nt with them. These
are not men caught up into the skies, and do not need to be sustained
there. The world they inhabit is not earth in heaven, but heaven on
earth,--the earth seen in accordance with the purpose of its existence.

Giotto's fellow-citizens were struck with the new interest which the
language of attitude and gesture and all the familiar details of life
acquired in his representation of them. Looking around them, they saw
what they had been taught to see, and concluded it was only an
unexampled closeness of copying. No doubt Giotto thought so, too,--but
had that been all, we should not have heard of it. It is this new
interest that has to be accounted for. The charm did not lie in the
fact, nor in the reproduction of it in the picture, but in a sudden
sense of its value as expression, resting on a still obscurer feeling
that herein lay its whole value,--that the actual _is_ not what it
seems, still less a pure delusion, but that it is pure _seeming_, so
that its phenomenal character is no reproach, but the bond that connects
it with reality. Just because it is only "the outward show," and does
not pretend to be anything more, what it shows is not "the things that
only seem," but the things that are. The attractiveness of beauty is due
to the sense of higher affinities in the object; it is finality felt,
but not comprehended, so that the form shines with the splendor of a
purpose that belongs not to it, but to the whole whereof it is a part.
Aristotle makes wonder the forerunner of science. So our admiration of
beauty is a tribute paid in advance to the fresh insight it promises.
Whether it be called miracle or inspiration, the artist must see his
theme as something excellent and singular. This is perhaps that
"strangeness" which Lord Bacon requires in all "excellent beauty," the
new significance coming direct, and not through reflection, and
therefore ineffable and incomparable. That Giotto and his successors
went on for two hundred years painting saints and miracles was not
because the Church so ordained, nor from any extraordinary devoutness of
the artists, but because they still needed an outward assurance that
what they did was not the petty triviality it seemed. There must always
remain the sense of an ulterior, undeveloped meaning; when that is laid
bare, Art has become superfluous, and makes haste to withdraw into
obscure regions. For it is only as language that the picture or the
statue avails anyt