d lest it be
a snare of the demon, he must make it a service of God. He must persuade
himself that all the pleasure he derives from art is the pleasure in
obeying God, in perceiving his goodness: that the pleasure he derives
from a flower is pleasure not in its curves and colours and scent, but
in its adaptation to its work, in its enjoyment of existence; that the
enjoyment he derives from a grand view is enjoyment of the kindness of
God, and the enjoyment in the sight of a noble face is enjoyment of the
expression of harmony with God's will; in short, all artistic pleasure
must become an act of adoration, otherwise, a jealous God, or a jealous
conscience, will smite him for abandoning the true altar for some golden
calf fashioned by man and inhabited by Satan. And to this constant
moralising, hallowing, nay, purifying of art, are due, as we have seen,
the greater number of Ruskin's errors; his system is false, and only
evil can spring from it; it is a pretence at a perfection which does not
exist, and which, like the pretence at the superhuman virtue of the
anchorite and mystic, must end in lamentable folly: in making men lie to
their own heart because they have sought to clothe all that is really
pure in a false garb of sanctity and have blushed at its naked reality;
because it makes a return to nature a return to sin, since what is
natural has been forbidden and what is innocent has been crookedly
obtained; because it tries to make us think we are nothing but soul, and
therefore turns us to brutes when we remember that we are also body, and
devils when we perceive that we are also reason. Because, in short, it
is a lie, and only falsehood can be born of it. For, in his constant
reference to a spiritual meaning, Ruskin has not only wasted and
sterilised our moral impulses, but has reduced art to mere foulness; in
his constant sanctifying of beauty he makes it appear impure. Above all,
in his unceasing attempt to attach a moral meaning to physical beauty,
he has lost sight of, he has denied, the great truth that all that which
is innocent is moral; that the morality of art is an independent quality
equivalent to, but separate from, the morality of action; that beauty
is the morality of the physical, as morality is the beauty of the
spiritual; that as the moral sense hallows the otherwise egotistic
relations of man to man, so also the aesthetic sense hallows the
otherwise brutish relations of man to matter; that separatel