ch he creates--the half which belongs exclusively to him, which he
does not share with any other artist; the half which gives poetry a
character in many respects different from that of painting or music. I
have always laughed at the Ruskinian idea of morality or immorality in
architecture, or painting, or music, and said that their morality and
immorality were beauty and ugliness. I have done so because moral ideas
don't enter into the arts of line, or colour, or sound, but only into
the subjects to which their visible and audible works are (usually
arbitrarily) attached. But with poetry the case is different; and if
the poet has got a keener perception (or ought to have) of right and
wrong than other men, it is because a sense of moral right and wrong is
required in his art, as a sense of colour is required in painting. I
have said 'art for art's own sake,' but I should have been more precise
in saying 'art for beauty's sake.' Now, in poetry, one half of beauty
and ugliness is purely ethical, and if the poet who deals with this
half, the half which comprises human emotion and action, has no sense
of right and wrong, he will fail as signally as some very dexterous
draughtsman, who should have no sense of physical beauty and ugliness,
and spend his time making wonderful drawings of all manner of diseased
growths. Of course, you may be a poet who does _not_ deal with the human
element, who writes only about trees and rivers, and in this case your
notions of right and wrong are as unnecessary to you as an artist as
they would be to a landscape painter. You use them in your life, but not
in your art. But as soon as a poet deals with human beings, and their
feelings and doings, he must have a correct sense of what, in such
feelings and doings, is right and what is wrong. And if he have not this
sense, he will not be in the same case as the painter or musician who is
deficient in the sense of pictorial or musical right and wrong. The
wise folk who have examined into our visual and acoustic nerves seem
to think, what to me seems extremely probable, that the impression of
aesthetic repulsion which we get from badly combined lines, or colours,
or sounds, is a sort of admonition that such combinations are more or
less destructive to our nerves of sight or of hearing; so, similarly,
the quite abstract aversion which we feel to an immoral effect in
literature, seems to me to be the admonition (while we are still
Platonically viewing