s without pleasure and never
known those thoughts that shape the lines of the body for beauty or
animation, and wake a desire for praise or for display.

There are two pictures of Venice side by side in the house where I am
writing this, a Canaletto that has little but careful drawing and a not
very emotional pleasure in clean bright air, and a Franz Francken, where
the blue water, that in the other stirs one so little, can make one long
to plunge into the green depth where a cloud shadow falls. Neither
painting could move us at all, if our thought did not rush out to the
edges of our flesh, and it is so with all good art, whether the Victory
of Samothrace which reminds the soles of our feet of swiftness, or the
Odyssey that would send us out under the salt wind, or the young
horsemen on the Parthenon, that seem happier than our boyhood ever was,
and in our boyhood's way. Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see
the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every
abstract thing, from all that is of the brain only, from all that is not
a fountain jetting from the entire hopes, memories, and sensations of
the body. Its morality is personal, knows little of any general law, has
no blame for Little Musgrave, no care for Lord Barnard's house, seems
lighter than a breath and yet is hard and heavy, for if a man is not
ready to face toil and risk, and in all gaiety of heart, his body will
grow unshapely and his heart lack the wild will that stirs desire. It
approved before all men those that talked or wrestled or tilted under
the walls of Urbino, or sat in the wide window seats discussing all
things, with love ever in their thought, when the wise Duchess ordered
all, and the Lady Emilia gave the theme.

RELIGIOUS BELIEF NECESSARY TO SYMBOLIC ART

All art is sensuous, but when a man puts only his contemplative nature,
and his more vague desires into his art, the sensuous images through
which it speaks become broken, fleeting, uncertain, or are chosen for
their distance from general experience, and all grows unsubstantial &
fantastic. When imagination moves in a dim world like the country of
sleep in Love's Nocturne and 'Siren there winds her dizzy hair and
sings' we go to it for delight indeed but in our weariness. If we are to
sojourn there that world must grow consistent with itself, emotion must
be related to emotion by a system of ordered images, as in the Divine
Comedy. It must grow to be