We ought to read in such a manner that we appropriate from what we have read the moral lesson that lies hidden behind it. —Georg Brandes

For those of us who are not practitioners, the most important thing we can get from a work of art is a moral lesson. This is true even if we and others get different lessons, and even if the work or the artist’s intention isn’t explicitly moral and the moral lesson is, as Brandes writes, “hidden”. And indeed, in most works of art, the moral lesson is not a moral but a vision.