genius this sort of
painting. The fiery, swift Italian nature of the man, so silent,
passionate, with its quick abrupt movements, its silent "pale rages,"
speaks itself in these things.

For though this of painting is one of the outermost developments of a
man, it comes like all else from the essential faculty of him; it is
physiognomical of the whole man. Find a man whose words paint you a
likeness, you have found a man worth something; mark his manner of doing
it, as very characteristic of him. In the first place, he could not have
discerned the object at all, or seen the vital type of it, unless he
had, what we may call, _sympathized_ with it,--had sympathy in him to
bestow on objects. He must have been _sincere_ about it too; sincere
and sympathetic: a man without worth cannot give you the likeness of
any object; he dwells in vague outwardness, fallacy and trivial hearsay,
about all objects. And indeed may we not say that intellect altogether
expresses itself in this power of discerning what an object is?
Whatsoever of faculty a man's mind may have will come out here. Is it
even of business, a matter to be done? The gifted man is he who _sees_
the essential point, and leaves all the rest aside as surplusage: it is
his faculty too, the man of business's faculty, that he discern the true
_likeness_, not the false superficial one, of the thing he has got to
work in. And how much of _morality_ is in the kind of insight we get
of anything; "the eye seeing in all things what it brought with it the
faculty of seeing"! To the mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly
as to the jaundiced they are yellow. Raphael, the Painters tell us, is
the best of all Portrait-painters withal. No most gifted eye can exhaust
the significance of any object. In the commonest human face there lies
more than Raphael will take away with him.

Dante's painting is not graphic only, brief, true, and of a vividness as
of fire in dark night; taken on the wider scale, it is every way noble,
and the outcome of a great soul. Francesca and her Lover, what qualities
in that! A thing woven as out of rainbows, on a ground of eternal black.
A small flute-voice of infinite wail speaks there, into our very heart
of hearts. A touch of womanhood in it too: _della bella persona, che
mi fu tolta_; and how, even in the Pit of woe, it is a solace that _he_
will never part from her! Saddest tragedy in these _alti guai_. And
the racking winds, in that _aer bruno_