existence;
essentially it enables the spirit to be, yet chokes it incidentally. Men
sadly misbegotten, or those who are thwarted at every step by the times'
penury, may fall to thinking of matter only by its defect, ignoring the
material ground of their own aspirations. All flesh will seem to them
weak, except that forgotten piece of it which makes their own spiritual
strength. Every impulse, however, had initially the same authority as
this censorious one, by which the others are now judged and condemned.

[Sidenote: But, on the whole, artistic activity is innocent.]

If a practice can point to its innocence, if it can absolve itself from
concern for a world with which it does not interfere, it has justified
itself to those who love it, though it may not yet have recommended
itself to those who do not. Now art, more than any other considerable
pursuit, more even than speculation, is abstract and inconsequential.
Born of suspended attention, it ends in itself. It encourages sensuous
abstraction, and nothing concerns it less than to influence the world.
Nor does it really do so in a notable degree. Social changes do not
reach artistic expression until after their momentum is acquired and
their other collateral effects are fully predetermined. Scarcely is a
school of art established, giving expression to prevailing sentiment,
when this sentiment changes and makes that style seem empty and
ridiculous. The expression has little or no power to maintain the
movement it registers, as a waterfall has little or no power to bring
more water down. Currents may indeed cut deep channels, but they cannot
feed their own springs--at least not until the whole revolution of
nature is taken into account.

In the individual, also, art registers passions without stimulating
them; on the contrary, in stopping to depict them it steals away their
life; and whatever interest and delight it transfers to their expression
it subtracts from their vital energy. This appears unmistakably in
erotic and in religious art. Though the artist's avowed purpose here be
to arouse a practical impulse, he fails in so far as he is an artist in
truth; for he then will seek to move the given passions only through
beauty, but beauty is a rival object of passion in itself. Lascivious
and pious works, when beauty has touched them, cease to give out what is
wilful and disquieting in their subject and become altogether
intellectual and sublime. There is a high breath