Unless the perception of beauty be accompanied
with these emotions, we have no more correct idea of beauty than we can
be said to have an idea of a letter of which we perceive the fine
handwriting and fair lines, without understanding the contents. The
emotions consequent upon the due perception of beauty are not given by
the senses, nor do they arise entirely from the intellect, but,
proceeding from the entire man, must be accompanied by a right and open
state of the heart. A true perception and acknowledgment of beauty is
then certainly elevating; exalting and purifying the mind in accordance
with its degree. And it would indeed seem, from the lavish profusion
with which the Deity has seen fit to scatter it around us, that it was
His beneficent intention we should be constantly under its influence.
Now the artist is one gifted by his Creator to discern that ineffable
beauty which is everywhere present, to live in the realm of the ideal,
and to reveal it to men through words, forms, colors, sounds, and, would
he insure the salvation of his own soul, through good deeds. Thus it can
be proved that 'religion is the soul of art,' and essentially necessary
to the artist, because it gives him, simultaneously, the ideas and
feelings of the Absolute, without which he must lose his way, falling
into sterile and ignoble copies of the real, like the Dutch painters,
and thus be able to produce nothing but detailed and accurate copies of
low subjects, of factitious emotions, or of vulgar sensations.
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