Here the material is little, the imagination mighty indeed, but less overwhelming than with poet and musician; but the technique, the God-given and labor-trained cunning of retina and wrist, how all-important! often how all-sufficing! In all criticism it is necessary first to reflect which of these three factors--intellectual power, physical endowment or propitious material--is most imperious. When we find this factor most perfectly developed, and the others, though subordinate, neither absent nor stunted, we shall find the art nearest to perfection. And the conditions of race and climate and society which most helpfully develop that factor without injuring the others are the conditions which will best further that art. And the critic who lays most stress on that factor, and is content to miss, if necessary, though noting the loss, a certain measure of the other two in order more entirely to gain the one that is vitalest, is the critic whose words are tonic. And he who, blending the province of the arts, calling them all with vagueness "art," exalts and demands the same factor first in all of them, must be detrimental, no matter how great his sincerity and his knowledge. Before weighing any contemporary thing in the balance let us mark out in the past some standards of comparison. For it is useless to speculate upon theoretical methods if we can discover the actual methods employed by those whose art, if not ideally perfect, is yet so far beyond our present power as to be quite perfectly ideal. It needs no discussion to prove that to find the utmost that has been actually accomplished by human endeavor we must turn in sculpture and in language to Greece, in music to Germany, in architecture to Greece or to mediaeval Europe as our taste may pull, and in painting to the Italians.