150 BEAUTY, COMPOSITION, 



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As a merely mimetic process, art is so conspicuously a 

 failure, whether we take drama, lyric, work of fiction, statue, 

 or painting into account, that its pretension to be realistic in 

 the technical sense of that word must pass for a piece of 

 impertinence and self -inflated ignorance. Aristotle has much 

 to answer for, since he it was who first used the phrase 

 Mimesis, or imitation, and treated the arts from that starting- 

 point. He set reflection on the wrong track, instead of 

 making it at once clear that we must look for something 

 else in the arts, and that imitation is only a condition under 

 which they partially fulfil their common task. 



It is indeed the duty of all arts faithfully to follow in the 

 steps of Nature, to create nothing without her sanction, to 

 read her book at morn, and noon, and eventide, and never 

 to deviate from her teaching. But they must resign the 

 attempt to do again what Nature does. They must give 

 up the ambition to be unconditionally realistic, flawlessly 

 naturalistic. They must recognise the fact that they cannot 

 rival the sun in his draughtmanship, or the mirror-surface o 

 a mountain tarn in its veracity of reproduction. 



To humbler functions, awful power, 

 I call thee ! 



Yes, indeed, to functions humbler in one sense, but loftier 

 in another, for art obeys the freedom of the spirit, and is 

 restrained by limitations very different in quality from those 

 necessities under which mechanical copies of nature are 

 evolved. 



The whole province of the human intellect and emotion 

 is art's sphere, wherein to expatiate with the untrammelled 

 liberty and creative power of mind. Not the heights alone, 

 but the depths also of humanity lie unveiled before the artist. 

 The forms he uses are but symbols, whereby he speaks as 

 soul to soul. To him it is given to effect a real new birth of 

 beauty, by baptizing nature in the rivers of the spirit. To 

 him again it is given to display the moral ugliness of vice, 

 the pathos of suffering, the tragic fate of heroes. Nothing 

 within the range of man's capacity is wholly alien to art. 



