lessness about beauty
that cancels lust and superstition. The artist, in taking the latter for
his theme, renders them innocent and interesting, because he looks at
them from above, composes their attitudes and surroundings harmoniously,
and makes them food for the mind. Accordingly it is only in a refined
and secondary stage that active passions like to amuse themselves with
their aesthetic expression. Unmitigated lustiness and raw fanaticism will
snarl at pictures. Representations begin to interest when crude passions
recede, and feel the need of conciliating liberal interests and adding
some intellectual charm to their dumb attractions. Thus art, while by
its subject it may betray the preoccupations among which it springs up,
embodies a new and quite innocent interest.

[Sidenote: It is liberal.]

This interest is more than innocent, it is liberal. Not being concerned
with material reality so much as with the ideal, it knows neither
ulterior motives nor quantitative limits; the more beauty there is the
more there can be, and the higher one artist's imagination soars the
better the whole flock flies. In aesthetic activity we have accordingly
one side of rational life; sensuous experience is dominated there as
mechanical or social realities ought to be dominated in science and
politics. Such dominion comes of having faculties suited to their
conditions and consequently finding an inherent satisfaction in their
operation. The justification of life must be ultimately intrinsic; and
wherever such self-justifying experience is attained, the ideal has been
in so far embodied. To have realised it in a measure helps us to realise
it further; for there is a cumulative fecundity in those goods which
come not by increase of force or matter, but by a better organisation
and form.

[Sidenote: and typical of perfect activity.]

Art has met, on the whole, with more success than science or morals.
Beauty gives men the best hint of ultimate good which their experience
as yet can offer; and the most lauded geniuses have been poets, as if
people felt that those seers, rather than men of action or thought, had
lived ideally and known what was worth knowing. That such should be the
case, if the fact be admitted, would indeed prove the rudimentary state
of human civilisation. The truly comprehensive life should be the
statesman's, for whom perception and theory might be expressed and
rewarded in action. The ideal dignity of art is ther