y but in
harmony, equally but differently, these two faculties make our lives
pure and noble. All this Ruskin has forgotten: he has made the enjoyment
of mere beauty a base pleasure, requiring a moral object to purify it,
and in so doing he has destroyed its own purifying power; he has
sanctified the already holy, and defiled with holy water, which implies
foulness, the dwelling of holiness.

This is the lesson to be derived from the attempt at noble self-delusion
which Ruskin has practised upon himself. There is not in the world that
harmony and perfection, nay, that analogy of good to good and evil to
evil for which our higher nature seeks. As we have said, there is
contradiction and anomaly: anomaly the most horrible, since our logical
sense must accept it, and our moral sense cannot: anomaly of good
springing from evil, and evil from good, of pollution of the noble and
hallowing of the foul by the force of inevitable sequence. There is also
isolation of one sort of good from the other, and clashing of their
interests. All this there is, and against it all our moral sense must
for ever protest, and against it, whether free in our endeavour or
merely pushed on by the universal necessity, we must struggle. We
must seek for ever to resolve the discord between good and good, to
disentangle the meshes of good and evil, to destroy the dreadful anomaly
of things. But we can do so, however partially, we can really wish to
do so, only if we have the courage to see that the lamentable discord
and the horrible tangle do exist: only if we do not shrink from the
battlefield of reality into an enervating Capua of moral idealism. And
thus we should admit that only morality is really moral, and only virtue
really virtuous; that physical beauty intrinsically possesses but an
aesthetic value quite separate from all moral value; that above it must
always remain a more generous world of feeling and endeavour. If we do
not shrink from this painful truth we shall see that physical beauty and
its egotistic enjoyment have yet a moral value of their own: the value
of being, in the lives of others, absolute pleasure, the giving of which
is positive good. For in this world all is not completed when we have
destroyed evil; it must be replaced by good. We must all of us work, but
we must work in different ways. One half of us are the destroyers of
evil, the wrestlers with all that is wrong in itself or begets wrong,
falsehood, injustice, disease