r friend,
Paul the Hebrew, who, by the bye, had as fine theories of art as he
had of society, if he had only lived fifteen hundred years later,
and had a chance of working them out.'

'How remarkably orthodox you are!' said Lancelot, smiling.

'How do you know that I am not? You never heard me deny the old
creed. But what if an artist ought to be of all creeds at once? My
business is to represent the beautiful, and therefore to accept it
wherever I find it. Yours is to be a philosopher, and find the
true.'

'But the beautiful must be truly beautiful to be worth anything; and
so you, too, must search for the true.'

'Yes; truth of form, colour, chiaroscuro. They are worthy to occupy
me a life; for they are eternal--or at least that which they
express: and if I am to get at the symbolised unseen, it must be
through the beauty of the symbolising phenomenon. If I, who live by
art, for art, in art, or you either, who seem as much a born artist
as myself, am to have a religion, it must be a worship of the
fountain of art--of the

"Spirit of beauty, who doth consecrate
With his own hues whate'er he shines upon."'

'As poor Shelley has it; and much peace of mind it gave him!'
answered Lancelot. 'I have grown sick lately of such dreary tinsel
abstractions. When you look through the glitter of the words, your
"spirit of beauty" simply means certain shapes and colours which
please you in beautiful things and in beautiful people.'

'Vile nominalist! renegade from the ideal and all its glories!' said
Claude, laughing.

'I don't care sixpence now for the ideal! I want not beauty, but
some beautiful thing--a woman perhaps,' and he sighed. 'But at
least a person--a living, loving person--all lovely itself, and
giving loveliness to all things! If I must have an ideal, let it
be, for mercy's sake, a realised one.'

Claude opened his sketch-book.

'We shall get swamped in these metaphysical oceans, my dear dreamer.
But lo, here come a couple, as near ideals as any in these
degenerate days--the two poles of beauty: the milieu of which would
be Venus with us Pagans, or the Virgin Mary with the Catholics.
Look at them! Honoria the dark--symbolic of passionate depth;
Argemone the fair, type of intellectual light! Oh, that I were a
Zeuxis to unite them instead of having to paint them in two separate
pictures, and split perfection in half, as everything is split in
this piecemea