to contract the business of dispensaries; to
study the questions of wages and want of work; to taste the
black bread of the poor; to seek labor for the
working-woman; to confront fashionable idleness with ragged
sloth; to throw down the partition of ignorance; to open
schools; to teach little children how to read; to attack
shame, infamy, error, vice, crime, want of conscience; to
preach the multiplication of spelling-books; to improve the
food of intellects and of hearts; to give meat and drink; to
demand solutions for problems and shoes for naked
feet,--these things they declare are not the business of the
azure. Art is the azure. Yes, art is the azure; but the
azure from above, whence falls the ray which swells the
wheat, yellows the maize, rounds the apple, gilds the
orange, sweetens the grape. Again I say, a further service
is an added beauty. At all events, where is the diminution?
To ripen the beet-root, to water the potato, to increase the
yield of lucern, of clover, or of hay; to be a
fellow-workman with the ploughman, the vinedresser, and the
gardener,--this does not deprive the heavens of one star.
_Immensity does not despise utility_,--and what does it lose
by it? Does the vast vital fluid that we call magnetic or
electric flash through the cloud-masses with less splendor
because it consents to perform the office of pilot to a
bark, and to keep constant to the north the little needle
intrusted to it, the gigantic guide? Yet the critics insist
that to compose social poetry, human poetry, popular poetry;
to grumble against the evil and laud the good, to be the
spokesman of public wrath, to insult despots, to make knaves
despair, to emancipate man before he is of age, to push
souls forward and darkness backward, to know that there are
thieves and tyrants, to clean penal cells, to flush the
sewer of public uncleanness,--is not the function of art!
Why not? Homer was the geographer and historian of his time,
Moses the legislator of his, Juvenal the judge of his, Dante
the theologian of his, Shakespeare the moralist of his,
Voltaire the philosopher of his. No region, in speculation
or in fact, is shut to the mind. Here a horizon, there
wings; freedom for all to soar. To sing the ideal, to love
humanity, to believe in pr