What art demands is that the artist’s personal convictions and notions, his likes and dislikes, do not obtrude themselves at all; that good and evil stand judged in his work by the logic of events, as they do in nature, and not by any special pleading on his part. He does not hold a brief for either side; he exemplifies the working of the creative energy. He is neither a judge nor an advocate; he is a witness on the stand; he tells how the thing fell out, and the more impartial he is as a witness, the better. We, the jury, shall watch carefully for any bias or leaning on his part. We shall try his testimony by the rules of evidence; in this case, by our acquaintance with other imaginative works and by our experience of life. The great artist works in and through and from moral ideas; his works are indirectly a criticism of life. He is moral without having a moral. The moment a moral or an immoral intention obtrudes itself, that moment he begins to fall from grace as an artist. He confesses his inability to let nature speak for herself. He is inadequate to the logic of events, and gives us a logic of his own. Shakespeare is our highest type of the disinterested artist. Does he do aught but hold the mirror up to nature? Is his work overlaid with an avowed moral intention? Does he go behind the returns, so to speak? Does he tamper with the logic of events, the fate of character? What is the moral of “Hamlet”? Has any one yet found out? Yet the plays all fall within the scope of moral ideas; they treat moral ideas with energy and depth, as Voltaire said of English poetry in general. We must discriminate between a conscious moral purpose and an unconscious moral impulse. A work of art arises primarily out of the emotions, and not out of the intellect, and is sound and true to the extent to which it repeats the method of nature. Buskin, whom Mr. Gladden quotes, was of course right when he said that the art of a nation is an exponent of its ethical state. But the condition of first importance with the artist is, not that he should have an ethical purpose, but that he should be ethically sound. He may work with ethical ideas, but not directly for them. The preacher speaks for them; the poet speaks out of them,--he plays with them, he takes his will of them; they follow, but do not lead him. Again, Ruskin says, “He is the greatest artist who has embodied in the sum of his works the greatest number of the greatest ideas;” but he is an artist only by virtue of having embodied these ideas in an imaginative form. If they run through his work as homilies or intellectual propositions, or lie upon it as moral reflections, they are not within the vital sphere of art.