Page:Yeast. A Problem - Kingsley (1851).djvu/73

 ism always ends in sheer indecency. Those Papists have forgotten what woman was made for, and therefore, they have forgotten that a woman's hair is her glory, for it was given to her for a covering; as says your friend Paul the Hebrew, who, by the by, had as fine theories of art as he had of society, if he had only lived fifteen hundred years later, and had a chance of working them out.'

'How remarkably orthodox you are!' said Lancelot, smiling.

'How do you know that I am not? You never heard me deny the old creed. But what if an artist ought to be of all creeds at once? My business is to represent the beautiful, and therefore to accept it wherever I find it. Yours is to be a philosopher, and find the true.'

'But the beautiful must be truly beautiful to be worth anything; and so you, too, must search for the true.'

'Yes; truth of form, colour, chiaroscuro. They are worthy to occupy me a life; for they are eternal—or at least that which they express and if I am to get at the symbolized unseen, it must be through the beauty of the symbolizing phænomenon. If I, who live by art, for art, in art, or you either, who seem as much a born artist as myself, am to have a religion, it must be a worship of the fountain of art—of the

'As poor Shelley has it; and much peace of mind