That the objection is
conceivable is precisely the measure of our decadence. For the vital
centre of our ethics is also the vital centre of our art. Moral nihilism
inevitably involves an aesthetic nihilism, which can be obscured only
temporarily by an insistence upon technical perfection as in itself a
supreme good. Neither the art of religion nor the religion of art is an
adequate statement of the possibilities and purpose of art, but there is
no doubt that the religion of art is by far the more vacuous of the two.
The values of literature, the standards by which it must be criticised,
and the scheme according to which it must be arranged, are in the last
resort moral. The sense that they should be more moral than morality
affords no excuse for accepting them when they are less so. Literature
should be a kingdom where a sterner morality, a more strenuous liberty
prevails--where the artist may dispense if he will with the ethics of
the society in which he lives, but only on condition of revealing a
deeper insight into the moral law to whose allegiance man, in so far as
he is man and not a beast, inevitably tends.
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