be, but, in a measure, what life should be and might
become: what are the methods of true greatness, the sensations of true
sanity.

It would teach us the eternal organic strivings and tendencies of our
soul, those leading in the direction of life, leading away from death.

If this seems mere allegory and wild talk, let us look at facts and
see what art is. For is not art inasmuch as untroubled by the
practical difficulties of existence, inasmuch as the free, unconscious
attempt of all nations and generations to satisfy, outside life, those
cravings which life still leaves unsatisfied--is not art a delicate
instrument, showing in its sensitive oscillations the most intimate
movements and habits of the soul? Does it not reveal our most
recondite necessities and possibilities, by sifting and selecting,
reinforcing or attenuating, the impressions received from without;
showing us thereby how we must stand towards nature and life, how we
must feel and be?

And this most particularly in those spontaneous arts which, first in
the field, without need of adaptations of material or avoidance of the
already done, without need of using up the rejected possibilities of
previous art, or awakening yet unknown emotions, are the simple,
straightforward expression, each the earliest satisfactory one in its
own line, of the long unexpressed, long integrated, organic wants and
wishes of great races of men: the arts, for instance, which have given
us that Hermes, Titian's pictures, and Michael Angelo's and Raphael's
frescoes; given us Bach, Gluck, Mozart, the serener parts of
Beethoven, music of yet reserved pathos, braced, spring-like strength,
learned, select: arts which never go beyond the universal, averaged
expression of the soul's desires, because the desires themselves are
sifted, limited to the imperishable and unchangeable, like the
artistic methods which embody them, reduced to the essential by the
long delay of utterance, the long--century long--efforts to utter.

Becoming intimate with such a statue as the Olympian Hermes, and
comparing the impressions received from it with the impressions both
of inferior works of the same branch of art and with the impressions
of equally great works--pictures, buildings, musical compositions--of
other branches of art, becoming conversant with the difference between
an original and a copy, great art and poor art, we gradually become
aware of a quality which exists in all good art and is a