he aesthetic temperament requires tutelage.]

A puritan moralist, before condemning such an infantile paradise, should
remember that a commonwealth of butterflies actually exists. It is not
any inherent wrongness in such an ideal that makes it unacceptable, but
only the fact that human butterflies are not wholly mercurial and that
even imperfect geniuses are but an extreme type in a society whose
guiding ideal is based upon a broader humanity than the artist
represents. Men of science or business will accuse the poet of folly,
on the very grounds on which he accuses them of the same. Each will seem
to the other to be obeying a barren obsession. The statesman or
philosopher who should aspire to adjust their quarrel could do so only
by force of intelligent sympathy with both sides, and in view of the
common conditions in which they find themselves. What ought to be done
is that which, when done, will most nearly justify itself to all
concerned. Practical problems of morals are judicial and political
problems. Justice can never be pronounced without hearing the parties
and weighing the interests at stake.

[Sidenote: AEsthetic values everywhere interfused.]

A circumstance that complicates such a calculation is this: aeesthetic
and other interests are not separable units, to be compared externally;
they are rather strands interwoven in the texture of everything.
AEsthetic sensibility colours every thought, qualifies every allegiance,
and modifies every product of human labour. Consequently the love of
beauty has to justify itself not merely intrinsically, or as a
constituent part of life more or less to be insisted upon; it has to
justify itself also as an influence. A hostile influence is the most
odious of things. The enemy himself, the alien creature, lies in his own
camp, and in a speculative moment we may put ourselves in his place and
learn to think of him charitably; but his spirit in our own souls is
like a private tempter, a treasonable voice weakening our allegiance to
our own duty. A zealot might allow his neighbours to be damned in
peace, did not a certain heretical odour emitted by them infect the
sanctuary and disturb his own dogmatic calm. In the same way practical
people might leave the artist alone in his oasis, and even grant him a
pittance on which to live, as they feed the animals in a zoological
garden, did he not intrude into their inmost conclave and vitiate the
abstract cogency of their designs. I