er
which the artistic manifestation of the spiritual content must he
made. It is the business of art to create an ideal world, in which
perception, emotion, understanding, action, all elements of human life
sublimed by thought, shall reappear in concrete forms as beauty. This
being so, the logical criticism of art demands that we should not
only estimate the technical skill of artists and their faculty for
presenting beauty to the aesthetic sense, but that we should also ask
ourselves what portion of the human spirit he has chosen to invest
with form, and how he has conceived his subject. It is not necessary
that the ideas embodied in a work of art should be the artist's
own. They may be common to the race and age: as, for instance, the
conception of sovereign deity expressed in the Olympian Zeus of
Pheidias, or the conception of divine maternity expressed in Raphael's
'Madonna di San Sisto.' Still the personality of the artist, his
own intellectual and moral nature, his peculiar way of thinking and
feeling, his individual attitude towards the material given to him in
ideas of human consciousness, will modify his choice of subject and
of form, and will determine his specific type of beauty. To take an
example: supposing that an idea, common to his race and age, is given
to the artist for treatment; this will be the final end of the work
of art which he produces. But his personal qualities and technical
performance determine the degree of success or failure to which he
attains in presenting that idea and in expressing it with beauty.
Signorelli fails where Perugino excels, in giving adequate and lovely
form to the religious sentiment. Michelangelo is sure of the sublime,
and Raphael of the beautiful.

Art is thus the presentation of the human spirit by the artist to his
fellow-men. The subject-matter of the arts is commensurate with what
man thinks and feels and does. It is as deep as religion, as wide as
life. But what distinguishes art from religion or from life is, that
this subject-matter must assume beautiful form, and must be presented
directly or indirectly to the senses. Art is not the school or the
cathedral, but the playground, the paradise of humanity. It does not
teach, it does not preach. Nothing abstract enters into art's domain.
Truth and goodness are transmuted into beauty there, just as in
science beauty and goodness assume the shape of truth, and in
religion truth and beauty become goodness. The rigid