EXPRESSION, CHARACTERISATION 149 



ugliness may be raised to sublimity, and even the revolting 

 may obtain the power to fascinate. Instead of being realistic, 

 this is one of the most idealistic functions of art. The 

 dwarfs of Velasquez Titian's terrible old woman with the 

 scroll * Col Tempo ' cannot be claimed by realism. The 

 intensity of selective insight exhibited in these works places 

 them in the ideal category as surely as any Genius by Michel 

 Angelo upon the vaulting of the Sistine Chapel. Interpre- 

 tation of the object reaches its climax here. 



VI 



It will seem, I expect, to many of my readers that I have 

 been eleborately proving a truism in the foregoing pages, the 

 aim of my argument being to show that art cannot dispense 

 with an element of ideality or exist apart from the expression 

 of thought or feeling. Still it is always well, in matters so 

 intangible as aesthetic criticism, to start by claiming nothing 

 which does not admit of demonstration. The less we 

 postulate, the firmer will our ground be in the future. 



The final truth impressed upon my own mind by the 

 analysis attempted in these three essays is that everything 

 which man can do in imitation of nature falls short of the fact, 

 as fact. We cannot make the image of a tree, or a flower, or 

 a man, which shall yield us one-tenth part of the pleasure or 

 the wonder which the sight of the tree, the flower, the living 

 man yields. Who can reproduce by pigments the luminous 

 texture of a lily chalice or the sheeny velvet of a pelargonium 

 petal ? It is impossible to relate a story or to act a drama 

 which shall contain as much of poignant interest as what 

 happens daily to thousands of our fellow-creatures on this 

 planet. The whole hell of Dante is as nothing in sheer 

 intensity when tested by the night hours of a tortured con- 

 science ? and even Sappho's odes seem calm beside a lover's 

 actual palpitations. Therefore this function of man's intellect, 

 called art, and classified since Aristotle's epoch under the title 

 of Imitation, is, in comparison with the object imitated, ' as 

 moonlight unto sunlight, as water unto wine/ 



