he situation as the
painter felt it, is there expressed upon his canvas in terms of visible
aspect; and correspondingly, Millet's meaning is fully and truly
received in the measure that we feel in ourselves the emotion roused
by the sight of his color and form.

The essential content of a work of art, therefore, is modified in its
effect upon us by the kind of medium in which it is presented. If an
idea phrased originally in one medium is translated into the terms of
another, we have _illustration._ Turning the pages of an "illustrated"
novel, we come upon a plate showing a man and a woman against
the background of a divan, a chair, and a tea-table. The man, in a
frock coat, holding a top hat in his left hand, extends his right hand
to the woman, who has just risen from the table. The legend under
the picture reads, "Taking his hat, he said good-by." Here the
illustrator has simply supplied a visible image of what was
suggested in the text; the drawing has no interest beyond helping the
reader to that image. It is a statement of the bare fact in other terms.
In the hands of an artist, however, the translation may take on a
value of its own, changing the original idea, adding to it, and
becoming in itself an independent work of art. This value derives
from the form into which the idea is translated. The frescoes of the
Sistine Chapel are only sublime illustration; but how little of their
power attaches to the subject they illustrate, and how much of their
sublimity lies in the painter's rendering! Conversely, an example of
the literary interpretation of a picture is Walter Pater's description of
Leonardo's Mona Lisa.

The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is
expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to
desire. Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of the world are
come," and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out
from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange
thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a
moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful
women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty,
into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts
and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that
which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward
form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the
midd