seem a natural law, but it is none the less a
scandal. An artist's business is not really to cut fantastical capers or
be licensed to play the fool. His business is simply that of every keen
soul to build well when it builds, and to speak well when it speaks,
giving practice everywhere the greatest possible affinity to the
situation, the most delicate adjustment to every faculty it affects. The
wonder of an artist's performance grows with the range of his
penetration, with the instinctive sympathy that makes him, in his mortal
isolation, considerate of other men's fate and a great diviner of their
secret, so that his work speaks to them kindly, with a deeper assurance
than they could have spoken with to themselves. And the joy of his great
sanity, the power of his adequate vision, is not the less intense
because he can lend it to others and has borrowed it from a faithful
study of the world.

[Sidenote: True art measures and completes happiness.]

If happiness is the ultimate sanction of art, art in turn is the best
instrument of happiness. In art more directly than in other activities
man's self-expression is cumulative and finds an immediate reward; for
it alters the material conditions of sentience so that sentience becomes
at once more delightful and more significant. In industry man is still
servile, preparing the materials he is to use in action. In action
itself, though he is free, he exerts his influence on a living and
treacherous medium and sees the issue at each moment drift farther and
farther from his intent. In science he is an observer, preparing himself
for action in another way, by studying its results and conditions. But
in art he is at once competent and free; he is creative. He is not
troubled by his materials, because he has assimilated them and may take
them for granted; nor is he concerned with the chance complexion of
affairs in the actual world, because he is making the world over, not
merely considering how it grew or how it will consent to grow in future.
Nothing, accordingly, could be more delightful than genuine art, nor
more free from remorse and the sting of vanity. Art springs so
completely from the heart of man that it makes everything speak to him
in his own language; it reaches, nevertheless, so truly to the heart of
nature that it co-operates with her, becomes a parcel of her creative
material energy, and builds by her instinctive hand. If the various
formative impulses afoot in the