tragedy of its own sorrows, the East has always kept true to art's
primary and pictorial conditions.

In judging of a beautiful statue the aesthetic faculty is
absolutely and completely gratified by the splendid curves of those
marble lips that are dumb to our complaint, the noble modelling of
those limbs that are powerless to help us. In its primary aspect a
painting has no more spiritual message or meaning than an exquisite
fragment of Venetian glass or a blue tile from the wall of
Damascus: it is a beautifully coloured surface, nothing more. The
channels by which all noble imaginative work in painting should
touch, and do touch the soul, are not those of the truths of life,
nor metaphysical truths. But that pictorial charm which does not
depend on any literary reminiscence for its effect on the one hand,
nor is yet a mere result of communicable technical skill on the
other, comes of a certain inventive and creative handling of
colour. Nearly always in Dutch painting and often in the works of
Giorgione or Titian, it is entirely independent of anything
definitely poetical in the subject, a kind of form and choice in
workmanship which is itself entirely satisfying, and is (as the
Greeks would say) an end in itself.

And so in poetry too, the real poetical quality, the joy of poetry,
comes never from the subject but from an inventive handling of
rhythmical language, from what Keats called the 'sensuous life of
verse.' The element of song in the singing accompanied by the
profound joy of motion, is so sweet that, while the incomplete
lives of ordinary men bring no healing power with them, the thorn-
crown of the poet will blossom into roses for our pleasure; for our
delight his despair will gild its own thorns, and his pain, like