Burns drink and wench?--yet he sang!

Did Coleridge opiate and neglect his family?--yet he sang!!

Did Shelley--well, whatever Shelley did of callous and foolish, the list
is long--yet he sang!!!

As years pass, however, he grows out of this stage, and, while regarding
his art in a spirit of dedication equally serious, and how much saner,
he comes to realise that, after all, art but forms one integral part,
however great, of a healthy life, and that for the greatest artist there
are still duties in life more imperative than any art can lay upon him.
It is a great hour when he rises up in his resolution first to be a man,
in faith that, if he be such, the artist in him will look after
itself--first a man, and surely all the greater artist for being that;
though if not, still a man. That is the duty that lies' next' to all of
us. Do that, and, as we are told, the other will be clearer for us. In
that hour that earlier form of absolution will reverse itself on his
lips into one of commination. Did they sing?--yet they sinned here and
here; and as a man soweth, so shall he reap, singer or sot. Lo! his
songs are stars in heaven, but his sins are snakes in hell: each shall
bless and torment him in turn.

Pitiable, indeed, will seem to him in that hour the cowardice that dares
to cloak its sinning with some fine-spun theory, that veils the
gratification of its desires in some shrill evangel, and wrecks a
woman's life in the names of--Liberty and Song! Art wants no such
followers: her bravest work is done by brave men, and not by sneaking
opium-eaters and libidinous 'reformers.' We all have sinned, and we all
will go on sinning, but for God's sake, let us be honest about it. There
are worse things than honest sin. If, God help you, you have ruined a
girl, do penance for it through your life; pay your share; but don't,
whatever you do, hope to make up for a bad heart by a good brain.
Foolish art-patterers may suffer the recompense to pass, for likely they
have all the one and none of the other; but good men will care nothing
about you or your work, so long as bad trees refuse to bring forth good
fruit, or figs to grow on thistles.

We have more to learn from Florentine artists than any 'craft mystery.'
If the capacity for using the blossom while missing the evil fruit, of
which Mr. Pater speaks in the case of Aurelius, were only confined to
those evil-bearing trees: alas! it is all blossom with us moderns, good
or bad alik