

TO SCIENCE AND MOEALITY 101 



ality. The mode of handling and treatment, what we call 

 style, communicates, dimly perhaps, but certainly, something 

 from the artist's nature to the sensibility of the percipient. 

 The same face painted by Greuze, Raphael, and Lionardo da 

 Vinci would affect us with very different sentiments. The 

 same torso modelled by Pheidias, Cellini, Gian Bologna, and 

 Michel Angelo would awake widely dissimilar sensations. 

 The same musical theme handled by Mozart, Cherubini, 

 Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Rossini would transport us into 

 diverse regions of emotion. Thus, at the very beginning of the 

 matter, each artist exercises a specific moral influence, without 

 deliberate intention, by the mere display of personality. 



If we proceed further, and regard the subject-matter of the 

 arts, this connection with morality becomes still more marked- 

 Except in purely decorative work, art cannot escape from con- 

 veying a meaning of some sort. It may therefore be used, 

 and it has been used, to inculcate religion and to stimulate 

 licentiousness, to exhibit the strength of heroes and the con- 

 stancy of martyrs, to reveal the seductions of the senses or 

 the poignant fascination of bloodthirsty passions. We need 

 hardly mention poetry in this discussion ; for poetry, by its 

 command of words, embraces the whole sphere of human 

 nature. Not only all the acts of men and women, but all 

 their thoughts and emotions, their aspirations toward a 

 better state of being, their affinities with brutes, their capa- 

 city to sink below the brutes into devildom, belong to verbal 

 expression. For this reason Milton regarded poetry as the 

 fundamental instrument in education. Logic and rhetoric, 

 he observes, have their important place in mental training ; 

 'to which poetry should be made subsequent, or indeed 

 rather precedent, as being less subtle and fine, but more 

 simple, sensuous, and passionate.' Poetry, to quote another 

 phrase from Milton, ' with a solid and treatable smoothness 

 points out and describes ' whatsoever is presented in abstract 

 form by theology, philosophy, history, logic, and rhetoric. 

 From poetry, therefore, through its simplicity, its sensuous 

 fulness, and its passionate appeal, commanding moral im- 

 pressions for good or evil have to be expected. But enough 



