It is just at these moments, when the mind momentarily fails in its unequal struggle with reality, that we discover the deep meaning and the supreme service of Art. For Art is the tender human servant that man has made himself for his solace. He has adjusted it to his faculties and restrained it within his scope; fashioning it from the infinite substance, he has impressed upon it finite form. It is a voice less thunderous than nature's, a lamp that does not dazzle like the great sun. It simplifies the wealth that is too luxuriant, and makes tangible a fragment of the great ethereal beauty no mortal can grasp. Thus art is visible and audible rightness; it is the love of God made manifest to the senses, a particular symbol of a universal harmony. When we are too weary to be comforted by the remote, abstract good that religion promises, art comes with its immediate, substantial, caressing beauty. Seeking to prove nothing, making no appeal to our logical intellects, requiring of us no activity, saying nothing of aught beyond itself, it is supremely restful. Finding us defeated in our search for rationality, it says, «Search no longer, puzzle no more; merely listen and look; see, here it is!» Its beauty answers our problems never directly, but by gently making them irrelevant. Art, then, differs from morality, philosophy, love and religion, in that it presents directly to sense the variety in unity which they manifest only to the mind and spirit. Like them, it deals with life, but the unity that it attains by selection and exclusion is unlike their unity in being tangible. Made by man, it has this one supreme advantage, that it is adapted from the outset to his needs. What it cannot unify it can exclude. Though nature care nothing for the peculiarities of the eye, a landscape painter can omit a tree that upsets the balance of his composition. Actual men and women present all sorts of incongruities of figure, but the sculptor can suppress the stooping shoulders, the knobby hips, and the bandy legs. Language bristles with trivial and vulgar words, but no poet except Walt Whitman thinks it necessary to write about hatters, who cannot, according to Stevenson, «be tolerated in emotional verse.» Out of the infinite number of sounds that besiege our natural ears, musicians have selected about ninety definite tones, preordained to congruity, with which to weave their marvelous fabric. That is ever the method of art; it excludes the irrelevant or the discordant, in order to secure a salient and pure integrity. By sacrificing something of the richness of experience, it gains a rationality unknown in experience. Browning's Pippa is a gentle, noble soul, bringing goodness everywhere; in real life she would be a poor mill-girl insulted by a thousand sordid and accidental details. Shelley portrays Beatrice Cenci in the transfiguring light of poetic truth; actual experience would show her tortured by a sinister and ignoble fate. No Greek youth could have