eeble serenity. But the great
new octagonal temple in the background,--an empty place it seemed--for
the open doors gave a glimpse of shadowy ranges--the shallow steps, the
stone volutes, the low hills behind, with the towered villa--even the
beggars begging of the richly dressed persons on the new-laid
pavement--all these had a sudden appeal for him.

The other picture was the "Communion of Jerome," by Domenichino--a
stiff, conventional design enough. The cherubs hanging in air might
have been made of wax or even metal--there was no aerial quality about
them--they cumbered the place! But the wistful look of the old worn
saint, kneeling so faintly, so wearily, the pure lines of the shrine,
the waxlights, the stiff robes of the priest, the open arch showing an
odd, clustered, castellated house, rising on its steep rocks among dark
brushwood, with a glimmering pool below, and mysterious persons drawing
near--it all had a tyrannical effect on Hugh's mind. Probably a
conventional critic would have spoken approvingly of the Raphael and
disdainfully enough of the Domenichino--but the point to Hugh was not
in the art revealed, but in the association, the remoteness, the
suggestiveness of the pictures. The faults of each were patent to him;
but something in that moment shone through; one looked through a
half-open door, and saw some beautiful mystery being celebrated within,
something that one could not explain or analyse, but which was none the
less certainly there.

Thus art became to Hugh, like nature, an echoing world that lay all
about him, which could suddenly become all alive with constraining
desire and joy. There was a scientific apprehension of both nature and
art possible, no doubt. The very science that lay behind art had a
suggestiveness of its own; that again had its own times for appeal.
But Hugh felt that here again he must realise his limitations, and that
life, to be real, must be a constant resisting of diffuse wanderings in
knowledge and perception. That his own medium was the medium of words,
and that his task was to discern their colour and weight, their
significance, whether alone or in combination; that he must be able to
upraise the jointed fabric of thought, like a framework of slim rods of
firm metal, not meant to be seen or even realised by the reader, but
which, when draped with the rich tapestry of words, would lend shape
and strong coherence to the whole. All other art must simply minist