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: 

[2] It may fairly be questioned whether that necessary connection between art and religion, which is commonly taken for granted, does in truth exist; in other words, whether great art might not flourish without any religious content.  This, however, is a speculative problem, for present and the future rather than the past.  Historically, it has always been found that the arts in their origin are dependent on religion.  Nor is the reason far to seek.  Art aims at expressing an ideal; and this ideal is the transfiguration of human elements into something nobler, felt and apprehended by the imagination.  Such an ideal, such an all-embracing glorification of humanity only exists for simple and unsophisticated societies in the form of religion.  Religion is the universal poetry which all possess; and the artist, dealing with the mythology of his national belief, feels himself in vital sympathy with the imagination of the men for whom he works.  More than the painter is required for the creation of great painting, and more than the poet for the exhibition of immortal verse.  Painters are but the hands, and poets but the voices, whereby peoples express their accumulated thoughts and permanent emotions.  Behind them crowd the generations of the myth-makers; and around them floats the vital atmosphere of enthusiasms on which their own souls and the souls of their brethren have been nourished.