Many fools have committed it and one man of genius has made it notorious.  Never was cart put more obstructively before horse than when Tolstoi announced that the justification of art was its power of promoting good actions.  As if actions were ends in themselves!  There is neither virtue nor vice in running:  but to run with good tidings is commendable, to run away with an old lady’s purse is not.  There is no merit in shouting:  but to speak up for truth and justice is well, to deafen the world with charlatanry is damnable.  Always it is the end in view that gives value to action; and, ultimately, the end of all good actions must be to create or encourage or make possible good states of mind.  Therefore, inciting people to good actions by means of edifying images is a respectable trade and a roundabout means to good.  Creating works of art is as direct a means to good as a human being can practise.  Just in this fact lies the tremendous importance of art:  there is no more direct means to good.

To pronounce anything a work of art is, therefore, to make a momentous moral judgment.  It is to credit an object with being so direct and powerful a means to good that we need not trouble ourselves about any other of its possible consequences.  But even were this not the case, the habit of introducing moral considerations into judgments between particular works of art would be inexcusable.  Let the moralist make a judgment about art as a whole, let him assign it what he considers its proper place amongst means to good, but in aesthetic judgments, in judgments between members of the same class, in judgments between works of art considered as art, let him hold his tongue.  If he esteem art anything less than equal to the greatest means to good he mistakes.  But granting, for the sake of peace, its inferiority to some, I will yet remind him that his moral judgments about the value of particular works of art have nothing to do with their artistic value.  The judge at Epsom is not permitted to disqualify the winner of the Derby in favour of the horse that finished last but one on the ground that the latter is just the animal for the Archbishop of Canterbury’s brougham.

Define art as you please, preferably in accordance with my ideas; assign it what place you will in the moral system; and then discriminate between works of art according to their excellence in that quality, or those qualities, that you have laid down in your definition as essential and peculiar to works of art.  You may, of course, make ethical judgments about particular works, not as works of art, but as members of some other class, or as independent and unclassified parts of the universe.  You may hold that a particular picture by the President of the Royal Academy is a greater means to good than one by the glory of the New English Art Club, and that a penny bun is better than either.  In such a case you will be making a moral and not an aesthetic judgment.  Therefore