t
unite to lead an artist to the foot of his shadowy, sun-crowned
mountain, can then carry him no step farther unless ideal Beauty join
him, and he comprehend her nature and follow to her height. Again we
quote from Charles Blanc--for why should we rewrite what he says so
ably?--"All the germs of beauty are in Nature, but it belongs to the
spirit of man alone to disengage them. When Nature is beautiful, the
painter _knows_ that she is beautiful, but Nature knows nothing of it.
Thus beauty exists only on the condition of being understood--that is to
say, of receiving a second life in the human thought. Art has something
else to do than to copy Nature exactly: it must penetrate into the
spirit of things, it must evoke the soul of its hero. It can then not
only rival Nature, but surpass her. What is indeed the superiority of
Nature? It is the life which animates all her forms. But man possesses a
treasure which Nature does not possess--thought. Now thought is more
than life, for it is life at its highest power, life in its glory. Man
can then contest with Nature by manifesting thought in the forms of art,
as Nature manifests life in her forms. In this sense the philosopher
Hegel was able to say that the creations of art were truer than the
phenomena of the physical world and the realities of history."

Now, thought in the soul of the true artist for ever labors to evolve
the beautiful. This is what the thought of a picture means to him--how
to express beauty, which he finds underlying even the imperfect
individual of Nature's decaying birth. To the high insight this is
always discernible. None are so fallen that some ray of God's light may
not touch them, and this possibility, the faith in light for ever,
radiates from the spirit of the artist, and renders him a messenger of
joy. No immortal works have bloomed in despondency: they may have taken
root in the slime of the earth, but they have blossomed into lilies.

We call this divine power to discern beauty in every manifestation of
the Deity, imagination. As it expresses itself in painting, it is so
closely allied with what is highest and holiest in our natures that
painting has come to be esteemed a Christian art, as contrasted in its
development subsequent to the Christian era with the less human works of
sculpture. "Christianity came, and instead of physical beauty
substituted moral beauty, infinitely preferring the expression of the
soul to the perfection of the body