limitless to find within the limits of form its complete expression, or
of a love too simple not to stammer in its tale. But to us the rule of
art is not the rule of morals. In an ethical system, indeed, of any
gentle mercy good intentions will, one is fain to fancy, have their
recognition; but of those that would enter the serene House of Beauty the
question that we ask is not what they had ever meant to do, but what they
have done. Their pathetic intentions are of no value to us, but their
realised creations only. Pour moi je prefere les poetes qui font des
vers, les medecins qui sachent guerir, les peintres qui sachent peindre.

Nor, in looking at a work of art, should we be dreaming of what it
symbolises, but rather loving it for what it is. Indeed, the
transcendental spirit is alien to the spirit of art. The metaphysical
mind of Asia may create for itself the monstrous and many-breasted idol,
but to the Greek, pure artist, that work is most instinct with spiritual
life which conforms most closely to the perfect facts of physical life
also. Nor, in its primary aspect, has a painting, for instance, any more
spiritual message or meaning for us than a blue tile from the wall of
Damascus, or a Hitzen vase. It is a beautifully coloured surface,
nothing more, and affects us by no suggestion stolen from philosophy, no
pathos pilfered from literature, no feeling filched from a poet, but by
its own incommunicable artistic essence--by that selection of truth which
we call style, and that relation of values which is the draughtsmanship
of painting, by the whole quality of the workmanship, the arabesque of
the design, the splendour of the colour, for these things are enough to
stir the most divine and remote of the chords which make music in our
soul, and colour, indeed, is of itself a mystical presence on things, and
tone a kind of sentiment.

This, then--the new departure of our younger school--is the chief