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ings and no more--the material worked upon, the hand that works, and the intellect or imagination which guides that hand. When the proportion is perfect between the three, the work of art is perfect of its kind. But in the different kinds of art the necessary proportion is not the same. In music, for example, the medium is at its lowest value, the imagination at its highest. In architecture, on the other hand, material is most important. Musicians use the vibration of string and atmosphere, sculptors use bronze and marble, painters use color and canvas, poets use rhythm and rhyme, as vehicles to express their ideas. The architect's ideas are for the sake of his material. He takes his material as such, and embellishes it with his ideas--creates beauty merely by disposing its masses and enriching its surface. But in all and each of these processes, whether mind predominate or matter, there comes in as a further necessary factor the actual technical manipulation. Poetic visions and a noble mother-tongue do not constitute a man a poet if he cannot treat that language nobly according to the technique of his art. Nor, though Ariel sing in his brain and the everlasting harp of the atmosphere wait for him, is he a musician if he have not a sensitive ear and a knowledge of counter-point. More notably yet does the hand--and in this as a technical term I include the other bodily powers which go to form technical skill,--more notably yet does the hand come in play with the painter. Here the material is little, the imagination mighty indeed, but less overwhelming than with poet and musician; but the technique, the God-given and labor-trained cunning of retina and wrist, how all-important! often how all-sufficing! In all criticism it is necessary first to reflect which of these three factors--intellectual power, physical endowment or propitious material--is most imperious. When we find this factor most perfectly developed, and the others, though subordinate, neither absent nor stunted, we shall find the art nearest to perfection. And the conditions of race and climate and society which most helpfully develop that factor without injuring the others are the conditions which will best further that art. And the critic who lays most stress on that factor, and is content to miss, if necessary, though noting the loss, a certain measure of the other two in order more entirely to gain the one that is vitalest, is the critic whose words are t
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