feel it, even in Milton and in Dante, minimizing. The
mysticism of the borderland at its supreme is a hope; at its nadir, it
is a fear. We do not know. But within the narrow range of the
intelligible and ordered world of art, which has been achieved by the
creative reason of civilized man in his brief centuries and along the
narrow path from Jerusalem and Athens to the western world, we do know
that for the normal man born into its circle of light the order of life
is within our reach, the order of death within reach of us. Shut within
these limits of the victory of our intellect and the upreaching of our
desires and the warfare of our will, we assert in art our faith that the
divine order is victorious, that the righteous man is not forsaken, that
the soul cannot suffer wrong either from others or from nature or from
God,--that the evil principle cannot prevail. It is faith, springing
from our experience of the working of that order in us; it transcends
knowledge, but it grows with knowledge; and ideal literature asserts
this faith against nature and against man in all their deformity, as the
centre about which life revolves so far as it has become subject to
rational knowledge, to beautiful embodiment, to joyful being, to the
will to live.

Can the faith of which idealism is the holder of the keys, the faith as
nigh to the intellect as to the heart, to the senses as to the spirit,
exceed even this limit, and affirm that if man were perfect in knowledge
and saw the universe as we believe God sees it, he would behold it as an
artistic whole even now? Would it be that beatific vision, revolving
like God's kaleidoscope, momentarily falling at each new arrangement
into the perfect unities of art? and is our world of art, our brief
model of such a world in single examples of its scheme, only a way of
limiting the field to the compass of human faculties that we may see
within our capacities as God sees, and hence have such faith? Is art
after all a lower creation than nature, a concession to our frail
powers? Has idealism such optimistic reach as that? Or must we see the
evil principle encamped here, confusing truth, deforming beauty,
depraving joy, deflecting the will, with wages of death for its victims,
and the hell of final destruction spreading beneath its sway? so that
the world as it now is cannot be thought of as the will of God exercised
in Omnipotence, but a human opportunity of union with or separation from
the id