by the vileness of
the mind which has conceived it? Must we, together with a precious and
noble gift taken from a hand we should shrink from touching, accept the
disheartening, the debasing conclusion, that in art purity may spring
from foulness, and the excellent be born of the base? It is a conclusion
from which we instinctively shrink, feeling, rather than absolutely
understanding, that it seems to strip the holiness from art, the
worthiness, nay, almost the innocence, from our enjoyment. We feel
towards any beautiful work of art something akin to love: a sort of
desire to absorb it into our soul, to raise ourselves to it, to be with
it in some manner united; and thus the mere thought that all this may
be sprung from out of unworthiness, that this noble century-enduring
work may be the sister of who knows how many long dead base thoughts
and desires and resolves born together with it in the nature of its
maker--this idea of contamination of origin, makes us shudder and
suspect.... Alas, how many of us, of the better and nobler of us, have
not often sickened for a moment as the thought quivered across their
mind of the foulness out of which the noblest of our art has arisen. But
instinctively we have struck down the half-formulated idea as we dash
away any suspicion against that which we love, and which our love tells
us must be good. And thus, as a rule, we have persuaded ourselves that,
though by a horrible fatality our greatest art--in sculpture, and
painting, and music, and poetry, has oftenest belonged not to a simple
and austere state of society, to the strong manly days of Greece or
Rome, to the first times of Christian abnegation and martyrdom, to
the childlike angelic revival of mediaeval Christianity, to the solemn
self-concentration of Huguenot France or Puritan England, that it
has not sprung out of the straightforward purity of periods of moral
regeneration, but rather from out of the ferment, nay, the putrescence,
of many-sided, perplexed, anomalous times of social dissolution. That
although our greatest art seems thus undeniably to have arisen in
corrupt times, yet the individuals to whom we proximately owe have been
the nobler and purer of their day. Nay, we almost persuade ourselves
that in those dubious times of doubt and dissolution, the spotless, the
unshaken were in a way divinely selected, like so many vestal virgins,
to cherish in isolation the holy fire of art. And we call up to our
minds men no