Art and morals. Attention has already been called to the fact that objects of art are powerful vehicles for social propaganda. Indeed some works become famous less for their intrinsic beauty than for their moral force.[1] The effectiveness of art forms as instruments of propaganda lies in the fact, previously noted, that the ideas presented, with all the accouterments of color, form, and movement, are incomparably effective in stimulating passion; ideas thus aroused in the beholder have the vivid momentum of emotion to sustain them. There is only rhetorical exaggeration in the saying, "Let me sing a country's songs, and I care not who makes its laws." Plato was one of the first to recognize how influential art could be in influencing men's actions and attitudes. So keenly did he realize its possible influence, that in constructing his ideal state he provided for the rigid regulation of all artistic production by the governing power, and the exile of all poets. He felt deeply how insinuatingly persuasive poets could become with their dangerous "beautiful lies." Artists have, indeed, not infrequently been revolutionaries, at least in the sense that the world which they so ecstatically pictured makes even the best of actual worlds look pale and paltry in comparison. The imaginative genius has naturally enough been discontented with an existing order that could not possibly measure up to his ardent specifications. Shelley is possibly the supreme example of the type; against his incorrigible construction of perfect worlds in imagination he set the real world in which men live, and found it hateful.
[Footnote 1: The classic instance of a work that certainly was notable in its early history for its propaganda value is Uncle Tom's Cabin. An extreme instance of a book famous almost exclusively for its vivid propaganda is Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.]
In consequence of this discontent which the imaginative artist so often expresses with the real world, and the power of his enthusiastic visions to win the loyalties and affections of men, many moralists and statesmen have, like Plato, regarded the creative artist with suspicion. They have half believed the lyric boast of the Celtic poet who wrote:
"One man with a dream at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown,
And three with a new song's measure,
Can trample an empire down.
"We, in the ages lying,
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
We o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth,
For each age is a dream that, is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth."[1]
[Footnote 1: O'Shaughnessy: Ode to the Music-Makers.]
Many, therefore, who have reflected upon art—Plato first and chiefly—have insisted that art must be used to express only those ideas and emotions which when acted upon would have beneficent social consequences. Only those stories are to be told, those pictures to be painted, those songs to be sung, which contribute to the welfare of the state. Many artists have similarly felt a Puritanical responsibility; they have told only those tales which could be pointed with a moral. The supreme example of this dedication of art to a moral purpose is found in the Middle Ages, when all beauty of architecture, painting, and much of literature and drama, was pervaded, as it was inspired, with the Christian message. Later Milton writes at the beginning of Paradise Lost:
"... What in me is dark,
Illumine, what is low—raise and support,
That to the height of this great argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to man."[2]
[Footnote 2: Milton: Paradise Lost, book I, lines 22-26.]
In a sense, the supreme achievements of creative genius have been notable instances of the expression of great moral or religious or social ideals. Lucretius's On the Nature of Things is the noblest and most passionate extant rendering of the materialistic conception of life. Goethe's Faust expresses in epic magnificence a whole romantic philosophy of endless exploration and infinite desire. Dante's Divine Comedy sums up in a single magnificent epic the spirit and meaning of the mediæval point of view. As Henry Osborn Taylor writes of it: