80 THE PROVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS 



itself. That form, after all, is but the mode of presentation 

 through which the spiritual content manifests itself. Beauty, 

 in like manner, is not the final end of art, but is the indis- 

 pensable condition under which the artistic manifestation of 

 the spiritual content must be made. It is the business of art 

 to create an ideal world, in which perception, emotion, under- 

 standing, action, all elements of human life sublimed by 

 thought, shall reappear in concrete forms as beauty. This 

 being so, the logical criticism of art demands that we should 

 not only estimate the technical skill of an artist and his 

 faculty for presenting beauty to the aesthetic sense, but that 

 we should also ask ourselves what portion of the human spirit 

 he has chosen to invest with form, and how he has conceived 

 his subject. It is not necessary that the ideas embodied in 

 a work of art should be the artist's own. They may be 

 common to the race and age : as, for instance, the concep- 

 tion of sovereign deity expressed in the Olympian Zeus of 

 Pheidias, or the conception of divine maternity expressed in 

 Raphael's Madonna di San Sisto. Still the personality of the 

 artist, his own intellectual and moral nature, his peculiar 

 way of thinking and feeling, his individual attitude toward 

 the material given to him in ideas of human consciousness, 

 will modify his choice of subject and of form, and will 

 determine his specific type of beauty. To take an example : 

 supposing that an idea, common to his race and age, is 

 given to the artist for treatment ; this will be the final end 

 of the work of art which he produces. But his personal 

 qualities and technical performance determine the degree of 

 success or failure to which he attains in seizing that idea 

 and in presenting it with beauty. Signorelli fails where 

 Perugino excels, in giving adequate and lovely form to the 

 religious sentiment. Michel Angelo is sure of the sublime, 

 and Raphael of the beautiful. 



Art is thus the expression of the human spirit by the 

 artist to his fellow-men. The subject-matter of the arts is 

 commensurate with what man thinks and feels and does. It 

 is as deep as religion, as wide as life. But what distinguishes 

 art from religion or from life is, that this subject-matter must 



