Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/410

 398 H. HAVELOCK ELLIS: latest and most important development of his ethical thoughts the fluency of right by the study of pictures. It was not till late in life that he became interested in art, and although he had a keen feeling for the art-process, he had little technical knowledge of painting. Indeed he pos- sessed no true aesthetic feeling at all ; there is probably not a single word in all that he wrote which indicates any sense of what he would probably call " thingal beauty ". He ignored things as well as individuals (as nature does), and saw all as processes, or parts of a process. Pictures were never a passion for Hinton as music was ; but while he learnt little from music (and what he wrote about music occupies only a few pages) he learnt very much from paint- ing. He saw the art of the painter as a great living process, true to the make of nature, and therefore (he would hold) to the make of man. The world of art was a world where all details are subordinated to the whole, where all truth is a truth of relation, where nothing exists by itself; a world where the conservation of energy rules, and where the best is the easiest. It is perhaps necessary to point out that Hinton chiefly occupied himself with landscape-painters, and especially with a group of artists who are marked by many features in common Turner, Constable, Dupre, David Cox. The painter, as Hinton saw him, is bound to cast out the " self-rights " in everything he paints ; he has attained perfect freedom from restraints, the right to do anything; and in doing so he is but following nature's method. In seeing this Hinton saw implicitly the law for man's action, and found it to be the explanation of morals, and one with the lesson of science. "It is the same in morals as in art. Truth is truth to nature ; goodness is goodness of nature." Life also is an art, the laws of which are revealed in the other arts. That art has always had a close relation to life Hinton found little difficulty in proving, and he endeavoured to trace out how a false moral code has never been able to exist at any great art-period, although the disintegration of the false morals has not necessarily meant the establishment of the true. " Morals cannot stand before a paint-brush. It never has ; visibly it never can." It will be seen that to Hinton the change he foresaw came as the destruction of morals. It was the breaking down of all outside restrictions for the reassertion of the law on the heart. There is a passage in the Introduction to Taine's Origines de la France contemporaine in which that writer enumerates those things in the abolition of which civilisation has consisted. With very few deductions the same passage