when I said that the only true religion was the
religion not of nature, nor of mankind, nor of science, nor of art, but
the religion of good, and that the creation of perfect beauty is the
highest aim of the artist, I was not contradicting myself, but merely
stating two parts--a general and a particular--of the same proposition.
I don't know what your definition of right living may be; mine, the more
I think over the subject, has come to be this:--the destruction of the
greatest possible amount of evil and the creation of the greatest
possible amount of good in the world. And this is possible only by the
greatest amount of the best and most complete activity, and the greatest
amount of the best activity is possible only when everything is seen in
its right light, in order that everything may be used in its right
place. I have always preached to you that life must be activity; but
activity defeats itself if misapplied; it becomes a mere Danaides' work
of filling bottomless casks--pour and pour and pour in as much as you
will, the cask will always be empty. Now, in this world there are two
things to be done, and two distinct sets of people to do them: the one
work is the destruction of evil, the other the creation of good. Mind, I
say the _creation_ of good, for I consider that to do good--that is to
say, to act rightly--is not necessarily the same as to _create_ good.
Every one who does his allotted work is doing good; but the man who
tends the sick, or defends the oppressed, or discovers new truths, is
not creating good, but destroying evil--destroying evil in one of a
hundred shapes, as sickness, or injustice, or falsehood. But he merely
removes, he does not give; he leaves men as poor or as rich as they
would have been, had not disease, or injustice, or error stolen away
some of their life. The man who creates good is the one who not merely
removes pain, but adds pleasure to our lives. Through him we are
absolutely the richer. And this creator of good, as distinguished from
destroyer of evil, is, above all other men, the artist. The scientific
thinker may add pleasure to our lives, but in reality this truth of his
is valuable, not for the pleasure it gives, but for the pain it removes.
Science is warfare; we may consider it as a kind of sport, but in
reality it is a hunting down of the most dangerous kind of wild
animal--falsehood. A great many other things may give pleasure to our
lives--all our healthy activities, upp