by
the magic of his presence and the music of his lips taught us at Oxford
that enthusiasm for beauty which is the secret of Hellenism, and that
desire for creation which is the secret of life, and filled some of us,
at least, with the lofty and passionate ambition to go forth into far and
fair lands with some message for the nations and some mission for the
world, and yet in his art criticism, his estimate of the joyous element
of art, his whole method of approaching art, we are no longer with him;
for the keystone to his aesthetic system is ethical always. He would
judge of a picture by the amount of noble moral ideas it expresses; but
to us the channels by which all noble work in painting can touch, and
does touch, the soul are not those of truths of life or metaphysical
truths. To him perfection of workmanship seems but the symbol of pride,
and incompleteness of technical resource the image of an imagination too
limitless to find within the limits of form its complete expression, or
of a love too simple not to stammer in its tale. But to us the rule of
art is not the rule of morals. In an ethical system, indeed, of any
gentle mercy good intentions will, one is fain to fancy, have their
recognition; but of those that would enter the serene House of Beauty the
question that we ask is not what they had ever meant to do, but what they
have done. Their pathetic intentions are of no value to us, but their
realised creations only. Pour moi je prefere les poetes qui font des
vers, les medecins qui sachent guerir, les peintres qui sachent peindre.

Nor, in looking at a work of art, should we be dreaming of what it
symbolises, but rather loving it for what it is. Indeed, the
transcendental spirit is alien to the spirit of art. The metaphysical
mind of Asia may create for itself the monstrous and many-breasted idol,
but to the Greek, pure artist, that work is most instinct with spiritual
life which conforms most closely to the perfect facts of physical life
also. Nor, in its primary aspect, has a painting, for instance, any more
spiritual message or meaning for us than a blue tile from the wall of
Damascus, or a Hitzen vase. It is a beautifully coloured surface,
nothing more, and affects us by no suggestion stolen from philosophy, no
pathos pilfered from literature, no feeling filched from a poet, but by
its own incommunicable artistic essence--by that selection of truth which
we call style, and that relation of valu