oftier realms, to catch the vision not revealed to mortals. The artist
is, by virtue of his high calling, a co-worker with God. An English wit
has declared that life copies art rather than that art copies life. In
this he expresses a truth rather than a merely clever epigram. It is the
artist's business to lead, not to follow. Only as he leads does he
fulfil his divinely appointed destiny. "I maintain that life is not a
form of energy," writes Sir Oliver Lodge; "that it is not included in
our present physical categories; that its explanation is still to be
sought. And it appears to me to belong to a separate order of existence,
which interacts with this material frame of things, and while here
exerts guidance and control on the energy which already here exists; for
although they alter the quantity of energy no whit, and though they
merely utilize available energy like any other machine, live things are
able to direct inorganic terrestrial energy along new and special paths,
so as to achieve results without which such living agency could not have
occurred." Does it for an instant seem that a great scientist's
theoretical speculations of the laws of the universe and of organic life
have no connection with the province of art? On the contrary. Truly does
Balzac exclaim: "Is not God the whole of science, the all of love,
the source of poetry?" The artist is he who enters into the divine
realm; who discerns the divine creations as the true ideals of humanity,
and who interprets to the world the sublime significance of the divine
thought. Shall such an artist degrade his power by portraying
ugliness--the mere defects of negations and distortions? Shall he
degrade life by calling these the realities?

[Illustration: "LA PIETA," ST. PETER'S, ROME
Michael Angelo
_Page 117_]

The painter or sculptor who holds that it is as truly art to represent
distortion and repulsiveness as it is to represent beauty is as false to
his high calling as would be the poet who should insist that doggerel
and mere commonplace truisms expressed in rhyme are poetry. Compare, for
example, two statues, Cecioni's "_La Madre_," in which a woman's utter
lack of personal attraction is so complete as to make her fairly
repulsive to the gazer, and the "Mother of Moses," by Franklin Simmons,
in which the mystic beauty, the very ideal of maternity, is embodied.
Which of these statues is calculated to uplift and to exalt all