The Cruise of the Branwen

CRUISE OF THE BRAN\VEN Art, though it may be found in any human handiwork, exists in nothing else, and is dis-– coverable only through those common channels of perception which are most efficient in the strongest and the most healthy organisms. So that art has- as little to do with insanity, or decadence, or deterioration, as with morals. In a madman those channels through which his mind should direct its communication& to his comrades have become clogged ; the balance between the receptive and responsive body and the creative mind has been destroyed, and so the possibility of his art's appeal is wrecked. The greatest artists have invariably possessed the most essential attributes of physical perfection. But they have not always been distinguished by superiority in what we call "the moral sense." That is a quality which stands outside either the existence or the expression of artistic creativeness. It would be as untrue to say that an artist must be " moral " as it would be to say that " im- morality" is an essential concomitant of the artistic temperament. We are under no more necessity to forgive a criminal because he is an artist than we are to suspect artistic persons of vaguely scandalous propensities. A ~chool of writers seems to have arisen, of late years, who think that the first mark of genius is to be "un– conventional"; that the true trade-mark of" the artist" is an open scorn of Mrs. Grundy. They forget apparently that laws and conventions are only necessary because, as has been so well said, men are either incapable of a choice between 14-2