gueness of past
times, all the chimeras that haunt the edge of trance; and if we are
painters, we shall express personal emotion through ideal form, a
symbolism handled by the generations, a mask from whose eyes the
disembodied looks, a style that remembers many masters, that it may
escape contemporary suggestion; or we shall leave out some element of
reality as in Byzantine painting, where there is no mass, nothing in
relief, and so it is that in the supreme moment of tragic art there
comes upon one that strange sensation as though the hair of one's head
stood up. And when we love, if it be in the excitement of youth, do we
not also, that the flood may find no stone to convulse, no wall to
narrow it, exclude character or the signs of it by choosing that beauty
which seems unearthly because the individual woman is lost amid the
labyrinth of its lines as though life were trembling into stillness and
silence, or at last folding itself away? Some little irrelevance of
line, some promise of character to come, may indeed put us at our ease,
'give more interest' as the humour of the old man with the basket does
to Cleopatra's dying; but should it come as we had dreamed in love's
frenzy to our dying for that woman's sake, we would find that the
discord had its value from the tune.

Nor have we chosen illusion in choosing the outward sign of that moral
genius that lives among the subtlety of the passions, and can for her
moment make her of the one mind with great artists and poets. In the
studio we may indeed say to one another 'character is the only beauty,'
but when we choose a wife, as when we go to the gymnasium to be shaped
for woman's eyes, we remember academic form, even though we enlarge a
little the point of interest and choose "a painter's beauty," finding it
the more easy to believe in the fire because it has made ashes.

When we look at the faces of the old tragic paintings, whether it is in
Titian or in some painter of medieval China, we find there sadness and
gravity, a certain emptiness even, as of a mind that waited the supreme
crisis (and indeed it seems at times as if the graphic art, unlike
poetry which sings the crisis itself, were the celebration of waiting).
Whereas in modern art, whether in Japan or Europe, 'vitality' (is not
that the great word of the studios?), the energy, that is to say, which
is under the command of our common moments, sings, laughs, chatters or
looks its busy thoughts.

Certainly