Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/199

 whether expressed in words or music, in colours or in marble, in the sensuous ideas of a poet or in the naked generalities of a philosopher, contains a latent hostility to the spirit of historical truth. He who loves the beautiful with heart and soul is not likely to watch its development from rude beginnings with pleasure, or even to admit that its nature is so perishable as to have had a beginning at all. To pry into its secret growth were almost as painful to the true artist as to look upon its decay and death.

It is a noble sentiment, worthy of greater and better beings than men, thus to reserve enthusiastic worship for that which looks immortal. But it is also a sentiment full of sad delusions, ever adorning with wreaths of eternal spring that which at a touch crumbles into dust, building everlasting ice-palaces which a few rays of even human reason melt away. In truth, the artist lives and must live, if he will act at all, a life of limitation fancied to be limitless. If he should know and feel his limits, if he should eat of the fatal tree of science and his eyes be opened, the ideas he expresses are likely to be revealed ephemeral in their essence, and his hands are apt to lose their cunning in a craft which has lost its divinity. For, however paradoxical it may appear, the true glimmerings of human divinity are visible, not in the creation of the artist, but in the reflection of the critic. The former is limited by the particular conditions of space and time, individual and social character, in and through which he works. The latter through a thousand of these shadows may catch an infinitely distant glimpse of the light which the artist imagines in the little day of the group for which he works. The artist deals with with appearances, simply because he is an artist, controlled by average language and thought, not a scientific