There is a curious passage in Boehme, which relates how Satan, when
asked the cause of the enmity of God and his own consequent downfall,
replied,--"I wished to be an Artist." So, according to antique
tradition, Prometheus manufactured a man and woman of clay, animated
them with fire stolen from the chariot of the Sun, and was punished for
the crime of Creation; Titans chained him to the rocks of the Indian
Caucasus for thirty thousand years!
This Ideal, this Aphrodite of old mythologies, still reigns over the
world of Art, and every truly noble effort of the artist is saturated
with her spirit, as with a religion. It is impossible for a true work of
Art to exist, unless this great creative principle of Love be present in
its inception, in its execution, in its detail. It must be pervaded with
the warmth of human, passionate affection. The skill which we are so apt
to worship is but the instrument in the hands of Love. It is the means
by which this humanity is transferred to the work, and there idealized
in the forms of Nature. Thus the test of Art is in our own hearts.
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