arriving at any final result in a short chapter, but merely in order to
give an idea of the point of view from which the following pages are
written, so that misunderstandings may be avoided.

The variety of definitions that exist justifies some inquiry. The
following are a few that come to mind:

"Art is nature expressed through a personality."

But what of architecture? Or music? Then there is Morris's

"Art is the expression of pleasure in work."

But this does not apply to music and poetry. Andrew Lang's

"Everything which we distinguish from nature"

seems too broad to catch hold of, while Tolstoy's

"An action by means of which one man, having experienced a feeling,
intentionally transmits it to others"

is nearer the truth, and covers all the arts, but seems, from its
omitting any mention of #rhythm#, very inadequate.

* * * * *

Now the facts of life are conveyed by our senses to the consciousness
within us, and stimulate the world of thought and feeling that
constitutes our real life. Thought and feeling are very intimately
connected, few of our mental perceptions, particularly when they first
dawn upon us, being unaccompanied by some feeling. But there is this
general division to be made, on one extreme of which is what we call
pure intellect, and on the other pure feeling or emotion. The arts, I
take it, are a means of giving expression to the emotional side of this
mental activity, intimately related as it often is to the more purely
intellectual side. The more sensual side of this feeling is perhaps its
lowest, while the feelings associated with the intelligence, the little
sensitivenesses of perception that escape pure intellect, are possibly
its noblest experiences.

Pure intellect seeks to construct from the facts brought to our
consciousness by the senses, an accurately measured world of phenomena,
uncoloured by the human equation in each of us. It seeks to create a
point of view outside the human standpoint, one more stable and
accurate, unaffected by the ever-changing current of human life. It
therefore invents mechanical instruments to do the measuring of our
sense perceptions, as their records are more accurate than human
observation unaided.

But while in science observation is made much more effective by the use
of mechanical instruments in registering facts, the facts with which art
deals, being those of feeling, can only be