He turned upon me almost angrily, but perceiving the genial savour of my
sarcasm, he smiled gravely. "Look at that picture," he said, "and cease
your irreverent mockery! Idealism is _that_! There's no explaining it;
one must feel the flame! It says nothing to Nature, or to any beautiful
girl, that they will not both forgive! It says to the fair woman,
'Accept me as your artist friend, lend me your beautiful face, trust me,
help me, and your eyes shall be half my masterpiece!' No one so loves
and respects the rich realities of nature as the artist whose imagination
caresses and flatters them. He knows what a fact may hold (whether
Raphael knew, you may judge by his portrait, behind us there, of Tommaso
Inghirami); bad his fancy hovers above it, as Anal hovered above the
sleeping prince. There is only one Raphael, bad an artist may still be
an artist. As I said last night, the days of illumination are gone;
visions are rare; we have to look long to see them. But in meditation we
may still cultivate the ideal; round it, smooth it, perfect it. The
result--the result," (here his voice faltered suddenly, and he fixed his
eyes for a moment on the picture; when they met my own again they were
full of tears)--"the result may be less than this; but still it may be
good, it may be _great_!" he cried with vehemence. "It may hang
somewhere, in after years, in goodly company, and keep the artist's
memory warm. Think of being known to mankind after some such fashion as
this! of hanging here through the slow centuries in the gaze of an
altered world; living on and on in the cunning of an eye and hand that
are part of the dust of ages, a delight and a law to remote generations;
making beauty a force and purity an example!"

"Heaven forbid," I said, smiling, "that I should take the wind out of
your sails! But doesn't it occur to you that, besides being strong in
his genius, Raphael was happy in a certain good faith of which we have
lost the trick? There are people, I know, who deny that his spotless