"Let any sculptor hew us out the most ravishing combination
of tender curves and spheric softness that ever stood for woman;
yet if the lip have a certain fulness that hints of the flesh,
if the brow be insincere, if in the minutest particular
the physical beauty suggests a moral ugliness, that sculptor --
unless he be portraying a moral ugliness for a moral purpose --
may as well give over his marble for paving-stones.
Time, whose judgments are inexorably moral, will not accept his work.
For, indeed, we may say that he who has not yet perceived
how artistic beauty and moral beauty are convergent lines
which run back into a common ideal origin, and who therefore is not afire
with moral beauty just as with artistic beauty -- that he, in short,
who has not come to that stage of quiet and eternal frenzy
in which the beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty mean one thing,
burn as one fire, shine as one light within him; he is not yet
the great artist."
==

And he returns to the theme:

==
"Can not one say with authority to the young artist, whether working
in stone, in color, in tones, or in character-forms of the novel:
So far from dreading that your moral purpose will interfere
with your beautiful creation, go forward in the clear conviction
that unless you are suffused -- soul and body, one might say --
with that moral purpose which finds its largest expression in love;
that is, the love of all things in their proper relation;
unless you are suffused with this love, do not dare to meddle with beauty;
unless you are suffused with beauty, do not dare to meddle with love;