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Rh 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,