st will still be instinctively spiritual.

Now I have used the word "spiritual" so often in connection with art
that you may reasonably ask for some definition of my meaning. I am
afraid it is easier to define spirituality in literature than in art.
But a literary definition may help. Spirituality is the power certain
minds have of apprehending formless spiritual essences, of seeing the
eternal in the transitory, of relating the particular to the universal,
the type to the archetype.

While I give this definition, I hope no artist will ever be insane
enough to make it the guiding principle of his art. I shudder to
think of any conscious attempt in a picture to relate the type to the
archetype. It is a philosophical definition, solely intended for the
spectator. I wish the artist only to paint his vision, and whether
he paints this, or another world he imagines, if it is art it will be
spiritual. I have given a definition of spirituality in literature, but
how now relate it to art? How illustrate its presence? When Pater wrote
his famous description of the Mona Lisa, that intense and enigmatic face
had evoked a spiritual mood. When he saw in it the summed-up experience
of many generations of humanity, he felt in the picture that relation
of the particular to the universal I have spoken of. When we find human
forms suggesting a superhuman dignity, as in Watts' figures of Time and
Death, or in the Phidian marbles, the type is there melting into the
archetype. When Millet paints a peasant figure of today with some
gesture we imagine the first Sower must have used, it is the eternal
in it which makes the transitory impressive. But these are obvious
instances, you will say, chosen from artists whose pictures lend
themselves to this kind of exposition. What about the art of the
landscape painter? Undeniably a form of art, where is the spirituality?

I am afraid my intellect is not equal to talking up every picture that
might be suggested and using it to illustrate my meaning, though I do
not think I would despair of finally discovering the spiritual element
in any picture I felt was art. However, I will go further. We have all
felt some element of art lacking in the painter who goes to Killarney,
Italy, or Switzerland, and brings us back a faithful representation of
undeniably beautiful places. It is all there--the lofty mountains, the
lakes, the local color; but what enchanted us in nature does not touch
us in the picture.