measure of result far surpassing their mere addition. The
creations of our mind are, of course, mere spiritual existences,
things of seeming, akin to illusions; and yet our mind can never rest
satisfied with an unreality, because our mind is active, penetrative
and grasping, and therefore craves for realisation, for completeness
and truth, and feels bruised and maimed whenever it hits against a
dead wall or is pulled up by a contradiction; nay, worst of all, it
grows giddy and faint when suddenly brought face to face with
emptiness. All insufficiency and shallowness means loss of power; and
it is such loss of power that we remark when we compare with the
religious art of past times the art which, every day more and more, is
given us by the hurried and over-thrifty (may I say "Reach-me-down"?)
hands of secularism. The great art of Greece and of the Middle Ages
most often represents something which, to our mind and feelings, is as
important, and even as beautiful, as the representation itself; and
the representation, the actual "work of art" itself, gains by that
added depth and reverence of our mood, is carried deeper (while
helping to carry deeper) into our soul. Instead of which we moderns
try to be satisfied with allowing the seeing part of us to light on
something pleasant and interesting, while giving the mind only
triviality to rest upon; and the mind goes to sleep or chafes to move
away. We cannot live intellectually and morally in presence of the
idea, say, of a jockey of Degas or one of his ballet girls in
contemplation of her shoe, as long as we can live aesthetically in the
arrangement of lines and masses and dabs of colour and interlacings of
light and shade which translate themselves into this _idea_ of jockey
or ballet girl; we are therefore bored, ruffled, or, what is worse, we
learn to live on insufficient spiritual rations, and grow anaemic. Our
shortsighted practicality, which values means while disregarding ends,
and conceives usefulness only as a stage in making some other
_utility_, has led us to suppose that the desire for beauty is
compatible, nay commensurate, with indifference to reality: the _real_
having come to mean that which you can plant, cook, eat or sell, not
what you can feel and think.

This notion credits us with an actual craving for something which
should exist as little as possible, in one dimension only, so to
speak, or as upon a screen (for fear of occupying valuable space which