ensity of the emotion, the
inevitability of the plot,--it is the pure and intelligible form
disclosed in the phases and movement of life, disengaged and set apart
for the contemplation of the mind,--it is the purging of the sensual
eye, enabling it to see through the mind as the mind first saw through
it, which renders the world of art the new vision it is, the revelation
accomplished by the mind for the senses. If the world of art were only a
reduplication of life, it would give only the pleasures that have been
mentioned; but its true pleasure is that which it yields from its
supersensual element, the reason which has entered into it with ordering
power. In the world thus created there will remain the imperfections
which are due to the limitation of the artist, in knowledge, skill, and
choice.

It will be said at once that all these concrete representations
necessarily fail to realize the artist's thought, and are inadequate,
inferior in exactness, to scientific and philosophic knowledge; in a
measure this is true, and would be important if the method of art were
demonstrative, instead of being, as has been said, experimental and
inductive. So, too, all thinkers, using the actual world in their
processes, are at a disadvantage. The figures of the geometer, the
quantities of the chemist, the measurements of the astronomer, are
inexact approximations to their equivalent in the mind. Art, as an
embodiment in mortal images, is subject to the conditions of mortality.
Hence arises its human history, the narrative of its rise, climax, and
decline in successive ages. The course of art is known; it has been run
many times; it is a simple matter. At first art is archaic, the sensible
form being rudely controlled by the artist's hand; it becomes, in the
second stage, classical, the form being adequate to the thought, a
transparent expression; last, it is decadent, the form being more than
the thought, dwarfing it by usurping attention on its own account. The
peculiar temptation of technique is always to elaboration of detail;
technique is at first a hope, it becomes a power, it ends in being a
caprice; and always as it goes on it loses sight of the general in its
rendering, and dwells with a near eye on the specific. Nor is this
attention to detail confined to the manner; the hand of the artist draws
the mind after it, and it is no longer the great types of manhood, the
important fates of life, the primary emotions in their norm