Medici or a Rubens fleshy, spilling-out-of-her-clothes Magdalen with
a Donatello Madonna. When ethical restraint disappears, art tends to
caricature, it becomes depersonalized. The Venus de Milo is a living
being, a great personage; indeed, a genuine and gracious goddess. The
Venus de Medici has scarcely any personality at all; she is chiefly
objectified desire! The essence of art is not spontaneous expression
nor naked passion; the essence of art is critical expression,
restrained passion.

[Footnote 18: _Rousseau and Romanticism_, p. 206.]

Now, such extreme naturalism has been the continuing peril and the
arch foe of every successive civilization. It is the "reversion to
type" of the scientist, the "natural depravity" of the older theology,
the scoffing devil, with his eternal no! in Goethe's _Faust_. It tends
to accept all powerful impulses as thereby justified, all vital and
novel interests as _ipso facto_ beautiful and good. Nothing desirable
is ugly or evil. It pays no attention, except to ridicule them, to
the problems that vex high and serious souls: What is right and wrong?
What is ugly and beautiful? What is holy and what is profane? It
either refuses to admit the existence of these questions or else
asserts that, as insoluble, they are also negligible problems. To all
such stupid moralizing it prefers the click of the castanets! The
law, then, of this naturalism always and everywhere is the law of
rebellion, of ruthless self-assertion, of whim and impulse, of cunning
and of might.

You may wonder why we, being preachers, have spent so much time
talking about it. Folk of this sort do not ordinarily flock to the
stenciled walls and carpeted floors of our comfortable, middle-class