annot be
retraced to them. It is a fancy created by fact, as flame by fuel; no
more identical with it. The fancy is not on that account a delusion. It
is the vision of ideal truth: the recognition by an inner sense of that
which does not exist for the outer. That is why hearts choose each other
by help of the face, and why they choose so diversely. The eye of love,
which again is the eye of art, reads soul into the features, however
incomplete their expression of it may be. It reconstructs the ideal type
which nature has failed to carry out.

He illustrates this by means of three faces roughly sketched in the
sand. At first sight they are grotesque and unmeaning. Yet a few more
strokes of the broken pipe which is serving him as a pencil, will give
to two of these a predominating expression; convert the third into a
likeness of Elvire.

"These completing touches represent the artist's action upon life. By
this method Don Juan has been enabled on a former occasion, to complete
a work of high art. A block of marble had come into his possession, half
shaped by the hand of Michael Angelo.

"... One hand,--the Master's,--smoothed and scraped
That mass, he hammered on and hewed at, till he hurled
Life out of death, and left a challenge: for the world,
Death still,--...." (vol. xi. p. 260.)

Not death to him: for as he gazed on the rough-hewn block, a form
emerged upon his mental sight--a form which he interpreted as that of
the goddess Eidothee.[53] And as his soul received it from that of the
dead master, his hand carried it out."

Mr. Browning's whole theory of artistic perception is contained in the
foregoing lines; but he proceeds to enforce it in another way. "The life
thus evoked from death, the beauty from ugliness, is the gain of each
special soul--its permanent conquest over matter. The mode of effecting
this is the special secret of every soul; and this Don Juan defines as
its chemic secret, the law of its affinities, the law of its actions and
reactions. Where one, he says, lights force, another draws forth pity;
where one finds food for self-indulgence, another acquires strength for
self-sacrifice. One blows life's ashes into rose-coloured flame, another
into less heavenly hues. Love will have reached its height when the
secret of each soul has become the knowledge of all; and the
many-coloured rays of individual experience are fused in the white light
of universal truth."

Here