ating in that joy. And if the Divine
Artist, whose lavish hand fills everything with goodness; who pours out
the treasures of His love and wisdom in every corner of our universe; of
whose greatness man knows not an appreciable fraction; who "does all
things well" for the very love of doing and of doing well; who utters
Himself for the sake of uttering, not only in His eternal, co-equal,
all-expressive Word, but also in the broken, stammering accents of a
myriad finite words or manifestations--if this Divine Artist teaches us
anything, it is that man, singly or collectively, is divinest when he
finds rest and joy in utterance for its own sake, in "telling the glory
of God and showing forth His handiwork," or, as Catholic doctrine puts
it, in praise; for praise is the utterance of love, and love is joy in
the truth.

As most of the useful arts perfect man's executive faculties, and thus
are said to improve upon, while in a certain sense they imitate nature;
so the fine arts extend and exalt man's faculty of expression, or
self-utterance, regarded not precisely as useful and _propter aliud_;
but as pleasurable and _propter se_. Even the most uncultivated savage
finds pleasure in some discordant utterance of his subjective frame of
mind; and it is really hard to find any tribe so degraded as to show no
rudiment of fine art, no sign of reflex pleasure in expression, and of
inventiveness in extending the resources nature has provided us with for
that end.

The artist as such aims at self-expression for its own sake. It is a
necessity of his nature, an outpouring of pent-up feeling, as much as is
the song of the lark. Of course we are speaking of the true creative
artist, and not of the laborious copyist. If he subordinates his work as
a means to some further end; if his aim is morality or immorality, truth
or error, pleasure or pain; if it is anything else than the embodiment
or utterance of his own soul, so far he is acting riot as an artist, but
as a minister of morality, or truth, or pleasure, or their contraries.
If we keep this idea steadily in view, we can see how much truth, or how
little, is contained in the various theories of fine art which have been
advanced from the earliest times. We can see how truly art is a [Greek:
mimaesis] an imitating of realities; not that art-objects are, as Plato
supposes, faint and defective representations, vicegerent species of the
external world, whose beauty is but the transfer and