140 BEAUTY, COMPOSITION, 



Yet the world of fact has not revealed to mortal sense such 

 beauty as this picture does ; for form, landscape, colour, the 

 play of light and shadow, have here been brought into con- 

 cordance with a leading tone of intellectual emotion, a per- 

 ception of divine melody existing in the painter's brain. This 

 dominant subjective sense of beauty does not violate the truth 

 of nature ; but it is not to be satisfied at any single moment 

 by external nature ; and it is the prerogative of the human 

 spirit to evoke such dreamland as shall correspond to its deep 

 longing. 



We must advance a step farther, and admit that the mind, 

 reflecting upon nature, and generalising the various sugges- 

 tions of beauty which it has received from nature, becomes 

 aware of an infinity which it can only grasp through thought 

 and feeling, which shall never be fully revealed upon this 

 earth, but which poetry and art bring nearer to our sensuous 

 perceptions. Shelley, personifying this ideal vision, and 

 addressing it as a goddess in his ' Hymn to Intellectual 

 Beauty,' exclaims : 



Man were immortal and omnipotent, 

 Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art, 

 Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart. 



Wordsworth, in calmer and more humble language, hits the 

 mark when speaking of ' the gleam, the light that never was 

 on sea or land.' Plato thought of this when he explained 

 how the mind ascends from the contemplation of beautiful 

 objects to the vision of beauty in its essence ; and when he 

 suggested, under the form of an allegory, that the soul of man 

 carries with it some remembrance of the archetypal loveliness 

 beheld in previous stages of existence. It is the function of 

 all true art to shed this gleam, this light, upon the things 

 which have been conscientiously and lovingly observed in 

 nature. It is the function of art to give the world a glimpse 

 and foretaste of that universal beauty by selecting from 

 natural objects their choicest qualities, and combining these 

 in a harmony beyond the sphere of actual material things. 

 Of this divine and transcendental loveliness Marlowe pro- 



