The Evolution of Art. 311 



nation of the law as their fear of its punishment will permit 

 them to do. 



Now, let us not ignore the facts of nature ; vice, crime, 

 misery, obscenity, unfortunately exist. Through the three- 

 score years of human life they will often enough protrude 

 themselves as uninvited guests upon all of us, but the heresy 

 of this school of art is found in its degradation of the art 

 object. The notion that, for any purpose, or to accomplish 

 any end or aim of true art-pleasure, the artist should find 

 it necessary, or in the least degree helpful, to draggle his 

 muse in the mire, is one utterly unsustained either by the 

 healthy intuitions of mankind or by empirical reasoning. 



The constantly increasing effort of every true disciple of 

 art, whether Olympian creator or humble admirer is to soar 

 above the limitations of to-day ; it is to direct the impulses 

 of humanity toward better things and not to call their at- 

 tention to meaner, not to say unclean, objects ; it is to reveal 

 to man the benignant significance of Nature rather than to 

 invite his attention to her morbid excrescences ; and every 

 great artist who has touched the heart of his own or suc- 

 ceeding ages with a commanding influence has used in the 

 accomplishment of his worthy purpose the chaste weapons of 

 honor, truth, simplicity, and sincerity. He has fixed his gaze 

 upon the shining purity of the Pleiades rather than upon the 

 unhallowed depths of human weakness and crime. 



Is there really so much danger that the coming genera- 

 tions shall be too refined or virtuous or high-minded, that 

 we must temper their noble aspirations with literature so 

 rankly questionable that it is most safely placed on the 

 high shelves of our libraries ? The alleged necessity of real- 

 ism, which, masquerading under the clean name of truth, 

 gluts itself >with the disgusting putridities of vicious hearts 

 and vicious minds, is the product of as diseased a condition of 

 the true art impulse as it is a subtle impeachment of our 

 common humanity ; and it finds its most ardent and effect- 

 ive support, not in the high-minded men who are blinded 

 by its seeming fidelity to the truths of Nature, but in the 

 scurvy camp-followers of art, who gorge themselves upon the 

 offal which is sometimes created by the mistakes of its mas- 

 ters. 



This school of realists is by no means new to the fields of 

 art. The churches of Naples and Spain in the sixteenth 

 century colored and draped their statues. Jarvis describes 

 a mosaic on the ceiling of the Baptistery of the Duomo of 



