be making them sin and be sinning yourself!
Why, my dear Cyril, if you condemn humanity to uninterrupted struggle
with evil, you create evil instead of destroying it; if mankind could
be persuaded to give up all of what you would call useless and selfish
pleasure, it would very soon become so utterly worn out and disheartened
as to be quite powerless to resist evil. If this is the system on which
poets would reform the world, it is very fortunate that they don't think
of it till they are flying to heaven."

"I can't make it out. You seem to be in the right, Baldwin, and yet I
still seem to be justified in sticking to my ideas," said Cyril. "Do you
see," he went on, "you have always preached to me that the highest aim
of the artist is the perfection of his own work; you have always told me
that art cannot be as much as it should if any extra-artistic purpose be
given to it. And while listening to you I have felt persuaded that all
this was most perfectly true. But then, an hour later, I have met the
same idea--the eternal phrase of art for art's own sake--in the mouths
and the books of men I completely despised; men who seemed to lose sight
of all the earnestness and duty of life, who had even what seemed to
me very base ideas about art itself, and at all events debased it by
associating it with effeminate, selfish, sensual mysticism. So that the
idea of art for art's own sake has come to have a disgusting meaning to
me."

Baldwin had risen from the grass, and untied the horse from the trunk of
the cypress.

"There is a storm gathering," he said, pointing to the grey masses of
cloud, half-dissolved, which were gathering everywhere; "if we can get
to one of the villages on the coast without being half-drowned while
crossing the swamps, we shall be lucky. Get in, and we can discuss art
for art's own sake, and anything else you please, on the way."

In a minute the gig was rattling down the hill, among the great blasted
grey olives, and the vines with reddening foliage, and the farm-houses
with their fig and orange trees, their great tawny pumpkins lying
in heaps on the threshing-floor, and their autumn tapestry of
strung-together maize hanging massy and golden from the eaves to
the ground.

Baldwin resumed the subject where they had left it: "My own experience
is, that the men who go in for art for art's own sake, do so mainly from
a morbid shrinking from all the practical and moral objects which other
folk are apt