THE ART-PRINCIPLE IN POETRY 201 



to their degree of wisdom and knowledge. So that, 

 as Ruskin in his Modern Painters says, '* He is the 

 greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his 

 works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas." 



IV 



This brings us to a final removal of the mistake 

 made in saying that the principle of art's being its 

 own end implies indifference to truth and good. 

 The principle does not mean that the contents of 

 a work of art — of a poem, for instance — are not 

 necessarily true and moral ; much less does it mean 

 that the contents, if the artist choose, may violate 

 truth and morality. Such a meaning would con- 

 tradict the nature of art, as we have now seen it. 

 The meaning is, that while truth and good, in all 

 their various gradations from the lowest to the high- 

 est, form the essential contents of art, its character 

 as art — as distinguished, that is, from science and 

 religion — turns upon its form, and that its whole 

 business, in dealing with whatever contents com- 

 patible with its nature, is to put them into its own 

 form, instead of the form proper to religion or to 

 science ; to put them into this form upon the form's 

 own merits, and not merely as if the form were 

 subsidiary to the form of science or of religion. The 

 proper form of science is explanation and argument, 



