efore merely
symbolic and vicarious. As some people study character in novels, and
travel by reading tales of adventure, because real life is not yet so
interesting to them as fiction, or because they find it cheaper to make
their experiments in their dreams, so art in general is a rehearsal of
rational living, and recasts in idea a world which we have no present
means of recasting in reality. Yet this rehearsal reveals the glories of
a possible performance better than do the miserable experiments until
now executed on the reality.

When we consider the present distracted state of government and
religion, there is much relief in turning from them to almost any art,
where what is good is altogether and finally good, and what is bad is at
least not treacherous. When we consider further the senseless rivalries,
the vanities, the ignominy that reign in the "practical" world, how
doubly blessed it becomes to find a sphere where limitation is an
excellence, where diversity is a beauty, and where every man's ambition
is consistent with every other man's and even favourable to it! It is
indeed so in art; for we must not import into its blameless labours the
bickerings and jealousies of criticism. Critics quarrel with other
critics, and that is a part of philosophy. With an artist no sane man
quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes. As nature,
being full of seeds, rises into all sorts of crystallisations, each
having its own ideal and potential life, each a nucleus of order and a
habitation for the absolute self, so art, though in a medium poorer than
pregnant matter, and incapable of intrinsic life, generates a semblance
of all conceivable beings. What nature does with existence, art does
with appearance; and while the achievement leaves us, unhappily, much
where we were before in all our efficacious relations, it entirely
renews our vision and breeds a fresh world in fancy, where all form has
the same inner justification that all life has in the real world. As no
insect is without its rights and every cripple has his dream of
happiness, so no artistic fact, no child of imagination, is without its
small birthright of beauty. In this freer element, competition does not
exist and everything is Olympian. Hungry generations do not tread down
the ideal but only its spokesmen or embodiments, that have cast in their
lot with other material things. Art supplies constantly to contemplation
what nature seldom affords in