THE ART-PRINCIPLE IN POETRY 183 



the coarse reality of its surface appearance ; the 

 other would have it ignore fact, and work only in 

 the medium of an ideal nowhere distinctly traceable 

 in Nature. Tlie true view, as Professor Le Conte 

 shows, is neither the one nor the other exclusively, 

 but a higher union of the two, limiting both and 

 fulfiUing both. Accordingly, the universal principle 

 of art may be stated, summarily, as real-ideality. 



That is, art is not the cancelling of the actual and 

 imperfect, and the putting in its place of a vague 

 and fanciful perfection that is only an illusory 

 abstraction after all ; it is the transfiguring of the 

 actual by the ideal that is actually immanent in it. 

 The actual hides in itself an ideal that is its true 

 reality and destination, and this hidden ideal it is 

 the function of art to reveal. The artist is a seer, 

 whose eye pierces to the secret of which the natural 

 fact is the sign and prophecy. He is a -magician, 

 whose hand releases the spirit imprisoned in matter, 

 and transforms the brute token into the breathing 

 and speaking body. And as the ideal in the whole 

 of Nature moves in an infinite process toward an 

 Absolute Perfection, we may say that art is in strict 

 truth the apotheosis of Nature. Art is thus at once 

 the exaltation of the natural toward its destined 

 supernatural perfection, and the investiture of the 

 Absolute Beauty with the reality of natural exist- 

 ence. Its work is consequently not a means to 



