ess, truth, or courage. The oratorio
has already lost its relation to the morning, to the sun, and the earth,
but that persuading voice is in tune with these. All works of art should
not be detached, but extempore performances. A great man is a new statue
in every attitude and action. A beautiful woman is a picture which
drives all beholders nobly mad. Life may be lyric or epic, as well as a
poem or a romance.

A true announcement of the law of creation, if a man were found worthy
to declare it, would carry art up into the kingdom of nature, and
destroy its separate and contrasted existence. The fountains of
invention and beauty in modern society are all but dried up. A popular
novel, a theatre, or a ball-room makes us feel that we are all paupers
in the alms-house of this world, without dignity, without skill or
industry. Art is as poor and low. The old tragic Necessity, which lowers
on the brows even of the Venuses and the Cupids of the antique, and
furnishes the sole apology for the intrusion of such anomalous figures
into nature,--namely, that they were inevitable; that the artist was
drunk with a passion for form which he could not resist, and which
vented itself in these fine extravagances,--no longer dignifies the
chisel or the pencil. But the artist and the connoisseur now seek in art
the exhibition of their talent, or an asylum from the evils of life.
Men are not well pleased with the figure they make in their own
imaginations, and they flee to art, and convey their better sense in
an oratorio, a statue, or a picture. Art makes the same effort which
a sensual prosperity makes; namely to detach the beautiful from the
useful, to do up the work as unavoidable, and, hating it, pass on to
enjoyment. These solaces and compensations, this division of beauty from
use, the laws of nature do not permit. As soon as beauty is sought, not
from religion and love but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker. High
beauty is no longer attainable by him in canvas or in stone, in sound,
or in lyrical construction; an effeminate, prudent, sickly beauty, which
is not beauty, is all that can be formed; for the hand can never execute
any thing higher than the character can inspire.

The art that thus separates is itself first separated. Art must not be
a superficial talent, but must begin farther back in man. Now men do not
see nature to be beautiful, and they go to make a statue which shall
be. They abhor men as tasteless, dull, and in