“Everything is base that does not speak to the soul, and arouses nothing other than a sensual interest. To be sure there are a thousand things that are already base because of their material or content, but because the baseness of material can be refined through treatment, in art it is a question only of baseness in form. A base head will degrade the most noble material due to a base treatment; a great head and a noble mind, on the other hand, will themselves be able to ennoble baseness and indeed, by doing this, it ties it to something spiritual and discovers a great facet to it. Thus, a story writer of the base shock type will relate to us a hero’s most insignificant accomplishments even so carefully as his most exalted deeds and dwell as long upon his genealogy, his dress, his domestic life, as upon his plans and enterprises. He will narrate his greatest deeds in such a way that nobody esteems them for what they represent. Conversely, a story writer of spirit and a spiritual nobility of his own will place, even in the private life and in the most unimportant actions of his hero, an interest and a substance that makes them important.
“One level further below baseness stands lowness, which is differentiated from the former in that it displays not only something negative, not merely a lack of the spiritual and noble, but something positive, that is, rawness of feelings, bad manners and contemptible attitudes. Baseness creates merely from the lack of a merit that is desired, lowness from the lack of character, which cannot be demanded of everybody... A man deals in a base way who thinks only of his gain and stands in this sense in opposition to the noble man, who can forget himself in order to provide enjoyment to another person. But the same man would act in a low way if he pursued his gains at the cost of his honor and did not even wish to respect the laws of respectability in doing so. Baseness is thus opposed to the noble, lowness to the noble and respectable at the same time. To give in to every passion without any resistance, satisfy every instinct without allowing oneself to be reined in by the rules of propriety, much less by those of morality, is low and betrays a low soul.
“Even in artworks, one can fall into lowness, not merely in that one chooses subjects that exclude the sense of respectability and morality, but also in that one treats them in a low way. One treats a subject in a low way when one either highlights that side of it which decency calls hidden, or when one gives it an expression which leads to ideas associated with lowness. Low actions come into the life of the greatest man, but only a low taste will raise them up and depict them.”94