Christian. Oh, Kalon, you hardly need an answer!  What! shall the artist spend weeks and months, nay, sometimes years, in thought and study, contriving and perfecting some beautiful invention,—­in order only that men’s pulses may be quickened?  What!—­can he, jesuit-like, dwell in the house of soul, only to discover where to sap her foundations?—­Satan-like, does he turn his angel of light into a fiend of darkness, and use his God-delegated might against its giver, making Astartes and Molochs to draw other thousands of innocent lives into the embrace of sin?  And as for you, Kosmon, I regard purpose as I regard soul; one is not more the light of the thought than the other is the light of the body; and both, soul and purpose, are necessary for a complete intellect; and intellect, of the intellectual—­of which the fine arts are the capital members—­is not more to be expected than demanded.  I believe that most of the pictures you mean are mere natural history paintings from the animal side of man.  The Dutchmen may, certainly, go Letheward; but for their colour, and subtleties of execution, they would not be tolerated by any man of taste.

Sophon. Christian here, I think, is too stringent.  Though walls be necessary round our flower gardens to keep out swine and other vile cattle—­yet I can see no reason why, with excluding beasts, we should also exclude light and air.  Purpose is purpose or not, according to the individual capacity to assimilate it.  Different plants require different soils, and they will rather die than grow on unfriendly ones; it is the same with animals; they endure existence only through their natural food; and this variety of soils, plants, and vegetables, is the world less man.  But man, as well as the other created forms, is subject to the same law:  he takes only that aliment he can digest.  It is sufficient with some men that their sensoria be delighted with pleasurable and animated grouping, colour, light, and shade:  this feeling or desire of their’s is, in itself, thoroughly innocent:  it is true, it is not a great burden for them to carry; no, but it is the lightness of the burden that is the merit; for thereby, their step is quickened and not clogged, their intellect is exhilarated and not oppressed.  Thus, then, a purpose is secured, from a picture or poem or statue, which may not have in it the smallest particle of what Christian and I think necessary for it to possess; he reckons a poem, picture, or statue, to be a work of fine art by the quality and quantity of thought it contains, by the mental leverage it possesses wherewith to move his mind, by the honey which he may hive, and by the heavenly manna he may gather therefrom.