at all, if our thought did not rush out to the
edges of our flesh, and it is so with all good art, whether the Victory
of Samothrace which reminds the soles of our feet of swiftness, or the
Odyssey that would send us out under the salt wind, or the young
horsemen on the Parthenon, that seem happier than our boyhood ever was,
and in our boyhood's way. Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see
the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every
abstract thing, from all that is of the brain only, from all that is not
a fountain jetting from the entire hopes, memories, and sensations of
the body. Its morality is personal, knows little of any general law, has
no blame for Little Musgrave, no care for Lord Barnard's house, seems
lighter than a breath and yet is hard and heavy, for if a man is not
ready to face toil and risk, and in all gaiety of heart, his body will
grow unshapely and his heart lack the wild will that stirs desire. It
approved before all men those that talked or wrestled or tilted under
the walls of Urbino, or sat in the wide window-seats discussing all
things, with love ever in their thought, when the wise Duchess ordered
all, and the Lady Emilia gave the theme.

RELIGIOUS BELIEF NECESSARY TO RELIGIOUS ART

All art is sensuous, but when a man puts only his contemplative nature
and his more vague desires into his art, the sensuous images through
which it speaks become broken, fleeting, uncertain, or are chosen for
their distance from general experience, and all grows unsubstantial and
fantastic. When imagination moves in a dim world like the country of
sleep in _Love's Nocturne_ and 'Siren there winds her dizzy hair and
sings,' we go to it for delight indeed but in our weariness. If we are
to sojourn there that world must grow consistent with itself, emotion
must be related to emotion by a system of ordered images, as in the
_Divine Comedy_. It must grow to be symbolic, that is, for the soul can
only achieve a distinct separated life where many related objects at
once distinguish and arouse its energies in their fulness. All
visionaries have entered into such a world in trances, and all ideal
art has trance for warranty. Shelley seemed to Matthew Arnold to beat
his ineffectual wings in the void, and I only made my pleasure in him
contented pleasure by massing in my imagination his recurring images of
towers and rivers, and caves with fountains in them, and that one star
of his, till