all times and places are one;
the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is
inept, no past or present preferable. The steam whistle will not
affright him nor the flutes of Arcadia weary him: for him there is but
one time, the artistic moment; but one law, the law of form; but one
land, the land of Beauty--a land removed indeed from the real world and
yet more sensuous because more enduring; calm, yet with that calm which
dwells in the faces of the Greek statues, the calm which comes not from
the rejection but from the absorption of passion, the calm which despair
and sorrow cannot disturb but intensify only. And so it comes that he
who seems to stand most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best,
because he has stripped life of what is accidental and transitory,
stripped it of that 'mist of familiarity which makes life obscure to us.'

Those strange, wild-eyed sibyls fixed eternally in the whirlwind of
ecstasy, those mighty-limbed and Titan prophets, labouring with the
secret of the earth and the burden of mystery, that guard and glorify the
chapel of Pope Sixtus at Rome--do they not tell us more of the real
spirit of the Italian Renaissance, of the dream of Savonarola and of the
sin of Borgia, than all the brawling boors and cooking women of Dutch art
can teach us of the real spirit of the history of Holland?

And so in our own day, also, the two most vital tendencies of the
nineteenth century--the democratic and pantheistic tendency and the
tendency to value life for the sake of art--found their most complete and
perfect utterance in the poetry of Shelley and Keats who, to the blind
eyes of their own time, seemed to be as wanderers in the wilderness,
preachers of vague or unreal things. And I remember once, in talking to
Mr. Burne-Jones about modern science, his saying to me, 'the more
materialistic science becomes, the more angels shall I paint: their wings
are my protest in favour of the immortality of the soul.'

But these are the intellectual speculations that underlie art. Where in
the arts themselves are we to find that breadth of human sympathy which
is the condition of all noble work; where in the arts are we to look for
what Mazzini would call the social ideas as opposed to the merely
personal ideas? By virtue of what claim do I demand for the artist the
love and loyalty of the men and women of the world? I think I can answer
that.

Whatever spiritual message an artist b