“So you married to be useful;—for no other reason on earth, my dear?”
“No, no, no. I was useful before. I married ... for the same reason as your son. But this reason did not make me forget my responsibilities; that is all.”
“Ah, my dear: you do not know,—highly as you rate your art,—what you have deprived society of by shutting yourself up here. Why,—I saw that sot, colonel Bibber, turned into a patriot for full three hours under your influence; and poor little lord H. that we were speaking of just now, grew almost magnanimous for the same space of time. These, and hundreds more, owe to you, my dear, the greater part of whatever virtue has visited them for the last five years.”
“If so,” said lord F——, “what was the effect on better people?”
“The effect that the fine arts are ordained to produce,” said Letitia. “They have much to answer for who defame them,—who perceive nothing in them besides colours, and sounds, and motion,—who put a kaleidoscope and Raphael’s Transfiguration on a level, and recognize nothing more in a symphony of Mozart than in an Eolian harp, and see no matter of choice between a merry Andrew and Kean in Hamlet. They who perceive not that the fine arts are the fittest embodiments of truth and beauty are unconscious of the vastness of the department in which they would have man remain unserved. Such would wonder or laugh at my view of my profession, and discredit my hesitating to leave it for lord F——.”
“You were satisfied that you held a commission to serve man, by means of the fine arts; you were right, my dear, as is proved by your having made the colonel a patriot, and the little lord a hero.”
“That it was only for three hours at a time,” said Letitia, “was not my fault, but that of the arrangements by which means and ends are sometimes separated as far asunder as if the world would be perilled by their coming together. In this, we might wisely copy from man in his state of nature. Indian savages have their songs and dances immediately before their battles; and, as long as prayers imply devotion, they are everywhere used in senates as a prelude to the business of the nation. But we go straight from an oratorio to dinner, from a tragedy to sleep, from the Elgin marbles to shopping in Regent-street; while, on the other hand, if a great national question has to be debated, a mighty national achievement to be wrought, the last thing its conductors would think of would be to spiritualise the passions, and elevate the emotions, and animate the faculties by the most appropriate means which Providence has given for that end.—I know that this union can be only partially effected yet. I know that the passage of the Reform Bill would have been but little helped by any such appliances as we can at present exhibit; but it will be different hereafter, when men have learned the true office of the fine arts, and the ultimate objects of political reforms. Then, hundreds of years hence, it may be,—if a new question of national renovation should be brought forward, the senate to whom it is committed may lay hold, with one accord, on whatever prior observance may best soothe down their animosities, and banish their petty self-regards, and establish their minds in that state of lofty tranquillity which alone beseems the master-spirits of an empire.”
“In those days,” said lord F——, “there will be an end of the absurdity of admitting the ennobling influence of the fine arts, and at the same time holding its professors in contempt.”
“Is it, even now, anything more than a nominal contempt?” asked Letitia. “Do not people mix up the profession and the vices of its professors together, and then talk of contempt?”
“But those very vices are caused by the treatment of the profession.”