Art is thus the presentation of the human spirit by the artist to his fellow-men.  The subject-matter of the arts is commensurate with what man thinks and feels and does.  It is as deep as religion, as wide as life.  But what distinguishes art from religion or from life is, that this subject-matter must assume beautiful form, and must be presented directly or indirectly to the senses.  Art is not the school or the cathedral, but the playground, the paradise of humanity.  It does not teach, it does not preach.  Nothing abstract enters into art’s domain.  Truth and goodness are transmuted into beauty there, just as in science beauty and goodness assume the shape of truth, and in religion truth and beauty become goodness.  The rigid definitions, the unmistakable laws of science, are not to be found in art.  Whatever art has touched acquires a concrete sensuous embodiment, and thus ideas presented to the mind in art have lost a portion of their pure thought-essence.  It is on this account that the religious conceptions of the Greeks were so admirably fitted for the art of sculpture, and certain portions of the mediaeval Christian mythology lent themselves so well to painting.  For the same reason the metaphysics of ecclesiastical dogma defy the artist’s plastic faculty.  Art, in a word, is a middle term between reason and the senses.  Its secondary aim, after the prime end of presenting the human spirit in beautiful form has been accomplished, is to give tranquil and innocent enjoyment.

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From what has gone before it will be seen that no human being can make or mould a beautiful form without incorporating in that form some portion of the human mind, however crude, however elementary.  In other words, there is no work of art without a theme, without a motive, without a subject.  The presentation of that theme, that motive, that subject, is the final end of art.  The art is good or bad according as the subject has been well or ill presented, consistently with the laws of beauty special to the art itself.  Thus we obtain two standards for aesthetic criticism.  We judge a statue, for example, both by the sculptor’s intellectual grasp upon his subject, and also by his technical skill and sense of beauty.  In a picture of the Last Judgment by Fra Angelico we say that the bliss of the righteous has been more successfully treated than the torments of the wicked, because the former has been better understood, although the painter’s skill in each is equal.  In the Perseus of Cellini we admire the sculptor’s spirit, finish of execution, and originality of design, while we deplore that want of sympathy with the heroic character which makes his type of physical beauty slightly vulgar and his facial expression vacuous.  If the phrase ‘Art for art’s sake’ has any meaning, this meaning is simply that the artist, having chosen a theme, thinks exclusively in working at it of technical dexterity or the quality of beauty.  There are