is this: The grand relation of man is not first to his brother
men, but to something else, that is beyond humanity--that is at once
without and also beyond himself; to this first, and to his brother men
through this. We are not our own; we are bought with a price. Our bodies
are God's temples, and the joy and the terror of life depends on our
keeping these temples pure, or defiling them. Such are the solemn and
profound beliefs, whether conscious or unconscious, on which all the
higher art of the world has based itself. All the profundity and
solemnity of it is borrowed from these, and exists for us in exact
proportion to the intensity with which we hold them.

Nor is this true of sublime and serious art only. It is true of cynical,
profligate, and concupiscent art as well. It is true of Congreve as it
is true of Sophocles; it is true of _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ as it is
true of _Measure for Measure_. This art differs from the former in that
the end presented in it as the object of struggle is not only not the
morally right, but is also to a certain extent essentially the morally
wrong. In the case of cynical and profligate art this is obvious. For
such art does not so much depend on the substitution of some new object,
as in putting insult on the present one. It does not make right and
wrong change places; on the contrary it carefully keeps them where they
are; but it insults the former by transferring its insignia to the
latter. It is not the ignoring of the right, but the denial of it.
Cynicism and profligacy are essentially the spirits that deny, but they
must retain the existing affirmations for their denial to prey upon.
Their function is not to destroy the good, but to keep it in lingering
torture. It is a kind of spiritual bear-baiting. They hate the good, and
its existence piques them; but they must know that the good exists none
the less. '_I'd no sooner_,' says one of Congreve's characters, '_play
with a man that slighted his ill-fortune, than I'd make love to a woman
who undervalued the loss of her reputation_.' In this one sentence is
contained the whole secret of profligacy; and profligacy is the same as
cynicism, only it is cynicism sensualized. Now we have in the above
sentence the exact counterpart to the words of Antigone that I have
already quoted. For just as her life lay in conformity to '_The
unwritten, and the enduring laws of God_,' so does the life of the
profligate lie in the violation of them.