BEFOEE BEAUTY 167 



between the poetic and the didactic treatment of a 

 subject. The essence of creative art is always the 

 same ; namely, interior movement and fusion ; while 

 the method of the didactic or prosaic treatment is 

 fixity, limitation. The latter must formulate and 

 define; but the principle of the former is to flow, 

 to suffuse, to mount, to escape. We can conceive 

 of life only as something constantly becoming. It 

 plays forever on the verge. It is never in loco, 

 but always in transitu. Arrest the wind, and it 

 is no longer the wind; close your hands upon the 

 light, and behold, it is gone. 



The antithesis of art in method is science, as 

 Coleridge has intimated. As the latter aims at 

 the particular, so the former aims at the universal. 

 One would have truth of detail, the other truth 

 of ensemble. The method of science may be sym- 

 bolized by the straight line, that of art by the curve. 

 The results of science, relatively to its aim, must 

 be parts and pieces; while art must give the whole 

 in every act; not quantitively of course, but quali- 

 tively, — by the integrity of the spirit in which it 

 works. 



The Greek mind will always be the type of the 

 artist mind, mainly because of its practical bent, its 

 healthful objectivity. The Greek never looked in- 

 ward, but outward. Criticism and speculation were 

 foreign to him. His head shows a very marked 

 predominance of the motor and perceptive principle 

 over the reflective. The expression of the face is 

 never what we call intellectual or thoughtful, but 



