of Modern Art is to incite the student who
has learned enough here, who has learned—
if I may repeat once more the theme of
this lecture—to be ashamed of nothing but
to be ashamed, to go to Paris, where he
will learn to appreciate life for its own sake,
and to look upon it as an incomparable gift.
In Paris he will be exalted to praise life. What
is art but praise of life ? and it is only through
the arts that we can praise life. Life is a rose
that withers in the iron fist of dogma, and it
was France that forced open the deadly fingers
of the ecclesiastic and allowed the rose to bloom
again. And France is in the world’s van to-
day in her repudiation of the deadly doctrine
that some Bedouin tribes invented in the desert
long ago, that life is a mean and contemptible
thing, and that renunciation of life is the
greatest virtue. The dusk of the gods thickened
in the temples and about the holy shrines
where life was praised in joyous procession.
Century passed over century, and art was
silent ; the beautiful limbs of the lover and
the athlete were forbidden to the sculptor, and
the meagre thighs of dying saints were offered
him instead. Literature died, for literature
can but praise life. Music died, for music
can but praise life, and the lugubrious Dies
Irae was heard in the fanes. What use had
a world for art when the creed current among
men was that life is a mean and miser-
able thing ? so amid lugubrious chant and
solemn procession the dusk thickened, until
4 7