He tried again in the well-known passage from _The Ring and the Book_:

"So may you paint your picture, twice show truth,
Beyond mere imagery on the wall,--
So note by note bring music from your mind
Deeper than ever e'en Beethoven dived,--
So write a book shall mean beyond the facts,
Suffice the eye and save the soul beside."

How Whistler, the author of _Ten O'Clock_ and the creator of exquisitely
lovely things, must have loathed that final line! But Bosanquet's
carefully framed definition of the beautiful, in his _History of
Aesthetic_, endeavors, like Browning, to adjust the different claims of
form and significance: "The beautiful is that which has characteristic or
individual expressiveness for sense-perception or imagination, subject to
the conditions of general or abstract expressiveness in the same medium."
That is to say, in less philosophical language, that as long as you
observe the laws of formal beauty which belong to the medium in which you
are working, you may be as expressive or significant as you like. But the
artist must be obedient to the terms of his chosen medium of expression;
if he is composing music or poetry he must not break the general laws of
music or poetry in order to attempt that valiant enterprise of saving a
soul.


_4. The Man in the Work of Art_

Though there is much in this matter of content and form which is baffling
to the student of general aesthetic theory, there is at least one aspect
of the question which the student of poetry must grasp clearly. It is