BEFORE BEAUTY j UE 
between the poetic and the didactic treatment of a 
subject. The essence of creative art is always the 
same; namely, interior movement and fusion; while 
the method of the didactic or prosaic treatment is 
fixity, limitation. The latter must formulate and 
define; but the principle of the former is to flow, 
to suffuse, to mount, to escape. We can conceive 
of life only as something constantly becoming. It 
plays forever on the verge. It is never in loco, 
but always in transitu. Arrest the wind, and it 
is no longer the wind; close your hands upon the 
light, and behold, it is gone. 
The antithesis of art in method is science, as 
Coleridge has intimated. As the latter aims at 
the particular, so the former aims at the universal. 
One would have truth of detail, the other truth 
of ensemble. The method of science may be sym- 
bolized by the straight line, that of art by the curve. 
The results of science, relatively to its aim, must 
be parts and pieces; while art must give the whole 
in every act; not quantitively of course, but quali- 
tively, — by the integrity of the spirit in which it 
works. 
The Greek mind will always be the type of the 
artist mind, mainly because of its practical bent, its 
healthful objectivity. The Greek never looked in- 
ward, but outward. Criticism and speculation were 
foreign to him. His head shows a very marked 
predominance of the motor and perceptive principle 
over the reflective. The expression of the face is 
never what we call intellectual or thoughtful, but 
