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“I think your philosophy is quite right, Baldwin, only–only, somehow, I can’t get it to suit my moral condition,” answered Cyril. “I do feel quite persuaded that sculptors must not try to be painters, nor musicians try to be poets, nor any of them try to be anything beyond what they are. It is all quite rational, and right, and moral, but still I am not satisfied about poetry. You see a poet is not quite in the same case as any other sort of artist. The musician, inasmuch as musician, knows only notes, has power only over sounds; and the painter similarly as to form and colours; if either be something more, it is inasmuch as he is a mere man, not an artist. But a poet, inasmuch as he is a poet, knows, sees, feels a great many things which have a practical and moral meaning: just because he is a poet, he knows that there is something beyond poetry; he knows that there are in the world such things as justice and injustice, good and evil, purity and foulness: he knows all this, which the mere musician, the mere painter, does not–and knowing it, perceiving, feeling, understanding it, with more intensity than other men, is he to sweep it all out of his sight? is he to say to justice and injustice, good and evil, purity and foulness, ‘I know you, but my work lies not with you?’ Is he to do this? Oh, Baldwin, if he be a man and an honest one, he surely cannot: he cannot set aside these ideas and devote himself to his art for its own sake.”

Baldwin listened attentively to the passionate words of his companion, and twitching at a sprig of olive as a branch swept across their heads in their rapid movement through the wood, he answered quietly:

“He will not set aside the ideas of justice and injustice, of good and evil, of purity and impurity, Cyril. He will make use of them even as the musician uses his sounds, or the painter uses his colours. Such ideas are at least one-half of the poet’s material, of the stuff out of which he creates–the half which belongs exclusively to him, which he does not share with any other artist; the half which gives poetry a character in many respects different from that of painting or music. I have always laughed at the Ruskinian idea of morality or immorality in architecture, or painting, or music, and said that their morality and immorality were beauty and ugliness. I have done so because moral ideas don’t enter into the arts of line, or colour, or sound, but only into the subjects to which their visible and audible works are (usually arbitrarily) attached. But with poetry the case is different; and if the poet has got a keener perception (or ought to have) of right and wrong than other men, it is because a sense of moral right and wrong is required in his art, as a sense of colour is required in painting. I have said ‘art for art’s own sake,’ but I should have been more precise in saying ‘art for beauty’s sake.’ Now, in poetry, one half of beauty and ugliness is purely ethical, and if the poet who deals with this half, the half which comprises human emotion and action, has no sense of right and wrong, he will fail as signally as some very dexterous draughtsman, who should have no sense of physical beauty and ugliness, and spend his time making wonderful drawings of all manner of diseased growths. Of course, you may be a poet who does not deal with the human element, who writes only about trees and rivers, and in this case your notions of right and wrong are as unnecessary to you as an artist as they would be to a landscape painter. You use them in your life, but not in your art. But as soon as a poet deals with human beings, and their feelings and doings, he must have a correct sense of what, in such feelings and doings, is right and what is wrong. And if he have not this sense, he will not be in the same case as the painter or musician who is deficient in the sense of pictorial or musical right and wrong. The wise folk who have examined into our visual and acoustic nerves seem to think, what to me seems extremely probable, that the impression of aesthetic repulsion which we get from badly combined lines, or colours, or sounds, is a sort of admonition that such combinations are more or less destructive to our nerves of sight or of hearing; so, similarly, the quite abstract aversion which we feel to an immoral effect in literature, seems to me to be the admonition (while we are still Platonically viewing the matter, and have not yet come personally into contact with it) that our moral sense–what I may call our nerves of right and wrong–is being disintegrated by this purely intellectual contact with evil. And, moreover, our nerves of right and wrong are, somehow, much less well protected than our visual or acoustic nerves: they seem to be more on the surface of our nature, and they are much more easily injured: it takes a good deal of bad painting and bad music to deprave a man’s eye or ear, and more than we can well conceive to make him blind or deaf; but it takes less than we think of base literature to injure a man’s moral perception, to make him see and hear moral things completely wrong. You see the good, simple, physical senses look after themselves–are in a way isolated; but the moral sense is a very complex matter, and interfered with in every possible manner by the reason, the imagination, the bodily senses–so that injuring it through any of these is extremely easy. And the people whom bad painting or bad music had made half-blind or half-deaf would be less dangerous to themselves and to others than those who had been made half-immoral by poetry.”