Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/89

 SOCIAL CONTROL 75

particular art and which exert a shaping pressure on each crafts- man. These will tend to limit the caprice and irresponsibility of the individual artist because the standards of every fine art come in time to a sort of modus vivendi with the reigning moral and religious standards.

As his work goes much further than his practice it is possi- ble for the artist to help in the moral uplifting of people without living up to his ideals. Singing the praises of friendship, con- stancy, poverty, independence, toil, simplicity, solitude or patri- otism, however much it may move others, happily does not commit the singer to any rash choices. His life is private, his work is public, and while the latter inspires and exalts he may live his life much as other people. The orator or the poet may nerve others to do and die without imitating a Fichte or a Korner. Devotees who take art as the witness of higher beings stand aghast at the gap between the artist's utterance and his life. But the judicious will see in this dualism the chief means whereby art has become the ally of society and a beacon light for moral progress. Only on such terms, perhaps, could the world have the inspiration of a Petrarch, a Rousseau, a Shelley, or a Coleridge. Let us not quarrel with an arrangement that enables each to assist in setting high his neighbor's ideal.

Nevertheless the rarest worth will always be that of the great sincere artists who speak from their heart of hearts and whose work is moral because their natures are profoundly social. Where, as with ^schylus, Dante, Milton, Lessing, Lammenais, or Tolstoi, the art has that indescribable ring of the personality, its mastery will be greatest.

Such are the guarantees that works of art generally shall in respect to social spirit stand above the average man and so draw him upward. 1 But we must not suppose that the net result is any such unflinching support of the social order as is given by

Of the four novels The Count of Mon:. f.es MiscrabU$> Vanity /air and

Ben Hur which during a recent twenty-three months were drawn more than a thousand times each from the St. Louis Public Library, only one is ethically neutral. Two if not three are profoundly social.