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 . . . all these poems aim, as I said, at producing a
purely artistic effect, and have the rare and exquisite quality
that belongs to work of that kind; and I feel that the entire
subordination in our aesthetic movement of all merely emotional and
intellectual motives to the vital informing poetic principle is the
surest sign of our strength.

But it is not enough that a work of art should conform to the
aesthetic demands of the age: there should be also about it, if it
is to give us any permanent delight, the impress of a distinct
individuality. Whatever work we have in the nineteenth century
must rest on the two poles of personality and perfection. And so