ed some one to read aloud in the refectory; and the Fathers,
obeying the same civilised instinct, had contrived in their theology
intelligible points of attachment for religious emotion. A refined mind
finds as little happiness in love without friendship as in sensuality
without love; it may succumb to both, but it accepts neither. What is
true of mere sensibility is no less true of mere fancy. The Arabian
Nights--futile enough in any case--would be absolutely intolerable if
they contained no Oriental manners, no human passions, and no convinced
epicureanism behind their miracles and their tattle. Any absolute work
of art which serves no further purpose than to stimulate an emotion has
about it a certain luxurious and visionary taint. We leave it with a
blank mind, and a pang bubbles up from the very fountain of pleasures.
Art, so long as it needs to be a dream, will never cease to prove a
disappointment. Its facile cruelty, its narcotic abstraction, can never
sweeten the evils we return to at home; it can liberate half the mind
only by leaving the other half in abeyance. In the mere artist, too,
there is always something that falls short of the gentleman and that
defeats the man.

[Sidenote: The sad values of appearance.]

Surely it is not the artistic impulse in itself that involves such lack
of equilibrium. To impress a meaning and a rational form on matter is
one of the most masterful of actions. The trouble lies in the barren and
superficial character of this imposed form: fine art is a play of
appearance. Appearance, for a critical philosophy, is distinguished from
reality by its separation from the context of things, by its immediacy
and insignificance. A play of appearance is accordingly some little
closed circle in experience, some dream in which we lose ourselves by
ignoring most of our interests, and from which we awake into a world in
which that lost episode plays no further part and leaves no heirs. Art
as mankind has hitherto practised it falls largely under this head and
too much resembles an opiate or a stimulant. Life and history are not
thereby rendered better in their principle, but a mere ideal is
extracted out of them and presented for our delectation in some cheap
material, like words or marble. The only precious materials are flesh
and blood, for these alone can defend and propagate the ideal which has
once informed them.

Artistic creation shows at this point a great inferiority to natural
rep