192 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



puts an end to the pretensions of the sensual 

 school of professed artists and poets, and allays 

 the righteous rage and honest apprehensions of 

 the Puritan, and may hope, possibly, to win him to 

 a larger apprehension of life. For it is not mere 

 physical or sensuous beauty that constitutes art, 

 but that intellectual beauty whose consummation 

 is the beauty of a completely right character. It 

 must be remembered that the ideal which inspires 

 and guides art, genuine art, is the Supreme Ideal 

 at once of man and of Nature. The true artist 

 worships, and must worship, God ; though his rite 

 and symbol must be his art, and, so far as he is 

 artist, must be his art alone. Not that the God 

 whom he adores by his art is other than the God 

 whom we all adore by a common dutiful life, but 

 that to him, in his function of artist, the godhead 

 in all its manifold of perfections is summed up in 

 the Spirit of Beauty. 



Nor does the doctrine that art is its own end 

 mean that art is indifferent to science ^ and reli- 

 gion, that beauty stands in no necessary relation 

 to truth and goodness. On the contrary, to reach 

 the heart of the case, we must go even farther 

 than Tennyson in the striking lines prefixed to his 

 Palace of Art, in which he declares — 



1 Throughout the essay I use this word to designate what might 

 perhaps be better called philosophy, except that I wish to include 

 also under it science ordinarily so called, — natural science. 



