for now their
idols represent some specific and beneficent function in nature,
something propitious to ideal life and to its determinate expression.
Isaiah is very scornful of idols made with hands, because they have no
physical energy. He forgets that perhaps they represent something, and
so have a spiritual dignity which things living and powerful never have
unless they too become representative and express some ideal. Isaiah's
conception of Jehovah, for instance, is itself a poetic image, the work
of man's brain; and the innocent worship of it would not be idolatry, if
that conception represented something friendly to human happiness and to
human art. The question merely is whether the sculptor's image or the
prophet's stands for the greater interest and is a more adequate symbol
for the good. The noblest art will be the one, whether plastic or
literary or dialectical, which creates figments most truly
representative of what is momentous in human life. Similarly the least
idolatrous religion would be the one which used the most perfect art,
and most successfully abstracted the good from the real.

[Sidenote: Inertia in technique.]

Conservatism rules also in those manufactures which are tributary to
architecture and the smaller plastic arts. Utility makes small headway
against custom, not only when custom has become religion, but even when
it remains inert and without mythical sanction. To admit or trust
anything new is to overcome that inertia which is a general law in the
brain no less than elsewhere, and which may be distinguished in
reflection into a technical and a social conservatism. Technical
conservatism appears, for instance, in a man's handwriting, which is so
seldom improved, even when admitted, perhaps, to be execrable. Every
artist has his tricks of execution, every school its hereditary,
irrational processes. These refractory habits are to blame for the rare
and inimitable quality of genius; they impose excellence on one man and
refuse it to a million. A happy physiological structure, by creating a
mannerism under the special circumstances favourable to expression, may
lift a man, perhaps inferior in intelligence, to heights which no
insight can attain with inferior organs. As a voice is necessary for
singing, so a certain quickness of eye and hand is needed for good
execution in the plastic arts. The same principle goes deeper.
Conception and imagination are themselves automatic and run in grooves,