EXPRESSION, CHARACTERISATION 141 



phesied in the sublime incoherence of a well-known passage 

 of his Tamburlaine. ' What is beauty, then ? ' the hero asks : 



If all the pens that ever poets held, 

 Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts, 

 And every sweetness that inspired their hearts, 

 Their minds, and muses on admired themes 

 If all the heavenly quintessence they still 

 From their immortal flowers of poesy, 

 Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive 

 The highest reaches of a human wit 

 If these had made one poem's period, 

 And all combined in beauty's worthiness, 

 Yet should there hover in their restless heads 

 One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, 

 Which into words no virtue can digest. 



There is no denying the reality for us of this ideal. That 

 elusive loveliness which * hovers in the restless heads ' of 

 poets, may not be something tangible, demonstrable, in 

 nature. But it remains a substantial fact for the subjective 

 sentient being. The thirst to seize and capture it, which 

 lures the artist on, ' for ever following and for ever foiled,' is 

 no mere morbid or capricious longing. Given at the same 

 time exactitude of observation, and fidelity to nature, this 

 element, in so far as it has been communicated to his work, 

 constitutes its highest value. 



Ill 



Beauty is so essential a condition of the arts that when we 

 come to treat of composition or design, this has to be con- 

 sidered as a constituent of intellectual beauty, Here, how- 

 ever, we are dealing with something more scientific, something 

 more strictly calculated, something less determined by emotion t 

 Composition implies balance, proportion, symmetry, the 

 subordination of each part to the whole. In figurative art it 

 is a synthesis of lines and masses resulting in a total unity ; 

 but inasmuch as these arts represent nature which is living, the 

 more such synthesis approaches the symmetry of living organ- 

 ism, not that of a geometrical diagram, the better it will be. 



