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 ideal order in conflict with the order of death. I recall Newman's
picture: "To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various
history, the many races of men, their starts, their fortunes, their
mutual alienation, their conflicts, and then their ways, habits,
governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses,
their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of
long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending
design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or
truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not
toward final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his
far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his
futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success
of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of
sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless
irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly
described in the Apostle's words, 'having no hope and without God in the
world,'--all this is a vision to dizzy and appall; and inflicts upon the
mind the sense of a profound mystery which is absolutely beyond human
solution." In the face of such a world, even when partially made