of that age, there only remained portraiture, history, dramatic incident,
landscape, _genre_, still life, and animals. In these spheres the art is
still exercised, and much good work, undoubtedly, is annually produced by
European painters. But painting has lost its hold upon the centre of our
intellectual activity. It can no longer give form to the ideas that at the
present epoch rule the modern world. These ideas are too abstract, too
much a matter of the understanding, to be successfully handled by the
figurative arts; and it cannot be too often or too emphatically stated
that these arts produce nothing really great and universal in relation to
the spirit of their century, except by a process analogous to the
mythopoetic. With conceptions incapable of being sensuously apprehended,
with ideas that lose their value when they are incarnated, they have no
power to deal. As meteors become luminous by traversing the grosser
element of our terrestrial atmosphere, so the thoughts that art employs
must needs immerse themselves in sensuousness. They must be of a nature to
gain rather than to suffer by such immersion; and they must make a direct
appeal to minds habitually apt to think in metaphors and myths. Of this
sort are all religious ideas at a certain stage of their development, and
this attitude at certain moments of history is adopted by the popular
consciousness. We have so far outgrown it, have so completely exchanged
mythology for curiosity, and metaphor for science, that the necessary
conditions for great art are wanting. Our deepest thoughts about the world
and God are incapable of personification by any aesthetic process; they
never enter that atmosphere wherein alone they could become through fine
art luminous. For the painter, who is the form-giver, they have ceased to
be shining stars, and are seen as opaque stones; and though divinity be in
them, it is a deity that refuses the investiture of form.

FOOTNOTES: