The romantic ideal of feudalism is reflected in the poems of chivalry. The ideal of the English Renascence is found in Shakespeare. The religious ideals are expressed in the Hindu temples, in the Parthenon, in the mediæval cathedrals, and in the poems of Dante and Milton. The ideals of the oriental monarchs are visibly embodied in the Assyrian and Babylonian palaces; the ideal of the merchant class in the stones of Venice, in the architecture of the German and Flemish cities, etc. The plastic arts especially owe their rise and prosperity to the princely and religious ideals—to the demand for temples, churches and palaces suitable for monarchs or merchant princes to dwell and worship in. The aim of the artificer is to furnish a splendid setting for princes and divinities. Mankind at different periods is in labor to give birth to ideals representing the purpose for which man exists, or the things that make life worth while, and art _assists in bringing to the birth these ideals_. It seeks to express them, and in the effort to do so it helps to develop and clarify them. This, and not merely to give pleasure, is its _grand_ function. In an age like the present, in which a new ideal is in the early stages of formation, art is likely to become, as in fact it has become, uncertain of its function, and hence apt to lose its direction, either turning back to the servile reproduction of past art forms, or seeking to achieve progress in the perfection of technical detail, or in the ways of subjective impressionism.[81] The efforts of a serious artist today, in so far as he undertakes to assist in bringing to the birth a new ideal by his endeavor to express it, must necessarily be tentative, if not crude. But such as they are their worth, if wholly sincere, can hardly be overestimated. In the vocation of the artist, as everywhere, the three-fold reverence is the capital point. Reverence for the great masters, as shown not in slavishly copying them, but in understanding the qualities that made them great, and in delivering from past art the things that are to be reincorporated and to live on; reverence for those who in different fields are intent on the problem of art today—all this to prepare the way for future artists, for the greater art that is to come. The relation of art to ethics, or to the spiritual life, is now sufficiently clear. In general it is to produce the semblance of the spiritual relation, and thereby to rejuvenate the world’s workers, to give them the joy of relative perfection, and thus to stimulate them to persevere in the real business of life, which is to approximate toward actual perfection. The specific task of the artist _at its height_ is to enshrine in his creation the ideals of the age with respect to the ultimate purpose of human existence, and in the endeavor so to incorporate them as to assist in defining them.