of the great
life spirit, the gladness of being, the desire of the sexes; and also
those connected with the sadness and mystery of death and decay, &c.

The technical side of an art is, however, not concerned with these
deeper motives but with the things of sense through which they find
expression; in the case of painting, the visible universe.

The artist is capable of being stimulated to artistic expression by all
things seen, no matter what; to him nothing comes amiss. Great pictures
have been made of beautiful people in beautiful clothes and of squalid
people in ugly clothes, of beautiful architectural buildings and the
ugly hovels of the poor. And the same painter who painted the Alps
painted the Great Western Railway.

The visible world is to the artist, as it were, a wonderful garment, at
times revealing to him the Beyond, the Inner Truth there is in all
things. He has a consciousness of some correspondence with something the
other side of visible things and dimly felt through them, a "still,
small voice" which he is impelled to interpret to man. It is the
expression of this all-pervading inner significance that I think we
recognise as beauty, and that prompted Keats to say:

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty."

And hence it is that the love of truth and the love of beauty can exist
together in the work of the artist. The search for this inner truth is
the search for beauty. People whose vision does not penetrate beyond the
narrow limits of the commonplace, and to whom a cabbage is but a vulgar
vegetable, are surprised if they see a beautiful picture painted of one,
and say that the artist has idealised it, meaning that he has
consciously altered its appearance on some idealistic formula; whereas
he has probably only honestly given expression to a truer, deeper vision
than they had been aware of. The commonplace is not the true, but only
the shallow, view of things.

[Illustration: Plate II.

DRAWING BY LEONARDO DA VINCI FROM THE ROYAL COLLECTION AT WINDSOR

_Copyright photo, Braun & Co._]

Fromentin's

"Art is the expression of the invisible by means of the visible"

expresses the same idea, and it is this that gives to art its high place
among the works of man.

Beautiful things seem to put us in correspondence with a world the
harmonies of which are more perfect, and bring a deeper peace than this
imperfect life seems capable of yielding of itself. Our moments of peace
are, I think, alway