centricity
in Art aims, first and last, at _sensible_ effect; to appease an
eager, prurient curiosity is its proper motive-spring; and it is
radically touched with some disease, perhaps an itch of moral or
intellectual or emotional demonstrativeness; and so it naturally
issues in a certain _plurisy_ of style, or some self-pleasing crotchet
or specialty of expression,--something which is striking and emphatic,
and which is therefore essentially disproportionate and false. In a
word, there is a fatal root of insincerity in the thing. For instance,
if one were to paint a tree in the brilliancy of full-bloom, or a
human face in the liveliest play of soul, I suppose the painting might
be set down as a work of eccentricity; for, though such things are
natural in themselves, they are but transient or evanescent moods of
Nature; and a painting of them has not that calmness and purity of
truth and art on which the mind can repose:

"Soft is the music that would charm for ever."

Moreover a work of art, as such, is not a thing to be learnt or
acquired, as formal knowledge is acquired: it is rather a presence for
the mind to commune with, and drink in the efficacy of, with an "eye
made quiet by the power of Beauty." Nor is such communion by any means
unfruitful of mental good: on the contrary, it is the right force and
food of the soundest and healthiest inward growth; and to be silent
and secret is the character of every process that is truly vital and
creative. It is on this principle that Nature, when conversed with in
the spirit of her works, acts "as a teacher of truth through joy and
through gladness, and as a creatress of the faculties by a process of
smoothness and delight"; and we gather in the richer intellectual
harvest from such converse when the mind is too intent on Nature's
forms to take any thought of its gatherings. We cannot truly live with
her without being built up in the best virtues of her life. It is a
mighty poor way of growing wise, when one loves to see

"Each little drop of wisdom as it falls
Into the dimpling cistern of his heart."

And so the conversing rightly with works of art may not indeed be very
available for showing off in recitation: it is all the better for
that, inasmuch as its best effect must needs be too deep for the
intellectual consciousness to grasp: because the right virtue of Art
lies in a certain self-withdrawing power which catches the mind as
from a distance, and c