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the spiritual powers, and is, in some sense, spontaneous—a law to 
itself. Schiller says: ‘‘ The artist (meaning the poet or creator) is 
no doubt the son of his time. But ill is it for him if he be also its 
pupil or darling. A beneficent divinity snatches the suckling in 
time from his mother’s breast, nourishes him on the milk of a bet- 
ter age and lets him ripen under distant Grecian heavens to his 
maturity. Then, when he has grown into manhood, he returns to 
his own country in the image of a stranger, not always to please it 
by his presence, but, terrible as the son of Agamemnon, to purify 
it. The substance of his work he will take from the present, but 
the form of it from a nobler time, yea, from beyond all time, out 
of the essential, invariable individuality of his own being.’’ * 
The highest conception of art is that it is the interpretation of 
the spirit in its varied forms, feelings and experiences, and of those 
eternal ideas of beauty that are in the soul and belong to absolute 
mind; but this admits, of course, of modification when other 
faculties and qualities of our nature—above all, the sensuous— 
come into view. The senses play their part in art, and a great deal of 
art is on this lower and not unnatural plane. What a world, that of 
color! Color hasastrong, sensuous appeal, as in nature, but is some- 
times too pronounced in art, as in the luxurious warmth of Rubens, 
the fiery tones of Raphael’s greatest pupil, Giulio Romano, the vio- 
lent contrasts of the Spanish school of painters. 
Now to discuss this subject in a direct manner, What is art? 
But we can only approximate to a definition. It is impossible to 
give a rigid definition of art. It bursts from our formulas like an 
uncontrolled spring. It is indefinable because it is a truth rather 
than a term; and yet we may do something towards a definition by 
separating art from truths closely akin to it. Art, for example, is 
not nature, while it is nothing without nature, as Shakespeare says: 
« There isan art 
Which doth mend nature—change it rather, but 
The art itself is nature.” 
Nature, in a general way, is all that is not art—all that is created, 
not made. Nature is the substance, physical and spiritual, out of 
whose depths art arises like an exhalation of beauty. It comprises 
the forces at work to produce the phenomena of the world and their 
laws outside of human agency. Those phenomena in ourselves 
* Esthetic Education of Mankind (ninth letter), 
