His ultimate standard of
value to which everything, alike in art and in social and political
relations, is referred, is--not success, not enjoyment, whether sensuous,
sentimental, or aesthetic, but--the measure in which may thereby be
trained up that higher life of humanity. Art is to him God's minister,
not when she is simply true to nature, but solely when true to nature in
such forms and phases as shall tend to bring man nearer to moral truth,
beauty, and purity. The Ios and Ariadnes of the debased Italian schools,
the boors of Teniers, the Madonnas of Guido, are truer to one phase of
nature than are Fra Angelico's angels, or Tintoret's Crucifixion. But
that nature is humanity as degraded by sense; and therefore the measure
of their truthfulness is for him also the measure of their debasement.
In poetry, the key-note so firmly struck by Wordsworth in his noble "Ode
to Duty" has been as firmly and more delicately caught up by other
singers; who, moreover, have seen more clearly than Wordsworth did, that
it is for faith, not for sight, that duty wears
"The Godhead's most benignant grace;"
for the path along which she leads is inevitably on earth steep, rugged,
and toilsome.
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