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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE III. THE RELATION OF ART TO MORALS. 66. You probably recollect that, in the beginning of my last lecture, it was stated that fine art had, and could have, but three functions: the enforcing of the religious sentiments of men, the perfecting their ethical state, and the doing them material service. We have to-day to examine, the mode of its action in the second power?that of perfecting the morality, or ethical state, of men. Perfecting, observe?not producing. You must have the right moral state first, or you cannot have the art. But when the art is once obtained, its reflected action enhances and completes the moral state out of which it arose, and, above all, communicates the exultation to other minds which are already morally capable of the like. 67. For instance, take the art of singing, andthe simplest perfect master of it (up to the limits of his nature) whom you can find;?a skylark. From him you may learn what it is to ' sing for joy.' You must get the moral state first, the pure gladness, then give it finished expression; and it is perfected in itself, and made communicable to other creatures capable of such joy. But it is incommunicable to those who are not prepared to receive it. Now, all right human song is, similarly, the finished expression, by art, of the joy or grief of noble persons, for right causes. And accurately in proportion to the rightness of the cause, and purity of the emotion, is the possibility of the fine art. A maiden may sing of her lost love, but a miser cannot sing of his lost money. And with absolute precision, from highest to lowest, the fineness of the possible art is an index of the moral purity and majesty of the emotion it expresses. You may test it practically at any instant. Question with yourselves respecting any fe...
| ISBN-13 | 9780217702348 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0217702341 |
| Weight | 0.34 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 0.23 In |
| List Price | $13.25 |
| Format | Paperback |
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| Pages | 96 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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