Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/372

 was other work I wished to do. I doubt whether the politician's work is ever permanent, though it is too much to say that it lacks real value; I have never been able to think it out. The work of few men, of course, is permanent, sometimes the work of the artist least of any. But, however ephemeral, if the artist's work is done in sincerity, it is of far greater worth than the work of the politician, if for no other reason, than because, to recall again those words of George Moore which can never lose their charm or their consolation, the traffic of the politician is with the affairs of this world, while the artist is concerned with the dreams, the visions, and the aspirations of a world that is beyond this. I have quoted them before in these pages, I know; they cannot be quoted too often, or too often read by us Americans, if, by pondering them, we may plumb their profound depths. For we all read human history too superficially. Kings and emperors, princes and dukes, prime ministers and generals may fascinate the imagination for a while, but if life is ever to unfold its possibilities to the later consciousness, these become but the phantoms of vanished realms, and there emerge more gracious figures, Phidias and Theocritus; Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio; Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, and Correggio; Donatello and Michelangelo; Sidney, Spenser, Tyndale, Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson. These and the other artists and humanists of their times are veritable personalities in our world, far more than Elizabeth, or the dukes of the Medici, or even Pericles. For from periods such as these their names