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colours will fade under your brush ; the idea in your mind will have no 

 expression. If you would produce a strain of music on a violin, you must rub 

 your bow with resin and not with grease, or your music will remain amongst the 

 eternal silences. If you make a pudding, you must use ingredients which Avill 

 combine in the manner you expect, or your pudding will curdle, and, as a 

 work of art, will be nothing more than a praiseworthy intention. But still 

 it is not with the material conditions of the work that Art deals. These 

 are within the province of the mechanist and workman, not of the Artist. 

 Nor does Art enquire what are the uses for which a thing is made, nor 

 of its fitness or the contrary, for such uses ; further than our perception of 

 such fitness or unfitness may enhance or destroy our sense of beauty. Art 

 deals solely with works in respect to their beauty; that is, in respect to 

 their capacity to kindle in the mind that emotion which the contemplation 

 of beauty affords. 



When we say that Art is limited by the laws of nature, we mean no 

 more than this — that Art is limited by the possibility of expression in 

 material forms. And all ideas must be expressed more or less in material 

 forms ; for even ideas unwritten and unspoken are incapable of being 

 recognised by the mind, except through the medium of language. If we 

 think at all, we think in a language of some sort. Art, therefore, must 

 have an expression ; and that expression is subject to the laws which govern 

 the materials which it uses for the purpose. But within these limits, 

 subject only to the conditions thus imposed, the artist roams free and 

 uncontrolled in a paradise of his own fancy, peopled by the creations of 

 his own teeming brain. And so, in and around the material world, and 

 out of elements of which he is himself a part, man weaves a new world, 

 which hangs like a vision around the coarser elements of matter, and by 

 the spells of his creative fancy, he calls into existence the world of Art. 



I may seem, by what I have said, to imply, that the idea of material 

 beauty, is wholly independent of the physical laws which rule the operations 

 of nature. But upon this point we should speak with the caution and modesty 

 becoming a very limited perception of truth. For we do not know that 

 there may not be some necessary connection between the laws of nature 

 and the manifestation of beauty. How can we say that the glories of the 

 evening sky are not a necessary result of the same causes by which the 

 revolution of the earth brings the sun every evening on the horizon ; which 

 guide the light of the sun through space, and refract it through our 

 atmosphere, and, absorbing some of the rays, transmit the rest in colour to 

 our eyes ; which suck up the moisture of the earth into the heavens, and 

 suspend it in graceful drapery over our heads? Who shall say that the 

 solemn beauty of the primeval forest is not an essential and necessary 

 consequence of the laws by which the forest grew 1 ? Certain it is that the 

 full development of the powers of life in an individual bears with it a 

 higher degree of physical beauty than the same individual exhibits, when its 

 vitality is impaired by age or sickness. The more perfectly fitted things are 

 for the uses for which they are designed, the more beautiful do they frequently 

 appear. For example, a yacht is more beautiful than a coal barge, even 

 in the eyes of those who are entirely ignorant of the superiority of one over 

 the other as a machine for sailing. I say not that this is a universal law ; but 

 I do say that its frequent appearance is sufficient to raise a doubt, whether 

 the production of beauty may not, in some manner of which we can form 

 no conception, be inherently and necessarily connected with the mechanism, of 

 nature. 



I have said that Art, in the proper sense of the term, does not deal 

 with the productions of man in any other respect than as regards their 



