vague, and art is
necessarily essentially distinct: give shape to the vague and it ceases
to exist. The task set to the artist by the dreamer, the prophet, the
priest, the ghost-seer of all times, is as difficult, though in the
opposite sense, as that by which the little girl in the Venetian fairy
tale sought to test the omnipotence of the emperor. She asked him for a
very humble dish, quite simple and not costly, a pat of butter broiled
on a gridiron. The emperor desired his cook to place the butter on the
gridiron and light the fire; all was going well, when, behold! the
butter began to melt, trickled off, and vanished. The artists were asked
to paint, or model, or narrate the supernatural; they set about the work
in good conscience, but see, the supernatural became the natural, the
gods turned into men, the madonnas into mere mothers, the angels into
armed striplings, the phantoms into mere creatures of flesh and blood.

There are in reality two sorts of supernatural, although only one really
deserves the name. A great number of beliefs in all mythologies are in
reality mere scientific errors--abortive attempts to explain phenomena
by causes with which they have no connection--the imagination plays not
more part in them than in any other sort of theorising, and the notions
that unlucky accidents are due to a certain man's glance, that certain
formulae will bring rain or sunshine, that miraculous images will dispel
pestilence, and kings of England cure epilepsy, must be classed under
the head of mistaken generalizations, not very different in point of
fact from exploded scientific theories, such as Descartes' vortices, or
the innate ideas of scholasticism. That there was a time when animals
spoke with human voice may seem to us a piece of fairy-lore, but it
was in its day a scientific hypothesis as brilliant and satisfying
as Darwin's theory of evolution. We must, therefore, in examining
the relations between art and the supernatural, eliminate as far as
possible this species of scientific speculation, and consider only
that supernatural which really deserves the name, which is beyond and
outside the limits of the possible, the rational, the explicable--that
supernatural which is due not to the logical faculties, arguing from
wrong premises, but to the imagination wrought upon by certain kinds of
physical surroundings. The divinity of the earlier races is in some
measure a mistaken scientific hypothesis of the sort we