d: so
that the question of its historic truth is distinct and separate from
the question of its artistic truth: it may be true as history, yet
false as art; or it may be historically wrong, yet artistically right;
true to nature, though not true to past fact; and, however we may have
to travel abroad in the historical inquiry, the virtue of the work as
art must be ascertainable directly from the thing itself. This, then,
is what I mean by artistic completeness; that quality in virtue of
which a work justifies itself, without foreign help, by its own
fulness and clearness of expression.

The fourth and last principle that I am to consider is
_Disinterestedness_. This is partly an intellectual, but more a moral
quality. Now one great reason why men fail so much in their mental
work is because they are not willing to see and to show things as they
are, but must still be making them as they would have them to be. Thus
from self-love or wilfulness or vanity they work their own humours and
crotchets and fancies into the matter, or overlay it with some
self-pleasing quirks of peculiarity. Instead of this, the artist must
lose himself, his personal aims, interests, passions, and preferences,
in the enthusiasm and inspiration of his work, in the strength,
vividness, and beauty of his ideas and perceptions, and must give his
whole mind and soul to the task of working these out into expression.
To this end, his mind must live in constant loving sympathy and
intercourse with Nature; he must work close to her life and order;
must study to seize and reproduce the truth of Nature just precisely
as it is, and must not think to improve her or get ahead of her;
though, to be sure, out of the materials she offers, the selection and
arrangement must be his own; and all the strength he can put forth
this way will never enable him to come up to her stern, honest, solid
facts. So, for instance, the highest virtue of good writing stands in
saying a plain thing in a plain way. And in all art-work the first
requisite is, that a man have, in the collective sense and reason of
mankind, a firm foothold for withstanding the shifting currents and
fashions and popularities of the day. The artist is indeed to work in
free concert with the imaginative soul of his age: but the trouble is,
that men are ever mistaking some transient specialty of mode for the
abiding soul; thus tickling the folly of the time, but leaving its
wisdom untouched.

If, theref