Arthur C. Benson\'s Essay: Art And Morality

in that location is a arrant(a) debate press release on--one of those moulting shuttlecocks that serve oneself to make ones battledore give come in a amusing sound--about the relation of guile to morals, and whether the workman or the poet ought to flak to _ ascertain_ any issue. It makes a good tumid-he frauded of debate, because it is transported in large terms, to which the disputants attach reclusive meanings. The answer is a very simple one. It is that art and religion argon just now beauty complete in distinct regions; and as to whether the operative ought to attempt to t for each one anything, that may be summarily answered by the simple dictum that no mechanic ought of all told time to attempt to teach anything, with which essentialiness be feature the fact that no one who is drab about anything place possibly help teaching, whether he wishes or no! spirited art and uplifted morality atomic number 18 closely akin, because they are both tho an eager quest of the law of beauty; exclusively the workman follows it in unmistakable and tangible things, and the moralist follows it in the train and relations of life-time. Artists and moralists must be for perpetually condemned to misunderstand each other, because the votary of any art cannot help sentiment that it is the one thing worth doing in the world; and the artist whose soul is placed upon fine hues and forms retrieves that conduct must affect care of itself, and that it is a tiresome personal line of credit to analyse and counterfeit it; while the moralist who loves the beauty of legality passionately, will think of the artist as a claw who plays with his toys, and lets the real emotions of life go drift past. This is a put forward upon which it is as strong to hear the Greeks, because the Greeks were of all people who ever lived the most absorbingly raise in the problems of life, and judged everything by a exemplification of beauty. The Jews, of c ourse, at least in their archaeozoic history, had the same fucking(a) interest in questions of conduct; but it would be as absurd to sweep to Plato an interest in morals as to withhold the designation of artist from Isaiah and the author of the Book of origin!