To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art

“To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination.” Thus spoke George Jean Nathan, the fiery critic of the early twentieth century, whose wit and intellect cut through pretense like a blade through silk. In this daring and paradoxical saying, he exposes the futility of binding art with rules, or of chaining imagination with moral law. To demand that art be “moral,” he tells us, is as absurd as demanding that love obey the statutes of government. Both art and love spring from the deepest core of being — wild, instinctive, sacred. They cannot be legislated; they can only be lived.

When Nathan says that “art is the sex of the imagination,” he speaks not in jest, but in revelation. Just as sex is the body’s expression of creation, art is the spirit’s. It is the sacred act by which the human soul joins the infinite, bringing forth beauty, meaning, and vision into the world. It is not sterile nor tame; it is primal, ecstatic, and sometimes dangerous. The moralist, who seeks to regulate it, does not understand it — for art, like desire, belongs to the realm of nature and passion, not to that of rules and restraint. To impose morality on art is to strip it of its vitality, to turn creation into conformity, and to make the living pulse of expression into a mechanical beat.

Nathan’s words echo an ancient wisdom known to the poets and prophets of every age: that art is divine fire, and divine fire must burn freely. The Greek god Dionysus, lord of ecstasy and inspiration, was both adored and feared — for his gifts liberated men from order and reason. The festivals of Dionysus, out of which Greek theater was born, were celebrations of chaos and truth, laughter and tragedy, joy and pain — all inseparable. No one dared speak of “morality” there, for to experience art was to experience the fullness of life itself, unfiltered and unashamed. Nathan’s metaphor thus becomes clear: to legislate art is to misunderstand its sacred nature, just as to legislate love is to misunderstand the heart.

History offers many examples of this eternal tension between morality and art. Consider Oscar Wilde, that brilliant and tragic poet of beauty. His life and work defied convention, proclaiming that art exists not to instruct, but to illuminate. When he wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray, critics condemned it as immoral — but Wilde replied that there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book; there are only well-written and badly written ones. Like Nathan, he knew that art transcends morality, for it belongs to a realm where good and evil dissolve into truth. In art, as in love, the soul bares itself — and in that nakedness lies its purity.

To understand Nathan’s teaching, one must grasp the difference between invention and imagination. Invention builds according to rule; imagination creates according to necessity. It is the vital force of the universe, the principle that gives rise to stars, to song, to life itself. When the artist creates, they act as the lover acts — in surrender, in passion, in communion with something greater than themselves. To speak of “morals” in this process is to miss its essence entirely. The imagination does not obey laws; it reveals truth through experience. It is not moral or immoral — it is elemental.

Nathan’s metaphor of sex is thus no vulgar comparison, but a sacred one. Both art and sex are acts of union — one of the body, the other of the soul. Both break boundaries, dissolve the ego, and remind us of our connection to the eternal. To legislate either is to deny life itself. Just as love, when reduced to law, becomes sterile, so art, when forced to be “proper,” ceases to be art. The true artist must dare to imagine without fear, to express without apology, and to trust the inner fire that demands to be made manifest.

And yet, Nathan’s wisdom is not a call to chaos, but to authenticity. He does not say that art should defy morality for rebellion’s sake, but that it must be free to reveal what is true, even when that truth is uncomfortable. Art, like sex, must come from love — not the love of rules, but the love of life. When the artist creates from this place, they speak the language of the gods, and their work becomes a bridge between the human and the divine.

The lesson, then, is this: do not fear the wildness of imagination, nor seek to cage it with the bars of morality. Let your creative spirit flow as freely as love itself, for both are acts of divine communion. Be brave enough to express the truths that live within you, even when they unsettle or disturb. For art, like sex, is the celebration of existence — the moment when the self and the infinite meet in ecstasy. As George Jean Nathan reminds us, to bind it is to betray it, and to free it is to honor the very power that makes us human.