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