has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which mediaeval magicians
made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over
daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours
and forms, a part of the Divine Essence. A person or a landscape that is a
part of a story or a portrait, evokes but so much emotion as the story or
the portrait can permit without loosening the bonds that make it a story
or a portrait; but if you liberate a person or a landscape from the bonds
of motives and their actions, causes and their effects, and from all bonds
but the bonds of your love, it will change under your eyes, and become a
symbol of an infinite emotion, a perfected emotion, a part of the Divine
Essence; for we love nothing but the perfect, and our dreams make all
things perfect, that we may love them. Religious and visionary people,
monks and nuns, and medicine-men, and opium-eaters, see symbols in their
trances; for religious and visionary thought is thought about perfection
and the way to perfection; and symbols are the only things free enough
from all bonds to speak of perfection.

Wagner's dramas, Keats' odes, Blake's pictures and poems, Calvert's
pictures, Rossetti's pictures, Villiers De l'Isle Adam's plays, and the
black-and-white art of Mr. Beardsley and Mr. Ricketts, and the lithographs
of Mr. Shannon, and the pictures of Mr. Whistler, and the plays of M.
Maeterlinck, and the poetry of Verlaine, in our own day, but differ from
the religious art of Giotto and his disciples in having accepted all
symbolisms, the symbolism of the ancient shepherds and star-gazers, that
symbolism of bodily beauty which seemed a wicked thing to Fra Angelico,
the symbolism in day and night, and winter and summer, spring and autumn,
once so great a part of an older religion than Christianity; and in having
accepted all the Divine Intellect, its anger and its pity, its waking and
its sleep, its love and its lust, for the substance of their art. A Keats
or a Calvert is as much a symbolist as a Blake or a Wagner; but he is a
fragmentary symbolist, for while he evokes in his persons and his
landscapes an infinite emotion, a perfected emotion, a part of the Divine
Essence, he does not set his symbols in the great procession as Blake
would have him, 'in a certain order, suited' to his 'imaginative energy.'
If you paint a beautiful woman and fill her face, as Rossetti filled so
many faces, with an infinite love, a