firmament showing His handiwork. If the artist can bring whatever
of that vision has touched him into his work we should ask no more,
and must not expect him to be more righteously minded than his
Creator, or to add a finishing tag of moral to justify it all, to
show that Deity is solemnly minded and no mere idle trifler with
beauty like Whistler.

I have stated my belief that art is spiritual, that its genuine
inspirations come from a higher plane of our being than the ethical
or intellectual; and I think wherever literature or ethics have
so dominated the mind of the artist that they change the form of
his inspiration, his art loses its own peculiar power and gains
nothing. We have here a picture of "Love steering the bark of
Humanity." I may put it rather crudely when I say that pictures
like this are supposed to exert a power on the man who, for example,
would beat his wife, so that love will be his after inspiration.
Anyhow, ethical pictures are painted with some such intention belief.
Now, art has great influence, but I do not believe this or any other
picture would stop a man beating his wife if he wanted to. Art does
not call sinners to repentance; that is not one of its powers. It
fulfils rather another saying: "Unto them that have much shall be
given," bringing delight to those that are already sensitive to
beauty. My own conviction is that ethical pictures are, if anything,
immoral in their influence, as everything must be that forsakes
the law of its own being, and that pictures like this only add to
the vanity of people so righteously minded as to be aware of their
own virtue. We will always have these concessions to passing phases
of thought. We have had requests for the scientific painter--the
man who will paint nature with geological accuracy, and man in
accordance with evolutionary dogmas. He will find his eloquent