66 
manifest and desirable of things. But while the artist represents 
the beautiful object that he sees in his mind’s eye, and paints from 
this mental image, art is never simply a mental act. Hegel con- 
tended for this. Art, without the mediation of objective form, he 
said, was an empty thing. ‘‘ The art-idea is not a mere conception 
—‘ist niemals ein Begriff’ —inasmuch as the latter is a frame into 
which different phenomena may fit, whereas the artistic idea must 
stand in the most intimate agreement with the particular form of 
the work.’’ The subject must be conceived in the object; there 
must be the manifestation of the idea, which is its expression, as in 
nature, and which expression must accompany the conception. 
Expression, in fine, reveals the artist and is another word for his 
art; for if it be true that 
«Many are the poets sown by nature, 
Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse,” 
it can hardly be said that the power of vision in the artist is ever 
unaccompanied by the power of expression, though the two may be 
unequally distributed. ‘The bes reliefs on the pediment of the 
temple of Zeus, at Olympia, which Pausanias ascribes to the Attic 
sculptors, Alkamenes and Paionios, are conceived with the utmost 
dramatic power, but are stiffly and rudely executed ; probably the 
conception was that of the great artist and the work that of the 
local artist. What wonderful power of expression, for another ex- 
ample, is in Rembrandt’s painting of ‘‘ Abraham’s Sacrifice,’’ now 
in the Hermitage, at St. Petersburg—the obedience of a servant, 
the heart-rending grief of a father, the mysterious awe which the 
celestial messenger inspires! Here the great artist is seen, and 
great artists exist because they cannot help being so any more than 
the roots of a willow-tree can help running to the water. Da Vinci 
and Correggio were predestined artists as truly as Isaiah and Martin 
Luther were predestined prophets and Dante and Tennyson predes- 
tined poets; fer the spiritual conceptions and yearnings in them, 
the strivings for universal beauty, found their only expression in 
art-forms. 
Art, therefore, if we should attempt to define the indefinable, 
might at least be described in its works as the power of represent- 
ing, like a new creation, in form, line and color, the object pre- 
sented to the mind, or, more specifically, to the imagination, which 
is awakened to act by a joyful and loving sympathy with nature in 
—_— 
