Originally Posted by diecastconvict

No man ever yet imagined beauty without imagining more beauty and less; he senses, as the good common phrase has it, the limitations to the expression of beauty.and if he is an artist he puts himself in the place of the man who made the thing of beauty before him, clothes himself in his possibilities, and lives the failure and the success which it records. His word, if honest, is the supreme criticism. By beauty of course I mean truth, for the one involves the other; it is only the false in art which is ugly, and it is only the false which is immoral. The truth may be indecent, but it cannot be vicious, it can never corrupt or deprave; and I should say this in defence of the grossest material honestly treated in modern novels as against the painted and perfumed meretriciousness of the
novels that went before them" (Howells).