roduction, since its product is dead. Fine art shapes inert matter
and peoples the mind with impotent ghosts. What influence it has--for
every event has consequences--is not pertinent to its inspiration. The
art of the past is powerless even to create similar art in the present,
unless similar conditions recur independently. The moments snatched for
art have been generally interludes in life and its products parasites in
nature, the body of them being materially functionless and the soul
merely represented. To exalt fine art into a truly ideal activity we
should have to knit it more closely with other rational functions, so
that to beautify things might render them more useful and to represent
them most imaginatively might be to see them in their truth. Something
of the sort has been actually attained by the noblest arts in their
noblest phases. A Sophocles or a Leonardo dominates his dreamful vehicle
and works upon the real world by its means. These small centres, where
interfunctional harmony is attained, ought to expand and cover the whole
field. Art, like religion, needs to be absorbed in the Life of Reason.

[Sidenote: They need to be made prophetic of practical goods.]

What might help to bring about this consummation would be, on the one
side, more knowledge; on the other, better taste. When a mind is filled
with important and true ideas and sees the actual relations of things,
it cannot relish pictures of the world which wantonly misrepresent it.
Myth and metaphor remain beautiful so long as they are the most adequate
or graphic means available for expressing the facts, but so soon as they
cease to be needful and sincere they become false finery. The same thing
happens in the plastic arts. Unless they spring from love of their
subject, and employ imagination only to penetrate into that subject and
interpret it with a more inward sympathy and truth, they become
conventional and overgrown with mere ornament. They then seem ridiculous
to any man who can truly conceive what they represent. So in putting
antique heroes on the stage we nowadays no longer tolerate a modern
costume, because the externals of ancient life are too well known to us;
but in the seventeenth century people demanded in such personages
intelligence and nobleness, since these were virtues which the ancients
were clothed with in their thought. A knowledge that should be at once
full and appreciative would evidently demand fidelity in both matters.