Aristotle teaches that: 'The object of the poet is not to conceive or treat the True as it really happened, but as it should have happened. The essential difference between the poet and historian is not that the one speaks in verse, the other in prose, for the work of Herodotus in verse would still be a history; that is, it would still relate what had actually occurred, while it is the province of a poem to detail that which should have taken place.' Thus the human soul exacts in the finite creations of the poet that justice which it ever divines, but cannot always see, because the end passes beyond its present vision, in the varying dramas of human destiny written in the Book of the Infinite God.
Carefully keeping in mind that the end of such divine dramas is not here, we see that, in accordance with the above views of Aristotle, the true is not that which really occurs, but that which our feelings and intellect tell us ought to occur. The actually occurring, the Real, has always been confounded with the abstractly true, but they are very different things. Virtue, morality, such as revealed by Christianity, and confirmed by reason, are certainly true; but in relation to that which is, to the real, the actual, what man has ever yet succeeded in realizing the pure, high model set forth in the Gospel? In accordance with the theory that the Actual is the true, the nature of a saintly hero, a self-abnegating martyr, would not be a true nature; while the fact is, it alone is true to the purposes of its creation.
Sophocles, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Fra Angelico, etc., etc., did not mean by truth in the arts, the pure and simple expression of that which really is, but the expression of that which is rarely found in the actual, but is suggested by it. Aquinas makes an acute distinction between the intellect passive, which merely receives impressions from without, and the intellect active, which reasons upon and draws inferences from them. The senses can only give or know the individual; the active intellect alone conceives the universal. Our eyes perceive a triangle; but as we have this perception in common with the brutes, it cannot raise us above their level; and to take our rank as intelligences, as men, we must rise from the mere perception of the individual triangle to the general idea of triangularity. Thus it is the power of generalizing which marks us as men; and the senses have in reality nothing to do with the internal operation; they but receive the impressions, and convey them to the active intellect. Thus to the impressions given by the senses of finite things to the passive mind, the active intellect adds the idea of infinity. The eager soul, always longing for the infinite, the absolute, then seeks to invest all with that perfection which it divines in the Maker of all; the possibility of which conception of perfection is added or attached by the Creator to the Real, as a supersensuous gift to those made in His own image. Such conceptions live ever firm and fair in the charmed world of the artist, for his world is the Realm of pure Ideas.
Much may be quoted in proof of this view. Cicero says:
'When Phidias formed his Jupiter, he had no living model before his eyes, but having conceived an idea of perfect beauty in his soul, he labored only to imitate it, to produce it in the marble without change.'
Raphael says:
'Having found no model sufficiently beautiful for my Galatea, I worked from a certain Idea which I found in my own mind.'
Fra Angelico furnishes a striking example of working from images found in the soul. He was an artist of very devout character, early devoting himself and his art to God, saying: Those who work for Christ, must dwell in Christ. Always, before commencing a picture which was to be consecrated to the honor of God, he prepared himself with fervent prayer and meditation, and then began in humble trust that 'it would be put into his mind what he ought to delineate;' he would never deviate from the first idea, for, as he said, 'that was the will of God.' This he said not in presumption, but in faith and simplicity of heart. So he passed his life in imaging his own ideas, which were sent to his meek soul by no fabled muse, but by that Spirit 'that doth prefer before all temples the upright heart and pure;' and never before or since was earthly material worked up into soul, nor earthly forms refined into spirit, as under the hands of this devout painter. He became sublime through trusting goodness and humility. It was as if Paradise had opened upon him—a Paradise of rest and joy, of purity and love, where no trouble, no guile, no change could enter; and if his celestial creations lack force, we feel that before these ethereal beings, power itself would be powerless; his angels are resistless in their soft serenity; his virgins are pure from all earthly stain; his redeemed spirits in meek rapture glide into Paradise; his martyrs and confessors are absorbed in devout ecstasy. Well has he been named Il Beato e Angelico, whose life was participate with the angels even in this world. Is it not clear that Fra Angelico had found the Realm of the Artist; the fair and happy clime of the Ideal?
Our readers must not confound the ideal with the imaginary: the ideal is rather that which the real requires to invest it with that beauty which it would have possessed had the spirits of Death and sin never thrown their dark shadows over God's perfect work. Let not the poet fear the reproach that his characters are too ideal; if harmoniously constructed, but true in the higher sense, such reproach is praise.
Man rises spontaneously from the perception of the finite beauty of creatures to the conception of the sovereign beauty of the Creator, which idea has indeed its first condition in the perception of the senses; but it passes on until it extends its sphere through all our faculties, all our moral life, until the distant vision of Absolute Beauty attracts us from the limited sphere of the senses to the realm of the ideal. Thus the artist, that he may appease the insatiate thirst for Absolute Beauty, which ever pursues him, strives to bring down upon earth the divine but veiled images, which he beholds in that fair clime.