Sistine Chapel; and yet it is equally obvious--if we care to look for
the evidence--that while he was at this work the mind of Michelangelo
was absorbed by the conquest of a host of technical difficulties. Of
course, it would be going too far to assert that the great artist did
not actually intend the sublimity that we admire and wonder at; but we
may be sure that this sublimity is not something deliberately planned
and achieved by him. It is there because the theme evoked it, and
because Michelangelo was himself a man of the noblest character and of
the loftiest imagination. It was inherent and latent in him, and it had
to come out, inevitably and mightily, when he was engaged on a piece of
work that tasked all his powers.

An ideal, a significance, a moral, that has to be inserted into a work
of art and that might have been omitted, is not likely to be firmly
joined; and it is liable to fall apart sooner or later. Morality, for
example, is not something to be put in or left out, at the caprice of
the creator; it is, as Mr. Henry James once called it, "a part of the
essential richness of inspiration." Therefore the artist need not give
thought to it. If his own soul is as clean as may be, and if his vision
is clear, the moral of his work may be left to take care of itself.
Nearly always when an artist has been over-anxious to charge his work
with a moral message, written so plain that all who run may read, he has
failed to attain either of his ends, the ethical or the esthetic. There
is a purpose plainly exprest in Miss Edgeworth's 'Moral Tales' and in
her 'Parent's Assistant'; and the result is that healthy girls and
wholesome boys are revolted. There was no moral intent in her
ever-delightful 'Castle Rackrent'; and yet it has an ethical
significance which few of its readers can have failed to feel.

Perhaps 'Castle Rackrent' is the finest of Miss Edgeworth's stories,