intelligible in ideal art, dare we assert that fatalistic optimism which
would have it that the universe is in God's eyes a perfect world? I can
find no warrant for it in ideal art, though thence the ineradicable
effort arises in us to win to that world in the conviction that it is
not indifferent in the sight of heaven whether we live in the order of
life or that of death, in the faith that victory in us is a triumph of
that order itself which increases and prevails in us, is a bringing of
Christ's kingdom upon earth. Art rather becomes in our mind a function
of the world's progress, and were its goal achieved would cease; for
life would then itself be one with art, one with the divine order. So
much of truth there is in Ruskin's statement that art made perfect
denies progress and is its ultimate. But perfection in life, as ideal
art presents it, it is a prophecy which enlists us as soldiers militant
in its fulfilment. Its optimism is that of the issue, and may be that of
the process; but it surely is not that of the state that now is in the
world.

It thus appears more and more that art is educative; it is the race's
foreknowledge of what may be, of the objects of effort and the methods
of their attainment under mortal conditions. The difficulty of men in
respect to it is the lax power they have to see in it the truth, as
contradistinguished from the fact, the continuous reality of the things
of the mind in opposition to the accidental and partial reality of the
things of actuality. They think of it as an imagined, instead of as the
real world, the model of that which is in the evolution of that which
ought to be. In history the climaxes of art have always outrun human
realization; its crests in Greece, Italy, and England are crests of the
never-attained; but they still make on in their mass to the yet rising
wave, which shall be of mankind universal, if, indeed, in the
cosmopolitan civilization which we hope for, the elements of the past,