of the religious feelings which it causes in the mind of the beholder.
The advantage of art over life is supposed to consist in its power to
create in the imagination better and more inspiring objects than life
can offer, and to free and control the contemplation of them. This is
the narrower interpretation of the theory. When the notion of the good
is liberalized so as to include innocent happiness as well as the
strictly ethical and religious values, beauty is conceded to belong
to pictures of fair women and children, and to lyrics and romances,
provided there is nothing in them to shock the moral sense. Aesthetic
value is the reflection--the imaginative equivalent--of moral or
practical value.

The prime difficulty of this theory is its inadequacy as an
interpretation of the whole of actual art; for, in order to find support
among existing examples, it is compelled to make an arbitrary selection
of such as can be made to fit it. Actual art is quite as much an image
of evil as of good; there is nothing devilish which it has not
represented. And this part of art is often of the highest aesthetic
merit. Velasquez's pictures of dwarfs and degenerate princes are as
artistic as Raphael's Madonnas; Goethe's Mephistopheles is one of his
supreme artistic achievements; Shakespeare is as successful artistically
in his delineation of Lady Macbeth as of Desdemona. Now for us who
claim that the purpose of art must be divined from the actual practice
of artists, from the inside, and should not be an arbitrary
construction, from the outside, the existence of such examples is
sufficient to refute the theory in question. If the artist finds a
value in the representation of evil, value exists there and can be
discovered.

If, indeed, the sole effect of artistic expression were to bring to