that which they had of power to refine and make expressive the
outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the
reverie of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambition and
imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the
Borgias?' He would probably have answered that he had contemplated
none of these things, but had concerned himself simply with certain
arrangements of lines and masses, and with new and curious colour-
harmonies of blue and green. And it is for this very reason that
the criticism which I have quoted is criticism of the highest kind.
It treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new
creation. It does not confine itself--let us at least suppose so
for the moment--to discovering the real intention of the artist and
accepting that as final. And in this it is right, for the meaning
of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the soul of
him who looks at it, as it was in his soul who wrought it. Nay, it
is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad
meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and sets it in some new
relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion of our
lives, and a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of what, having
prayed for, we fear that we may receive. The longer I study,
Ernest, the more clearly I see that the beauty of the visible arts
is, as the beauty of music, impressive primarily, and that it may
be marred, and indeed often is so, by any excess of intellectual
intention on the part of the artist. For when the work is finished
it has, as it were, an independent life of its own, and may deliver
a message far other than that which was put into its lips to say.
Sometimes, when I listen to the overture to Tannhauser, I seem
indeed to see that comely knight treading delicately on the flower-
strewn grass, and to hear the voice of Venus calling to him from
the caverned hill. But at other times it speaks to me of a