This—­I thought is surely what the Western world has dimly been rediscovering.  There has crept into our minds once more the feeling that the Universe is all of a piece, Equipoise supreme; and all things equally wonderful, and mysterious, and valuable.  We have begun, in fact, to have a glimmering of the artist’s creed, that nothing may we despise or neglect—­that everything is worth the doing well, the making fair—­that our God, Perfection, is implicit everywhere, and the revelation of Him the business of our Art.

And as I jotted down these words I noticed that some real stars had crept up into the sky, so gradually darkening above the pollard lime-trees; cuckoos, who had been calling on the thorn-trees all the afternoon, were silent; the swallows no longer flirted past, but a bat was already in career over the holly hedge; and round me the buttercups were closing.  The whole form and feeling of the world had changed, so that I seemed to have before me a new picture hanging.

Ah!  I thought Art must indeed be priest of this new faith in Perfection, whose motto is:  “Harmony, Proportion, Balance.”  For by Art alone can true harmony in human affairs be fostered, true Proportion revealed, and true Equipoise preserved.  Is not the training of an artist a training in the due relation of one thing with another, and in the faculty of expressing that relation clearly; and, even more, a training in the faculty of disengaging from self the very essence of self—­and passing that essence into other selves by so delicate means that none shall see how it is done, yet be insensibly unified?  Is not the artist, of all men, foe and nullifier of partisanship and parochialism, of distortions and extravagance, the discoverer of that jack-o’-lantern—­Truth; for, if Truth be not Spiritual Proportion I know not what it is.  Truth it seems to me—­is no absolute thing, but always relative, the essential symmetry in the varying relationships of life; and the most perfect truth is but the concrete expression of the most penetrating vision.  Life seen throughout as a countless show of the finest works of Art; Life shaped, and purged of the irrelevant, the gross, and the extravagant; Life, as it were, spiritually selected—­that is Truth; a thing as multiple, and changing, as subtle, and strange, as Life itself, and as little to be bound by dogma.  Truth admits but the one rule:  No deficiency, and no excess!  Disobedient to that rule—­nothing attains full vitality.  And secretly fettered by that rule is Art, whose business is the creation of vital things.

That aesthete, to be sure, was right, when he said:  “It is Style that makes one believe in a thing; nothing but Style.”  For, what is Style in its true and broadest sense save fidelity to idea and mood, and perfect balance in the clothing of them?  And I thought:  Can one believe in the decadence of Art in an age which, however unconsciously as yet, is beginning to worship that which Art worships—­Perfection-Style?