form. This so partial
synthesis is a synthesis indeed, and just because settlements made in
fancy are altogether premature, and ignore almost everything in the
world, in type they can be the most perfect settlements. The artist,
being a born lover of the good, a natural breeder of perfections, clings
to his insight. If the world calls his accomplishments vain, he can,
with better reason, call vain the world's cumbrous instrumentalities, by
which nothing clearly good is attained. Appearances, he may justly urge,
are alone actual. All forces, substances, realities, and principles are
inferred and potential only and in the moral scale mere instruments to
bring perfect appearances about. To have grasped such an appearance, to
have embodied a form in matter, is to have justified for the first time
whatever may underlie appearance and to have put reality to some use. It
is to have begun to live. As the standard of perfection is internal and
is measured by the satisfaction felt in realising it, every artist has
tasted, in his activity, what activity essentially is. He has moulded
existence into the likeness of thought and lost himself in that ideal
achievement which, so to speak, beckons all things into being. Even if a
thousand misfortunes await him and a final disappointment, he has been
happy once. He may be inclined to rest his case there and challenge
practical people to justify in the same way the faith that is in them.

[Sidenote: Pros and cons of detached indulgences.]

That a moment of the most perfect happiness should prove a source of
unhappiness is no paradox to any one who has observed the world. A hope,
a passion, a crime, is a flash of vitality. It is inwardly congruous
with the will that breeds it, yet the happiness it pictures is so
partial that even while it is felt it may be overshadowed by sinister
forebodings. A certain unrest and insecurity may consciously harass it.
With time, or by a slight widening in the field of interest, this
submerged unhappiness may rise to the surface. If, as is probable, it is
caused or increased by the indulgence which preceded, then the only
moment in which a good was tasted, the only vista that had opened
congenially before the mind, will prove a new and permanent curse. In
this way love often misleads individuals, ambition cities, and religion
whole races of men. That art, also, should often be an indulgence, a
blind that hides reality from ill-balanced minds and ultimately