crop of first-rate formal expression.]

[Footnote 9: Formerly he held that inanimate beauty also was good in
itself. But this tenet, I am glad to learn, he has discarded.]

III

THE CHRISTIAN SLOPE

I. THE RISE O