Goethe, who thus laid down the principle that works of art speak to the feelings and the conscience, and can awaken associations tending to good and evil, by some strange inconsistency places art and artists out of the sphere of morals. He speaks somewhere with contempt and ridicule of those who take their conscience and their morality with them to an opera or a picture gallery. Yet surely he is wrong. Why should we not? Are our conscience and our morals like articles of dress which we can take off and put on again as we fancy it convenient or expedient?—shut up in a drawer and leave behind us when we visit a theatre or a gallery of art? or are they not rather a part of ourselves—our very life—to graduate the worth, to fix the standard of all that mingles with our life? The idea that what we call _taste_ in art has something quite distinctive from conscience, is one cause that the popular notions concerning the productions of art are abandoned to such confusion and uncertainty; that simple people regard _taste_ as something forensic, something to be learned, as they would learn a language, and mastered by a study of rules and a dictionary of epithets; and they look up to a professor of taste, just as they would look up to a professor of Greek or of Hebrew. Either they listen to judgments lightly and confidently promulgated with a sort of puzzled faith and a surrender of their own moral sense, which are pitiable; as if art also had its infallible church and its hierarchy of dictators!—or they fly into the opposite extreme, and seeing themselves deceived and misled, fall away into strange heresies. All from ignorance of a few laws simple in their form, yet infinite in their application;—_natural_ laws we must call them, though here applied to art. In my younger days I have known men conspicuous for their want of elevated principle, and for their dissipated habits, held up as arbiters and judges of art; but it was to them only another form of epicurism and self-indulgence; and I have seen them led into such absurd and fatal mistakes for want of the power to distinguish and to generalise, that I have despised their judgment, and have come to the conclusion that a really high standard of taste and a low standard of morals are incompatible with each other. [Illustration] 104.