Page:The Dial (Volume 76).djvu/641

Rh with the religions, tenderly, but with fury. It plays with the religions like that divine monster, the only one beloved, the only one knowing how to love, who sees in all women nothing but successive incarnations of love, and who leaves each one of them broken, bruised, and sometimes dead, but carried by his mere embrace to the summit of her true power, during the time that she belonged to him. Art, like that monster, is immoral, being indivisible and realizing in itself, by the mere fact that it is living, the cruel unity of life. It is the impassive idol which persists upon the desert and upon the tombs because it did not place the arid idea of moral perfection at the threshhold of the knowledge of form; and, residing at the centre of the passions, of the antagonistic systems, and of the pathetic drama of action and of movement, it has sought its food within those struggling forces and shaped its bronze or its stone from their accepted contrasts.