the last word of beauty and
propriety in the praise of God.

In short, there is a vast body of art now within the reach of everybody.
The difficulty is that this art, which alone can educate us in grace of
body and soul, and which alone can make the history of the past live for
us or the hope of the future shine for us, which alone can give delicacy
and nobility to our crude lusts, which is the appointed vehicle of
inspiration and the method of the communion of saints, is actually
branded as sinful among us because, wherever it arises, there is
resistance to tyranny, breaking of fetters, and the breath of freedom.
The attempt to suppress art is not wholly successful: we might as well
try to suppress oxygen. But it is carried far enough to inflict on huge
numbers of people a most injurious art starvation, and to corrupt a
great deal of the art that is tolerated. You will find in England plenty
of rich families with little more culture than their dogs and horses.
And you will find poor families, cut off by poverty and town life
from the contemplation of the beauty of the earth, with its dresses of
leaves, its scarves of cloud, and its contours of hill and valley, who
would positively be happier as hogs, so little have they cultivated
their humanity by the only effective instrument of culture: art. The
dearth is artificially maintained even when there are the means of
satisfying it. Story books are forbidden, picture post cards are
forbidden, theatres are forbidden, operas are forbidden, circuses are
forbidden, sweetmeats are forbidden, pretty colors are forbidden, all
exactly as vice is forbidden. The Creator is explicitly prayed to, and
implicitly convicted of indecency every day. An association of vice and
sin with everything that is delightful and of goodness with everything
that is wretched and detestable is set up. All the most perilous (and
glorious) appetites and propensities are at once inflamed by starvation
and uneducated by art. All the wholesome conditions which art imposes on
appetite are waived: instead of cultivated men and women restrained by
a thousand delicacies, repelled by ugliness, chilled by vulgarity,
horrified by coarseness, deeply and sweetly moved by the graces that art
has revealed to them and nursed in them, we get indiscriminate rapacity
in pursuit of pleasure and a parade of the grossest stimulations in
catering for it. We have a continual clamor for goodness, beauty,
virtue, and sanctity, w