egards its educational or culture
quality and value. Ideas are presented not in isolation and
detachment, but in their totality of origin and relationship; they are
not abstractions, general propositions, philosophical generalisations;
they are living truths--truths, that is, which have become clear by
long experience, and to which men stand, or have stood, in personal
relations. They are ideas, in other words, which stand together, not
in the order of formal logic, but of the "logic of free life." They
are not torn out of their normal relations; they bring all their
relationships with them. We are offered a plant in the soil, not a
flower cut from its stem. Every man is rooted to the soil, touches
through his senses the physical, and through his mind and heart the
spiritual, order of his time; all these influences are focussed in
him, and according to his capacity he gathers them into his
experience, formulates and expresses them. The greater and more
productive the man, the wider his contact with and absorption of the
life of his time. For the artist stands nearest, not farthest from his
contemporaries. He is not, however, a mere medium in their hands, not
a mere secretary or recorder of their ideas and feelings. He is
separated from them in the clearness of his vision of the significance
of their activities, the ends towards which they are moving, the ideas
which they are working out; but, in the exact degree of his greatness,
he is one with them in sympathy, experience, and comprehension. They
live for him, and he lives with them; they work out ideas in the logic
of free life, and he clarifies, interprets, and illustrates those
ideas. The world is not saved _by_ the remnant, as Matthew Arnold
held; it is saved _through_ the remnant. The elect of the race,
its prophets, teachers, artists,--and every great artist is also a
prophet and teacher,--are its leaders, not its masters; its
interpreters, not its creators. The race is dumb without its artists;
but the artists would be impossible without the sustaining fellowship
of the race. In the making of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" the Greek
race was in full partnership with Homer. The ideas which form the
summits of human achievement are sustained by immense masses of earth;
the higher they rise the vaster their bases. The richer and wider the
race life, the freer and deeper the play of that vital logic which
produces the formative ideas.

Chapter XII.

The Imag