“I have often known of people,” said Henry, “who went out to do charity and neglected their families.”
“Yes,” I said, “but that is sometimes for still worse reasons. Now what would the artist in life do? He would be full of the delight of Christmas feeling; and he would either share his dinner with the other man—according to circumstances—or ask him in to his table, if the poor children were not too dirty. He would look out for himself and for the other man, and do it gracefully, beautifully. He knows that first of all he must make his own life sane and beautiful, but he wants to include as many other lives as he can in that life of his, and to make all his relations with men beautiful.”
“What you call the philosophic way,” said Ruth, “is what I had always called the artistic way.”
“That is,” I said, “because you have all of you had a ridiculous, false idea of what the artist is. The scientific life is the life according to particular truths, without an aim. The philosophic life is the life dreaming of supreme good, and neglecting the particular, individual beauty of life.”
“But doesn’t the philosophic way help toward that good?” asked Henry.
“Yes,” I said, “though often it tries only impracticable schemes. The artistic way combines and transcends the two. For the artist must have knowledge of facts, must know science, and must love supreme good, as well. Facts according to the supreme good, life made beautiful to be like completeness, that is the artistic life. It includes both the scientific and the philosophic.”
“It is as it were the middle way?” asked Ruth.
“Yes,” I said, “because beauty includes all extremes.”
Henry remarked: “It may be the best way, but I wouldn’t guarantee to live according to it.”
I smiled. “You mean,” I said, “that you didn’t like the idea of asking the poor man in to dinner?” He assented. “But you misunderstood me. That was only a picture, a story, not a law. If we make large laws for life—such laws as those of art—we shall avoid petty moralizing, which I, for one, detest. We shall see that every circumstance alters the case.
“It’s just this petty moralizing that is unnecessary, when one has big laws and standards which he can use in life, each for himself.”