e only, whom the sequence of
time affects, and who possess not merely the present but the future, and
can rise or fall from a past of glory or of shame. Movement, that
problem of the visible arts, can be truly realised by Literature alone.
It is Literature that shows us the body in its swiftness and the soul in
its unrest.--_The Critic as Artist_.

THE CRITIC AND HIS MATERIAL

Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin's views on Turner are sound or not? What
does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so
fiery-coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate symphonic
music, so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of word and
epithet, is at least as great a work of art as any of those wonderful
sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in England's
Gallery; greater indeed, one is apt to think at times, not merely because
its equal beauty is more enduring, but on account of the fuller variety
of its appeal, soul speaking to soul in those long-cadenced lines, not
through form and colour alone, though through these, indeed, completely
and without loss, but with intellectual and emotional utterance, with
lofty passion and with loftier thought, with imaginative insight, and
with poetic aim; greater, I always think, even as Literature is the
greater art. Who, again, cares whether Mr. Pater has put into the
portrait of Monna Lisa something that Lionardo never dreamed of? The
painter may have been merely the slave of an archaic smile, as some have
fancied, but whenever I pass into the cool galleries of the Palace of the
Louvre, and stand before that strange figure 'set in its marble chair in
that cirque of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea,' I
murmur to myself, 'She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like
the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the
grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day
about her: and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and,
as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as St. Anne, the mother of
Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes,
and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing
lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.' And I say to my
friend, 'The presence that thus so strangely rose beside the waters is
expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years man had come to
desire'; and