THE ART-PRINCIPLE IN POETRY 1 99 



and the companions of man's spiritual life. It was 

 with literal truth that Schiller sang — 



But thine, O Man, is art ! thine wholly and alone. 



Yes, — the entire world of spirit — the world of 

 religion, of laws, and of science, as well as of art, 

 of good and right and truth, as well as of beauty — 

 God creates only through the creative freedom of 

 man. And thus every work of art is and must be 

 an embodied Theodicy — a symbol of the justifica- 

 tion of the ways of God to man, of the perfection 

 of the Sum of All Perfections in accepting and 

 directing an imperfect world. It is a monument of 

 that kingdom of Grace, built upon yet above the 

 kingdom of Nature, wherein good is wrought out 

 of evil, and evil transformed into good, by the free 

 cooperation of man and God. It is the visible or 

 audible token that God regards man with the grace 

 of recognising _/r^^^<:?;;2 — creative power and coopera- 

 tion with him in the regeneration of things and in 

 self-regeneration. It avouches the perfection of the 

 world by making palpable the atonement this affords 

 for evil, in being the means of free reasonable life. 

 Every work of art is an incarnation of man's faith 

 in the perfection of things when seen in the whole ; 

 in short, it is the visible confession that there 

 really is a God. Art in its unblemished nature, like 

 religion and the search for truth, is thus literally a 



