rejecting all literary reminiscence and all metaphysical idea, is in
itself entirely satisfying to the aesthetic sense--is, as the Greeks
would say, an end in itself; the effect of their work being like the
effect given to us by music; for music is the art in which form and
matter are always one--the art whose subject cannot be separated from the
method of its expression; the art which most completely realises for us
the artistic ideal, and is the condition to which all the other arts are
constantly aspiring.

Now, this increased sense of the absolutely satisfying value of beautiful
workmanship, this recognition of the primary importance of the sensuous
element in art, this love of art for art's sake, is the point in which we
of the younger school have made a departure from the teaching of Mr.
Ruskin,--a departure definite and different and decisive.

Master indeed of the knowledge of all noble living and of the wisdom of
all spiritual things will he be to us ever, seeing that it was he who by
the magic of his presence and the music of his lips taught us at Oxford
that enthusiasm for beauty which is the secret of Hellenism, and that
desire for creation which is the secret of life, and filled some of us,
at least, with the lofty and passionate ambition to go forth into far and
fair lands with some message for the nations and some mission for the
world, and yet in his art criticism, his estimate of the joyous element
of art, his whole method of approaching art, we are no longer with him;
for the keystone to his aesthetic system is ethical always. He would
judge of a picture by the amount of noble moral ideas it expresses; but
to us the channels by which all noble work in painting can touch, and
does touch, the soul are not those of truths of life or metaphysical
truths. To him perfection of workmanship seems but the symbol of pride,
and incompleteness of technical resource the image of an imagination too