philosophy of
art. For art is the outcome of a surplus of human energy, the expression
of a state of vital harmony, striving for and partly realising a yet
greater energy, a more complete harmony in one sphere or another of man's
relations with the universe. Now if evil is a non-vital, deciduous, and
sterile phenomenon _par excellence_, art must be necessarily opposed to
it, and opposed in proportion to art's vigour. While, on the other hand,
the seeking, the realisation of greater harmony, whether harmony visible,
audible, thinkable, and livable, is as necessarily opposed to anomaly
and perversity as the great healthinesses of air and sunshine are
opposed to bodily disease. Hence, in whatever company we find art,
even as in whatever company we find bodily health and vigour, let us
understand that _in so far as truly art_, it is good and a source of
good. Let us never waver in our faith in art, for in so doing we should
be losing (what, alas! Puritan contemners of art, and decadent defilers
thereof, are equally doing) much of our faith in nature and much of our
faith in man. For art is the expression of the harmonies of nature,
conceived and incubated by the harmonious instincts of man.

I have given the influence of St. Francis as an example of what added
strength our modern soul may get by a sojourn in the Past. What our soul
may get of similar but more sober joy may be shown by another example
from that wonderful Umbrian district, one of the earth's oases of
spiritual rest and refreshment. Among all the sane and satisfying art
of the Renaissance, Umbria, on the whole, has surely grown for us the
highest and the holiest. I am not speaking of the fact that Perugino
painted saints in devout contemplation, nor of their type of face and
expression. Whatever his people might be doing, or if they were not
people at all, but variations only of his little slender trees or distant
domes and steeples, his art would have been equally high and holy. And
this because of its effect, direct, unreasoning, on our spirit, making
us, while we look, live with a deeper, more devoutly joyful life. What
the man Perugino was, in his finite dealings with his clients and
neighbours, has mattered nothing in the painting of these pictures and
frescoes; still less what samples of conduct he was shown by the
ephemeral magnificos who bought his works.

The tenderness and strength of the mediaeval Italian temper (as shown in
Dante when he is human