say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like
one of these. Shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?"
Such is the normal development of all imagery; its actuality limits it,
and in becoming remote it grows flexible. It is only by virtue of this
that man can retain the vast treasures of race-imagination, and continue
to use them, such as the worlds of mythology, of chivalry, and romance.
The imagery is, in truth, a background, whose foreground is the ideal
meaning. Thus even fairyland, and the worlds of heaven and hell, have
their place in art. The actuality of the imagery is in fact irrelevant,
just as history is in the idealization of human events. Its transience,
then, cannot matter, except in so far as it loses intelligibility
through changes of time, place, and custom, and becomes a dead language.
It follows that that imagery which keeps close to universal phases of
nature, to pursuits always necessary in human life, and to ineradicable
beliefs in respect to the supernatural, is most permanent as a language;
and here art in its most immortal creations returns again to its
omnipresent character as a thing of the common lot.

The transience of the contents of art may be of two kinds. There is a
passing away of error, as there is in all knowledge, but such a loss
need not detain attention. What is really in issue is the passing away
of the authority of precept and example fitted to one age but not to
another, as in the case of the substitution of the ideal of humility for
that of valour, owing to a changed emphasis in the scale of virtues. The
contents of art, its general ideals, reproduce the successive periods of
our earth-history as a race, by generalizing each in its own age. A
parallel exists in the subject-matter of the sciences; astronomy,
geology, paleontology are similar statements of past phases of the
evolution of the earth, its aspects in successive stages. Or, to take a
kindred example, just as the planets in their order set forth now the