r is the physiognomy of
the being within, and even such is the appropriate
excellence of Shakespeare, himself a nature humanized, a
genial understanding, directing self-consciously a power and
an implicit wisdom deeper even than our consciousness.

There 'the absolute' has been affirmed in the sphere of art; and
thought begins to congeal. Coleridge has not only overstrained the
elasticity of his hypothesis, but has also obscured the true interest
of art. For, after all, the artist has become something almost
mechanical; instead of being the most luminous and self-possessed
phase of consciousness, the associative act itself looks like some
organic process of assimilation. The work of art is sometimes likened
to the living organism. That expresses the impression of a
self-delighting, independent life which a finished work of art gives
us; it does not express the process by which that work was produced.
Here there is no blind ferment of lifeless elements to realize a type.
By exquisite analysis the artist attains clearness of idea, then, by
many stages of refining, clearness of expression. He moves slowly over
his work, calculating the tenderest tone, and restraining the subtlest
curve, never letting his hand or fancy move at large, gradually
refining flaccid spaces to the higher degree of expressiveness.
Culture, at least, values even in transcendent works of art the power
of the understanding in them, their logical process of construction,
the spectacle of supreme intellectual dexterity which they afford.

Coleridge's criticism may well be remembered as part of the long
pleading of German culture for the things 'behind the veil'. It
recalls us from the work of art to the mind of the artist; and, after
all, this is what is infinitely precious, and the work of art only as
the index of it. Still, that is only the narrower side of a complete
criticism. Perhaps it is true, as some one says in Lessing's _Emilie
Galotti_, that, if Michael Angelo had been born without hands, he
would still have been the greatest of artists. But we must admit the
truth also of an opposite view: 'In morals as in art', says M. Renan,
'the word is nothing--the fact is everything. The idea which lurks
under a picture of Raphael is a slight matter; it is the picture
itself only that counts.'

What constitutes an artistic gift is, first of all, a natural
susceptibility to moments of strange excitement, in which the colours
fresh