cuts into the matter as with a pen of fire. Plutus, the blustering giant,
collapses at Virgil's rebuke; it is "as the sails sink, the mast being
suddenly broken." Or that poor Brunetto Latini, with the _cotto aspetto_,
"face _baked_," parched brown and lean; and the "fiery snow" that falls on
them there, a "fiery snow without wind," slow, deliberate, never-ending!
Or the lids of those Tombs; square sarcophaguses, in that silent
dim-burning Hall, each with its Soul in torment; the lids laid open there;
they are to be shut at the Day of Judgment, through Eternity. And how
Farinata rises; and how Cavalcante falls--at hearing of his Son, and the
past tense "_fue_"! The very movements in Dante have something brief;
swift, decisive, almost military. It is of the inmost essence of his
genius this sort of painting. The fiery, swift Italian nature of the man,
so silent, passionate, with its quick abrupt movements, its silent "pale
rages," speaks itself in these things.

For though this of painting is one of the outermost developments of a man,
it comes like all else from the essential faculty of him; it is
physiognomical of the whole man. Find a man whose words paint you a
likeness, you have found a man worth something; mark his manner of doing
it, as very characteristic of him. In the first place, he could not have
discerned the object at all, or seen the vital type of it, unless he had,
what we may call, _sympathized_ with it,--had sympathy in him to bestow on
objects. He must have been _sincere_ about it too; sincere and
sympathetic: a man without worth cannot give you the likeness of any
object; he dwells in vague outwardness, fallacy and trivial hearsay, about
all objects. And indeed may we not say that intellect altogether expresses
itself in this power of discerning what an object is? Whatsoever of
faculty a man's mind may have will come out here. Is it even of business,
a matter to be done? The gifted man is he who _sees_ the essential point,
and leaves all the rest aside as surplusage: it is his faculty too, the