er or lower, must; but the lower
ones are already fully exercised, and, if anything, require restraint;
so that French cooks and erotic poets ought rather to be exterminated
as productive of evil than encouraged as creative of good. And moral
satisfaction and love give us the best pleasures of all; but these are
pleasures which are not due to any special class created on purpose
for their production. Oh, I don't say that any artist can give you
the pleasure you have in knowing yourself to be acting rightly, or in
sympathizing and receiving sympathy; but the artist is the instrument,
the machine constructed to produce the only pleasures which can come
near these. Every one of us can destroy evil and create pleasure, in a
sort of incidental, amateurish way, within our own immediate circle;
but as the men of thought and of action are the professional destroyers
of evil, so the artists are the professional creators of good--they
work not for those immediately around them, but for the world at large.
So your artist is your typical professional creator of pleasure; he
is fitted out, as other men are not, to do this work; he is made of
infinitely finer stuff than other men, not as a whole man, but as an
artist: he has much more delicate hearing, much keener sight, much
defter fingers, much farther-reaching voice than other men; he is
specially prepared to receive and transmit impressions which would be
as wasted on other creatures, as the image in the camera on unprepared,
ordinary paper. Now, what I maintain is simply this, that if, according
to my definition, the object of destroying as much evil and creating as
much good can be attained only by the greatest activity rightly applied,
it is evident that a man endowed to be an artist--that is to say, a
creator of good for the whole world--is simply failing in his duty by
becoming a practical worker; that is to say, an amateur destroyer of
evil. What shall we say of this artist? We shall say that, in order
to indulge in the moral luxury, the moral amusement, of removing an
imperceptible amount of pain, he has defrauded the world of the immense
and long-lasting pleasure placed in his charge to give; we shall say
that, in order to feel himself a little virtuous, this man has simply
acted like a cheat and a thief."

Baldwin had spoken rapidly and earnestly, with a sort of uniform or only
gradually rising warmth, very different from the hesitating, fluctuating
sort of passion of hi