To the artist who is living the evil life which he expresses, there can be even less danger in expression, than to the spectator. For the expression is not the cause of his life, but only its efflorescence. The roots of evil lie deep below in the subsoil of instinct. Without expression, life would be much the same, only secret instead of articulate. The puritan shows a shocking naivete in thinking that he can reform life by destroying its utterance. Moreover, to express life implies a certain mastery over it, a power of detachment and reflection, which are fundamentally ethical and may lead to a new way of living. Every form of life has an inalienable right to expression. In order to be judged fairly, it must be allowed to plead for itself, and art is its best spokesman. And that we should know life sympathetically is of practical importance; for otherwise we shall not know how to change it or indeed that it ought to be changed at all. Only by knowing other ways of life can we be certain of the relative worth of our own way; knowledge alone gives certitude. Without knowledge we run the risk of becoming ruthless destroyers of things which an intelligent sympathy might well preserve and find a place for in the world. To all these considerations the puritan will doubtless oppose a truth impossible to deny. Experience, he will say, is one, not many; imagination and action are not separated by an impassable wall; things merely imagined or dreamed, even when they do not directly issue in action, may nevertheless influence conduct through a slow and subtle transforming effect upon the sentiments and valuations which make up its background. Character can be maintained only by a vigilant and steady control over impulses which are always threatening rebellion; purity of mind only through the rigid exclusion of the sensual, luxurious, and ignoble; imaginative sympathy with evil, even when sublimated in art, must necessarily undermine the one and becloud the other. "If thine eye offend thee, cut it out and cast it from thee."