power. The progress of science is fatal to folly, to
superstition, to all kinds of false admiration and
reverence — to the realm of falsehood and lies in
general; but I do not think that in its furthest
advances it will ever intrude a hostile step into the
domain of imagination, or lay rude hands on a
sinarle fair creation which the true life of art has
ever inspired. Nature and art, the world of sensuous
existences in time and space, and the world of ideas
which thought produces, cannot be contrasted as
reality and unreality. The notion lurking in many
minds is that the external objective world of earth
and rocks, and streams and mountains, is a reality
which God created, whilst the thoughts about it,
even of the most brilliant minds, are mere human
speculations and fancies, devoid of any claim to be
called real substantial existences. But if it be the
divine creative power which entitles anything to be
called real, is there more of it in stones than in self-
conscious thought ? Have dead rocks and streams
more of a divine presence and activity in them than
the ideas of the intelligences which have been made
in the divine likeness ? The smallest original inven-
tion in the mechanical arts contains in it something
which has never yet existed in the world of outward
realities, and in that sense is unreal, a mere fiction
of the brain. But even before it has been embodied
in material shape, shall we say that lumps of iron
or brass or zinc — inorganic matter, and the forces of
material nature, — out of which the macliine is to be
constructed, are realities, and the conception spring-
ing from the creative realm of thought, that is to
infuse into them new power, and compel them into
new relations, has as yet only an existence that is
unreal and illusory. And when the matter-of-fact
world of nature and of human life has yielded up
its most precious content to furnish materials for
the conception of genius, and they are reproduced
on the canvas of Raphael or Perugino, or on the
page of Homer or Dante, or Shakespeare or Goethe,
in a form of living harmony and beauty, such as the
eye of sense has never seen or can see, shall we say
that a lump of clay or a block of stone is a reality,
that the details of domestic life or the vulgar
incidents which a daily newspaper chronicles, for-
gotten ere the eye has ceased to skim them, are true
and real, and the noble creations of genius whicji
live in our thoughts for ever are only empty
phantoms which produce an impression of reality on
us by a childish illusion ?
But we may go further than this. So far from
conceding that the creations of art are unreal, there
is a sense in which it may be maintained that all
great works of art are more real, certain, and ex-
press a deeper truth, than the matter-of-fact world
for wjiicli exclusive reality is claimed. For truth
or reality is not that which lies on the surface
of things and can be perceived by every cursory
observer. What meets the eye or is the object of
immediate observation is but a chaos of accidental
and transient phenomena, of facts and occuiTences
succeeding or crossing eadi other in endless com-
plexity and multiplicitv. To know the truth of
things, to have cognisance of that which is real, we
must penetrate beneath the surface, eliminate the
accidental and irrelevant, and grasp the principle or
essence which underlies and interprets appeai'ances.
Now, whilst this hidden reality is imveiled to us in
one way by science and philosophy, it is the function
of art to reveal it to us in another and, for many
minds, a more expressive and intelligible way. Art
does not analyse, or abstract, or classify, or gener-
alise ; it does not lay bare the mechanism of thought,
or evolve by the process of a rigid dialectic the secret
order and system of nature and history. But the
idea which, gazing on nature and human life, by the
intuitive force of imagination the great artist has
divined, he gives shape and expression to in sensible
forms and images ; he incarnates anew in a represen-
tation, borrowed indeed from the actual world, but
closer to thought, more speaking and significant,
more true tiian nature and life itself. For there is
a sense in which it may be said that nature speaks
her own meaning with an indistinct and faltering
voice, and needs some inspired interpreter to make
music of her stannnering accents. And though our
common life is replete with spiritual significance, yet
its pathos, its beauty, its harmony, the secret rhythm
that runs through it, and the more than tragic
interest that underlies it, are but too often obscured and lost amidst the perplexing confusion of its accidents and the triviality of its meaningless details. Now it is the mission of Art to speak, indeed, in Nature's language, but to lend to her a voice more
clear and articulate than her own ; to represent
human life, but so to do it that, through the forms of the ideal world, the obscured plot of the real world shall unfold itself in its true significance and grandeur.
I can only refer, lastly, in briefest form, to one other consideration derived from the very nature of art which has been urged in proof of its unprogressive character. If there ever was a time when art could be a religion, drawing into its own sphere all the force of the religious element of man's nature, must not that, of necessity, have been the time when art reached its culminating-point? Can we conceive of a period of human development at which religion is the worship of the beautiful, when our deepest thoughts about ourselves, about nature,
