acter--delicate
provision in the organisation of the moral world for the transmission
to every part of it of the life quickened at single points! For this
nature there is no place ready in its affections. This colourless,
unclassified purity of life it can neither use for its service, nor
contemplate as an ideal.

"Sibi unitus et simplificatus esse," that is the long struggle of the
Imitatio Christi. The spirit which it forms is the very opposite of
that which regards life as a game of skill, and values things and
persons as marks or counters of something to be gained, or achieved,
beyond them. It seeks to value everything at its eternal worth, not
adding to it, or taking from it, the amount of influence it may have
for or against its own special scheme of life. It is the spirit that
sees external circumstances as they are, its own power and tendencies
as they are, and realises the given conditions of its life, not
disquieted by the desire for change, or the preference of one part in
life rather than another, or passion, or opinion. The character we
mean to indicate achieves this [249] perfect life by a happy gift of
nature, without any struggle at all. Not the saint only, the artist
also, and the speculative thinker, confused, jarred, disintegrated in
the world, as sometimes they inevitably are, aspire for this simplicity
to the last. The struggle of this aspiration with a lower practical
aim in the mind of Savonarola has been subtly traced by the author of
Romola. As language, expression, is the function of intellect, as art,
the supreme expression, is the highest product of intellect, so this
desire for simplicity is a kind of indirect self-assertion of the
intellectual part of such natures. Simplicity in purpose and act is a
kind of determinate expression in dexterous outline of one's
personality. It is a kind of moral expressiveness; there is an
intellectual triumph implied in it. Such a simplicity is
characteristic of the repose of perfect intellectual culture. The
artist and he who has treated life in the spirit of art desires only to
be shown to the world as he really is; as he comes nearer and nearer to
perfection, the veil of an outer life not simply expressive of the
inward becomes thinner and thinner. This intellectual throne is rarely
won. Like the religious life, it is a paradox in the world, denying
the first conditions of man's ordinary existence, cutting obliquely the
spontaneous order o