to nature must not need another mirror to discover or interpret its reflection to us.  For instance, a building, as a building, looks to certain practical ends and uses; and, before we can rightly understand the order and reason of it, we must know from other sources the ends and uses for which it was designed:  but in so far as it is architecture, in so far as it is truly imaginative, and embodies the author’s intellectual soul, it must be able to express its own meaning, so that we can understand and feel it without any thing but what comes directly from the work itself.  But perhaps the point may be better illustrated in the case of an historical drama, which may be viewed either as history or as art:  and, to determine its merit as history, we must go to other sources; but, for ascertaining its merit as art, the work must itself give us all the knowledge we need:  so that the question of its historic truth is distinct and separate from the question of its artistic truth:  it may be true as history, yet false as art; or it may be historically wrong, yet artistically right; true to nature, though not true to past fact; and, however we may have to travel abroad in the historical inquiry, the virtue of the work as art must be ascertainable directly from the thing itself.  This, then, is what I mean by artistic completeness; that quality in virtue of which a work justifies itself, without foreign help, by its own fulness and clearness of expression.

The fourth and last principle that I am to consider is Disinterestedness.  This is partly an intellectual, but more a moral quality.  Now one great reason why men fail so much in their mental work is because they are not willing to see and to show things as they are, but must still be making them as they would have them to be.  Thus from self-love or wilfulness or vanity they work their own humours and crotchets and fancies into the matter, or overlay it with some self-pleasing quirks of peculiarity.  Instead of this, the artist must lose himself, his personal aims, interests, passions, and preferences, in the enthusiasm and inspiration of his work, in the strength, vividness, and beauty of his ideas and perceptions, and must give his whole mind and soul to the task of working these out into expression.  To this end, his mind must live in constant loving sympathy and intercourse with Nature; he must work close to her life and order; must study to seize and reproduce the truth of Nature just precisely as it is, and must not think to improve her or get ahead of her; though, to be sure, out of the materials she offers, the selection and arrangement must be his own; and all the strength he can put forth this way will never enable him to come up to her stern, honest, solid facts.  So, for instance, the highest virtue of good writing stands in saying a plain thing in a plain way.  And in all art-work the first requisite is, that a man have, in the collective sense and reason of mankind, a firm foothold for withstanding the shifting currents and fashions and popularities of the day.  The artist is indeed to work in free concert with the imaginative soul of his age:  but the trouble is, that men are ever mistaking some transient specialty of mode for the abiding soul; thus tickling the folly of the time, but leaving its wisdom untouched.