can abstract from it and relate to the conduct of life? My belief is
that the most literature can do is to help to interpret art, and that
art offers to it, as nature does, a vision of beauty, but of undefined
significance.

No one asks or expects the clouds to shape themselves into ethical
forms, or the sun to shine only on the just and not on the unjust
also. It is vain to expect it, but there is something written about the
heavens declaring the beauty of the Creator and the firmament showing
His handiwork. If the artist can bring whatever of that vision has
touched him into his work we should ask no more, and must not expect him
to be more righteously minded than his Creator, or to add a finishing
tag of moral to justify it all, to show that Deity is solemnly minded
and no mere idle trifler with beauty like Whistler.

I have stated my belief that art is spiritual, that its genuine
inspirations come from a higher plane of our being than the ethical
or intellectual; and I think wherever literature or ethics have so
dominated the mind of the artist that they change the form of his
inspiration, his art loses its own peculiar power and gains nothing. We
have here a picture of "Love steering the bark of Humanity." I may put
it rather crudely when I say that pictures like this are supposed to
exert a power on the man who, for example, would beat his wife, so that
love will be his after inspiration. Anyhow, ethical pictures are painted
with some such intention belief. Now, art has great influence, but I do
not believe this or any other picture would stop a man beating his wife
if he wanted to. Art does not call sinners to repentance; that is not
one of its powers. It fulfils rather another saying: "Unto them that
have much shall be given," bringing delight to those that are already
sensitive to beauty. My own conviction is that ethical pictures are,
if anything, immoral in their influence, as everything must be that
forsakes the law of its own being, and that pictures like this only add
to the vanity of people so righteously minded as to be aware of their
own virtue. We will always have these concessions to passing phases of
thought. We have had requests for the scientific painter--the man who
will paint nature with geological accuracy, and man in accordance
with evolutionary dogmas. He will find his eloquent literary defenders
enchanted to find so much learning to point to in his work, but it will
all pass. The true arti