210 Colonel Sir Ronald Ross [June 4, 



both for humanity. In every great work of art which I have ever 

 examined I see the didactic intention written large all over it. Art 

 is science teaching us, not by means of saws and syllogisms, but by 

 means of wise instances and great figures set within crystals of 

 perfect and immortal beauty. It is this very didactic intention 

 which divides great art from little art. Take, for example, what are 

 perhaps the most enduring and universal of all forms of art, proverbs 

 and maxims, the fairy-tales, folk-lore and mythologies. The latter 

 may perhaps contain personifications of the dawn, the totem and 

 tabu ; but they contain much more of wise instruction ; and my 

 own feeling is thai they are the relics of great poems invented long 

 before the days of writing, in the vast dark ages of mankind, by the 

 prophets and thinkers who lived then and who had no other means 

 of communicating their wisdom. The mythology of Greece was 

 created by Homers before Homer, and is a perpetual instruction 

 which permeates us all even to-day. The court of Zeus, the labours 

 of Heracles, the despair of Orpheus, are pictures of universal fact ; 

 and the punishment of Prometheus for giving fire from heaven to 

 men, that is, the punishment of genius, is a story of which many 

 actual instances may be mentioned. Then take the world's greatest 

 literature — let us say, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare. As I 

 have argued elsewhere, these great men of science were, each in his 

 own epoch and country, the first to commence the exposition of a 

 branch of natural knowledge which, though it is of prime importance 

 for all of us, has not yet even received a name. The subscience of 

 this department of knowledge aims at collecting, classifying and 

 cataloguing the infinite varieties of character and circumstance found 

 in human life ; the theory of the science attempts to extract from 

 the facts an explanation of human action ; and the great final 

 synthesis endeavours to give us a logical rule of virtue and conduct 

 based upon the previous findings — just, as for instance, chemistry 

 tells us how to make sulphuric acid out of certain elements. Now 

 the only manner in which such a science can be taught to men is by 

 way of stories which, though they may not actually have occurred as 

 described, are really occurring over and over again — somewhat as 

 Euclid's book was the first to crystallise geometry in sets of proposi- 

 tions with figures which are never actually found in nature. The 

 constructions of the men of science mentioned above are similarly 

 idealised, partly for brevity and partly for fixing the attention of the 

 public. With them, as with Euclid, this necessity demands crystal- 

 lisation in the highest aesthetic sense, the perfection of form — a 

 crystallisation which is known by the name of art. Fundamentally, 

 however, all these works are works of science. The art lies only in 

 their presentment. 



I say that it is the philosophic intention which distinguishes great 

 from little art. Consider this intention in the books of Homer. The 



