eclamations, to live lost in
imaginary passions and histrionic woes, is an unmanly life, cut off from
practical dominion and from rational happiness. A lovely dream is an
excellent thing in itself, but it leaves the world no less a chaos and
makes it by contrast seem even darker than it did. By dwelling in its
mock heaven art may inflict on men the same kind of injury that any
irresponsible passion or luxurious vice might inflict. For this reason
it sometimes passes for a misfortune in a family if a son insists on
being a poet or an actor. Such gifts suggest too much incompetence and
such honours too much disrepute. A man does not avoid real evils by
having visionary pleasures, but besides exposing himself to the real
evils quite unprotected, he probably adds fancied evils to them in
generous measure. He becomes supersensitive, envious, hysterical; the
world, which was perhaps carried away at first by his ecstasies, at the
next moment merely applauds his performance, then criticises it
superciliously, and very likely ends by forgetting it altogether.

Thus the fine arts are seldom an original factor in human progress. If
they express moral and political greatness, and serve to enhance it,
they acquire a certain dignity; but so soon as this expressive function
is abandoned they grow meretricious. The artist becomes an abstracted
trifler, and the public is divided into two camps: the dilettanti, who
dote on the artist's affectations, and the rabble, who pay him to grow
coarse. Both influences degrade him and he helps to foster both. An
atmosphere of dependence and charlatanry gathers about the artistic
attitude and spreads with its influence. Religion, philosophy, and
manners may in turn be infected with this spirit, being reduced to a
voluntary hallucination or petty flattery. Romanticism, ritualism,
aestheticism, symbolism are names this disease has borne at different
times as it appeared in different circles or touched a different object.
Needless to say that the arts themselves are the first to suffer. That
beauty which should have been an inevitable smile on the face of
society, an overflow of genuine happiness and power, has to be imported,
stimulated artificially, and applied from without; so that art becomes a
sickly ornament for an ugly existence.

[Sidenote: yet prototypes of true perfections.]

Nevertheless, aesthetic harmony, so incomplete in its basis as to be
fleeting and deceptive, is most complete in its