that it presents to our eyes and
mind a certain form, a form which we define, from its resemblance to
other forms made out of flesh and bone, the face and body of a young
man; a form which, owing to certain constitutional peculiarities
and engrained habits of our mind, we also declare to a given extent
beautiful. This form, moreover, distinctly recalls to our mind real
forms which experience has taught us to associate with the idea of moral
purity, self-forgetfulness, piety; simply because we have noticed or
been told since our infancy that persons with such bodily aspects are
usually pure, self-forgetful and pious; because, without our knowing
it, thousands of painters have accustomed us by giving us such forms as
the portraits of saints to consider this physical type as distinctly
saintly. This perception, that the form into which the colours on
Perugino's canvas have been combined is such as we are accustomed to
think of in connection with saintliness, immediately awakens in our mind
a whole train of associations: we not merely see with our physical eyes
the combination of colours and lines constituting the form, but with
our mental eyes we rapidly and half unconsciously glance over all the
occupations, aspirations, habits of such a creature as we conceive this
form to belong to. We not merely see the delicate, thin, pale lips,
thrown back head and neck, and the wide-opened, dilated, greyish eyes;
we imagine in our mind the vague delights after which those lips are
thirsting as the half-closed pale flowers thirst for the rain-drops, the
ecstasy of fulfilled hope which makes the veins of the neck pulse and
the head fall back in weariness of inner quivering; the confused glory
of heaven after which those wide-opened eyes are straining; while our
bodily sight is resting on the mere coloured surface of Perugino's
picture, our mental sight is wandering across all the past and future of
this strange being whose bodily semblance the artist has suddenly thrust
upon us. All this is what we vaguely think of when we speak of a work
of art. Perhaps we can so little disentangle our impressions and our
fancies that their combination may thus be treated as a unity. But
this unity is a dualism: the mere colour arrangement constituting the
form which we see with our bodily eyes, and with our bodily eyes find
beautiful, is one half; and the whole moral apparition, conjured up by
association and imagination, is the other. And, as far as