THE PROVINCES OF THE SEVERAL ARTS 81 



assume beautiful form, and must be presented directly or 

 indirectly to the senses. Art is not the school or the 

 cathedral, but the playground, the paradise of humanity. 

 It does not teach, it does not preach. Nothing abstract 

 enters into art's domain. Truth and goodness are trans- 

 muted into beauty there, just as in science beauty and 

 goodness assume the shape of truth, and in religion truth 

 and beauty become goodness. The rigid definitions, the 

 unmistakable laws of science, are not to be found in 

 art. Whatever art has touched acquires a concrete sensuous 

 embodiment, and thus ideas presented to the mind in art 

 have lost a portion of their pure thought-essence. It is 

 on this account that the religious conceptions of the Greeks 

 were so admirably fitted for the art of sculpture, and certain 

 portions of the mediaeval Christian mythology lent themselves 

 so well to painting. For the same reason the metaphysics 

 of ecclesiastical dogma defy the artist's plastic faculty. Art, 

 in a word, is a middle term between reason and the senses. 

 Its secondary aim, after the prime end of manifesting the 

 human spirit in beautiful form has been accomplished, is to 

 give tranquil and innocent enjoyment. 



II 



From what has gone before, it will be seen that no 

 human being can make or mould a beautiful form without 

 incorporating in that form some portion of the human mind, 

 however crude, however elementary. In other words, there 

 is no work of art without a theme, without a motive, without 

 a subject. The presentation of that theme, that motive, that 

 subject, is the final end of art. The art is good or bad 

 according as the subject has been well or ill presented, 

 consistently with the laws of beauty special to the art itself. 

 Thus we obtain two standards for aesthetic criticism. We 

 judge a statue, for example, both by the sculptor's intellectual 

 grasp upon his subject, and also by his technical skill and 

 sense of beauty. In a picture of the Last Judgment by 

 Fra Angelico we say that the bliss of the righteous has been 



G 



