a master mind arose, and gathered the finer efficacies of them all into one result.  This is notoriously true of Greek, Venetian, Florentine, and Gothic Art:  Phidias, Sophocles, Titian, and Raphael had each many precursors and companions.  The fact indeed is apt to be lost sight of, because the earlier and inferior essays perish, and only the finished specimens survive; so that we see them more or less isolated; whereas in truth their origin and growth were social, the fruit of a large intellectual partnership and co-operation.—­It is on the same principle that nothing truly excellent either in the minds or the characters of men is reached without much of “ennobling impulse from the Past”; and that they who live too much in the present miss the right food of human elevation, contented to be, perhaps proud of being the vulgar things they are, because ignorant of what has been before them.  It is not that the present age is worse than former ages; it may even be better as a whole:  but what is bad or worthless in an age dies with the age; so that only the great and good of the Past touches us; while of the present we are most touched by that which is little and mean.

The third principle of Art, as I am taking them, is Completeness.  A work of art must have within itself all that is needful for the due understanding of it, as Art; so that the beholder will not have to go outside or beyond the work itself to learn what it means; that is, provided he have the corresponding faculties alive within him, so as to be capable of its proper force.  For, if the work speaks through form and colour, there must be, in answering measure, a natural or an instructed eye; if sound is its organ, there must be a natural or an instructed ear; if its speech is verbal, there must be, besides a natural or an instructed taste, a sufficient knowledge also of the language in which it is written.  All this of course.  But, apart from this, the work must be complete in and of itself, so as to be intelligible without a commentary.  And any work which requires a sign or a showman to tell the beholder what it is, or to enable him to take the sense and virtue of it, is most certainly a failure.

In all this, however, I am speaking of the work simply as art, and not as it is or may be something else.  For works of art, in many cases, are or have a good deal besides that.  And in connection with such a work there may arise various questions,—­of antiquity, philology, local custom and allusion; in what place and at what time it was done; whence, how, and why it came to be as it is; where the author got any hints or materials for it, and what of antecedent or contemporary history may be gathered from it.  All this is legitimate and right in its place, but has nothing to do with the character and meaning of the thing as a work of art, in which respect it must know its cue without a prompter, and be able to tell its own tale.  That which holds the mirror up