152 BEAUTY, COMPOSITION, 



for years of training under this influence, should I have had the 

 eyes to see and the spirit to admire what was revealed to me ? 



Art satisfies the desire of man for fidelity of record, for 

 excellence of workmanship, and for permanence. It gratifies 

 our sense of ingenuity. It enables us to enjoy summer in 

 winter, poetry among prosaic circumstances, the country in 

 the town, woodland and river in the sick-room, open air and 

 joyousness in prisons or in what is often tantamount to 

 prison, in our daily life. All this it achieves by means of its 

 wonderful shadow- work of forms ; and it can do this, as 

 nature cannot, for generations which succeed each other like 

 the leaves of kindly seasons. It is even more poignant than 

 nature, by reason of the sympathy between the artist's mind 

 and ours. It satisfies the infantine and ever-present longing 

 for romance in human hearts the thirst to view things nobler 

 and less tiresome than we hourly find thern ; the yearning 

 for companionship with heroic souls ; the hunger to be bathed 

 in turbulent passions and be purified by their expansion ; the 

 aspiration to behold the world more clearly and with deeper 

 intuition ; the curiosity to be present at perilous adventures 

 and at the crisis of great destinies, if only in a vision. It 

 fills up, in one word, that void of our daily experience, which 

 is alluded to in the French saying : * Eien n'est si joli que la 

 fable, si triste que la ve"rite.' 



The world which art creates for us is like the Greek 

 Elysium. In it exist the unsubstantial shades. 



Of all that is most beauteous imaged there 



In happier beauty ; more pellucid streams, 



An ample ether, a diviner air, 



And fields invested with purpureal gleams ; 



Climes which the sun, who sheds the brightest day 



Earth knows, is all unworthy to survey. 



Human tragedies removed into this Elysian sphere lose their 

 brutality, and shock our sense no longer. Human joys are 

 divested of their crude excitement. The aesthetic emotion 

 does not stimulate pain or pleasure in the same degree as the 

 immediate emotions. Consequently, it does not lead to 

 action, whether of pursuit or of avoidance. The self within 

 us, powerfully played upon by images of suffering or delight, 



