: it is a beautifully coloured
surface, nothing more. The channels by which all noble imaginative work
in painting should touch, and do touch the soul, are not those of the
truths of life, nor metaphysical truths. But that pictorial charm which
does not depend on any literary reminiscence for its effect on the one
hand, nor is yet a mere result of communicable technical skill on the
other, comes of a certain inventive and creative handling of colour.
Nearly always in Dutch painting and often in the works of Giorgione or
Titian, it is entirely independent of anything definitely poetical in the
subject, a kind of form and choice in workmanship which is itself
entirely satisfying, and is (as the Greeks would say) an end in itself.

And so in poetry too, the real poetical quality, the joy of poetry, comes
never from the subject but from an inventive handling of rhythmical
language, from what Keats called the 'sensuous life of verse.' The
element of song in the singing accompanied by the profound joy of motion,
is so sweet that, while the incomplete lives of ordinary men bring no
healing power with them, the thorn-crown of the poet will blossom into
roses for our pleasure; for our delight his despair will gild its own
thorns, and his pain, like Adonis, be beautiful in its agony; and when
the poet's heart breaks it will break in music.

And health in art--what is that? It has nothing to do with a sane
criticism of life. There is more health in Baudelaire than there is in
[Kingsley]. Health is the artist's recognition of the limitations of the
form in which he works. It is the honour and the homage which he gives
to the material he uses--whether it be language with its glories, or
marble or pigment with their glories--knowing that the true brotherhood
of the arts consists not in their borrowing one another's method, but in
their producing, each of them by its own individual means, each of them
by keeping its objective limits, the same unique artistic delight. The
delight is like that given to us by music--for music is the art in which
form and matter are always one, the art whose subject cannot be separated
from the method of its expression, the art which most completely realises
the artistic ideal, and is the condition to which all the other arts are
constantly aspiring.

And criticism--what place is that to have in our culture? Well, I think
that the first duty of an art critic is to hold his tongue at all times,