EXPRESSION, CHARACTERISATION 151 



Great races have consigned their most earnest aspirations, 

 their strivings after a solution of ' the riddle of this painful 

 earth,' their inflexible codes of conduct, to the forms of art ; 

 and naught survives of them but sphinx-like figures carved 

 on rocks in wildernesses, or mystic shapes half buried in the 

 tangles of primeval forests. Yet from these dead stones the 

 spirit still speaks through art, still tells us by what faiths 

 those men who were our ancestors both lived and died. Nor 

 this alone, but whatsoever is capricious, fascinating, super- 

 ficially delightful, evanescently fragrant to the soul in reverie, 

 obeys the artist's touch. And the lyre of art is an instrument 

 of five chords. Architecture, sculpture, painting, poetry, 

 music, are the strings upon which the genius of art plays, 

 according to the diverse nature of the spiritual message which 

 human mind conveys to mind through sensuous impressions. 

 Only two of these are bound to imitation of the outer world ; 

 and they use imitation for the utterance of what is integral 

 with mind. 



It is the privilege of art to quicken feeling, and to lead our 

 soul through all the labyrinths of life as in a vision. Sculpture 

 and painting, in particular, teach us to see what is noteworthy 

 in the form of man and in the face of nature. Not many 

 weeks ago, I walked in the light of a mellow July sunset 

 along the Serpentine, watching the crowd of men and lads 

 who bathe there. I recognised how impossible it would be to 

 reproduce in its complexity of interest and beauty what I saw 

 before me the space, the atmosphere, the massive trees, the 

 luminosity of sky above, the sheeny, troubled surface of the 

 pond, and above all, the innumerable groups and changeful 

 attitudes of naked men in every posture. And yet, at the 

 same time, it was borne in upon my mind that only through 

 the service of art, through the labour of Greek sculptors and 

 the industry of modern painters, was I at the proper point for 

 discerning what this common scene contained of beauty and 

 of interest. No painting could place in right relation to the 

 whole and to the parts the multiplicity of marvels it offered 

 to my vision. No sculpture could fix and perpetuate the grace 

 inseparable from movement in those men and lads. But except 



