d even
imagines such a disgrace to be its essence. Art, on the contrary, as
often hugs unreason for fear of losing its inspiration, and forgets that
it is itself a rational principle of creation and order. Morality is
thus reduced to a necessary evil and art to a vain good, all for want of
harmony among human impulses. If the passions arose in season, if
perception fed only on those things which action should be adjusted to,
turning them, while action proceeded, into the substance of ideas--then
all conduct would be voluntary and enlightened, all speculation would be
practical, all perceptions beautiful, and all operations arts. The Life
of Reason would then be universal.

To approach this ideal, so far as art is concerned, would involve
diffusing its processes and no longer confining them to a set of dead
and unproductive objects called works of art.

[Sidenote: A mere "work of art" a baseless artifice.]

Why art, the most vital and generative of activities, should produce a
set of abstract images, monuments to lost intuitions, is a curious
mystery. Nature gives her products life, and they are at least equal to
their sources in dignity. Why should mind, the actualisation of nature's
powers, produce something so inferior to itself, reverting in its
expression to material being, so that its witnesses seem so many fossils
with which it strews its path? What we call museums--mausoleums, rather,
in which a dead art heaps up its remains--are those the places where the
Muses intended to dwell? We do not keep in show-cases the coins current
in the world. A living art does not produce curiosities to be collected
but spiritual necessaries to be diffused.

Artificial art, made to be exhibited, is something gratuitous and
sophisticated, and the greater part of men's concern about it is
affectation. There is a genuine pleasure in planning a work, in
modelling and painting it; there is a pleasure in showing it to a
sympathetic friend, who associates himself in this way with the artist's
technical experiment and with his interpretation of some human episode;
and there might be a satisfaction in seeing the work set up in some
appropriate space for which it was designed, where its decorative
quality might enrich the scene, and the curious passer-by might stop to
decipher it. The pleasures proper to an ingenuous artist are spontaneous
and human; but his works, once delivered to his patrons, are household
furniture for the state. Set