The lack is, however, no less fatal, inasmuch as the
void produced by the absence of one of the noblest faculties of human
activity must usually be filled by disturbing forces.
I have heard the theory, "art for art," supported by men otherwise very
enlightened. "An artistic production need not contain a moral treatise,"
they say, and this is quite true, provided the artist be a quick
observer, possessing talent sufficient to handle his subject
harmoniously. Vice carries its own stigma, and pure beauty surrounds
itself with light. The author should be able readily to distinguish the
one as well as the other, and his precepts should come as the harmonious
result of his experience. But such a work, at the mercy of an
ill-balanced brain and unhealthful temperament, must yield bad fruit.
Talent without broad and true knowledge of _reality_, or that which
_is_, instead of being invented, is incomplete in its workings and
results. Its creations resemble the light of the foot-lamp, of
fireworks, of the prodigies of our modern pyrotechnists--pleasing for a
time, dazzling, captivating, intoxicating! But lost in the life-giving
beauty of a summer's night or a glorious sunset, we are tempted to cry
out with the poet,--
"Nothing is beautiful but the True."
What can be said of the other _simplisme_ which, in its search for the
True, ignores the Beautiful while it disregards the Good? Again, its
partisans seek artistic truth in its very worst conditions.
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