increases their confusion, is by no means incompatible with art's ideal
essence. On the contrary, such a result is inevitable when ideality is
carried at all far upon a narrow basis. The more genuine and excellent
the vision the greater havoc it makes if, being inadequate, it
establishes itself authoritatively in the soul. Art, in the better
sense, is a condition of happiness for a practical and labouring
creature, since without art he remains a slave; but it is one more
source of unhappiness for him so long as it is not squared with his
necessary labours and merely interrupts them. It then alienates him from
his world without being able to carry him effectually into a better one.

[Sidenote: The happy imagination is one initially in line with things.]

The artist is in many ways like a child. He seems happy, because his
life is spontaneous, yet he is not competent to secure his own good. To
be truly happy he must be well bred, reared from the cradle, as it were,
under propitious influences, so that he may have learned to love what
conduces to his development. In that rare case his art will expand as
his understanding ripens; he will not need to repent and begin again on
a lower key. The ideal artist, like the ideal philosopher, has all time
and all existence for his virtual theme. Fed by the world he can help to
mould it, and his insight is a kind of wisdom, preparing him as science
might for using the world well and making it more fruitful. He can then
be happy, not merely in the sense of having now and then an ecstatic
moment, but happy in having light and resource enough within him to cope
steadily with real things and to leave upon them the vestige of his
mind.

[Sidenote: and brought always closer to them by experience.]

One effect of growing experience is to render what is unreal
uninteresting. Momentous alternatives in life are so numerous and the
possibilities they open up so varied that imagination finds enough
employment of a historic and practical sort in trying to seize them. A
child plans Towers of Babel; a mature architect, in planning, would lose
all interest if he were bidden to disregard gravity and economy. The
conditions of existence, after they are known and accepted, become
conditions for the only pertinent beauty. In each place, for each
situation, the plastic mind finds an appropriate ideal. It need not go
afield to import something exotic. It need make no sacrifices to whim
and to personal