pise or
neglect--that everything is worth the doing well, the making fair--that
our God, Perfection, is implicit everywhere, and the revelation of Him
the business of our Art.

And as I jotted down these words I noticed that some real stars had crept
up into the sky, so gradually darkening above the pollard lime-trees;
cuckoos, who had been calling on the thorn-trees all the afternoon, were
silent; the swallows no longer flirted past, but a bat was already in
career over the holly hedge; and round me the buttercups were closing.
The whole form and feeling of the world had changed, so that I seemed to
have before me a new picture hanging.

Ah! I thought Art must indeed be priest of this new faith in Perfection,
whose motto is: "Harmony, Proportion, Balance." For by Art alone can
true harmony in human affairs be fostered, true Proportion revealed, and
true Equipoise preserved. Is not the training of an artist a training in
the due relation of one thing with another, and in the faculty of
expressing that relation clearly; and, even more, a training in the
faculty of disengaging from self the very essence of self--and passing
that essence into other selves by so delicate means that none shall see
how it is done, yet be insensibly unified? Is not the artist, of all
men, foe and nullifier of partisanship and parochialism, of distortions
and extravagance, the discoverer of that jack-o'-lantern--Truth; for, if
Truth be not Spiritual Proportion I know not what it is. Truth it seems
to me--is no absolute thing, but always relative, the essential symmetry
in the varying relationships of life; and the most perfect truth is but
the concrete expression of the most penetrating vision. Life seen
throughout as a countless show of the finest works of Art; Life shaped,
and purged of the irrelevant, the gross, and the extravagant; Life, as it
were, spiritually selected--that is Truth; a thing as multiple, and
changing, as subtle, and strange, as Life itself, and as little to be
bound by dogma. Truth admits but the one rule: No deficiency, and no
excess! Disobedient to that rule--nothing attains full vitality. And
secretly fettered by that rule is Art, whose business is the creation of
vital things.

That aesthete, to be sure, was right, when he said: "It is Style that
makes one believe in a thing; nothing but Style." For, what is Style in
its true and broadest sense save fidelity to idea and mood, and perfect
balance in the cl