rings to his aid is a matter for
his own soul. He may bring judgment like Michael Angelo or peace like
Angelico; he may come with mourning like the great Athenian or with mirth
like the singer of Sicily; nor is it for us to do aught but accept his
teaching, knowing that we cannot smite the bitter lips of Leopardi into
laughter or burden with our discontent Goethe's serene calm. But for
warrant of its truth such message must have the flame of eloquence in the
lips that speak it, splendour and glory in the vision that is its
witness, being justified by one thing only--the flawless beauty and
perfect form of its expression: this indeed being the social idea, being
the meaning of joy in art.

Not laughter where none should laugh, nor the calling of peace where
there is no peace; not in painting the subject ever, but the pictorial
charm only, the wonder of its colour, the satisfying beauty of its
design.

You have most of you seen, probably, that great masterpiece of Rubens
which hangs in the gallery of Brussels, that swift and wonderful pageant
of horse and rider arrested in its most exquisite and fiery moment when
the winds are caught in crimson banner and the air lit by the gleam of
armour and the flash of plume. Well, that is joy in art, though that
golden hillside be trodden by the wounded feet of Christ and it is for
the death of the Son of Man that that gorgeous cavalcade is passing.

But this restless modern intellectual spirit of ours is not receptive
enough of the sensuous element of art; and so the real influence of the
arts is hidden from many of us: only a few, escaping from the tyranny of
the soul, have learned the secret of those high hours when thought is
not.

And this indeed is the reason of the influence which Eastern art is
having on us in Europe, and of the fascination of all Japanese work.
While the Western world has been laying on art the intolerable burden of
its own intellectual doubts and the spiritual tragedy of its own sorrows,
the East has always kept true to art's primary and pictorial conditions.

In judging of a beautiful statue the aesthetic faculty is absolutely and
completely gratified by the splendid curves of those marble lips that are
dumb to our complaint, the noble modelling of those limbs that are
powerless to help us. In its primary aspect a painting has no more
spiritual message or meaning than an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass
or a blue tile from the wall of Damascus