We believe or try to believe that God is pure
and loving and true, and that His Heart is with all that is noble
and hopeful and high. Yet the more generous the character, the
deeper is the fall! Can such things be meant to show us that we
have no concern with art at all; and that our only hope is to cling
to bare, austere, simple, uncomforted virtue? Ought we to try to
think of art only as an innocent amusement and diversion for our
leisure hours? As a quest to which no man may vow himself, save at
the cost of walking in a vain shadow all his days? Ought we to
steel our hearts against the temptation, which seems to be
implanted as deep as anything in my own nature--nay, deeper--to
hold that what one calls ugliness and bad taste is of the nature of
sin? But what then is the meaning of the tyrannous instinct to
select and to represent, to capture beauty? Ought it to be enough
to see beauty in the things around us, in flowers and light, to
hear it in the bird's song and the falling stream--to perceive it
thus gratefully and thankfully, and to go back to our simple lives?
I do not know; it is all a great mystery; it is so hard to believe
that God should put these ardent, delicious, sweet, and solemn
instincts into our spirits, simply that we may learn our error in
following them.
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