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 limitless to find within the limits of
form its complete expression, or of 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 realized
creations only. Pour moi je prefere les poetes qui font des vers,
les medecins qui sachent guerir, les peintres qui sanchent peindre.

Nor, in looking at a work of art, should we be dreaming of what it