he answers me, 'Hers is the head upon which all "the ends of
the world are come," and the eyelids are a little weary.'

And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and
reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing, and the
music of the mystical prose is as sweet in our ears as was that flute-
player's music that lent to the lips of La Gioconda those subtle and
poisonous curves. Do you ask me what Lionardo would have said had any
one told him of this picture that 'all the thoughts and experience of the
world had etched and moulded therein that which they had of power to
refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the
lust of Rome, the reverie of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambition
and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the
Borgias?' He would probably have answered that he had contemplated none
of these things, but had concerned himself simply with certain
arrangements of lines and masses, and with new and curious
colour-harmonies of blue and green. And it is for this very reason that
the criticism which I have quoted is criticism of the highest kind. It
treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new creation. It
does not confine itself--let us at least suppose so for the moment--to
discovering the real intention of the artist and accepting that as final.
And in this it is right, for the meaning of any beautiful created thing
is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in
his soul who wrought it. Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends to the
beautiful thing its myriad meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and
sets it in some new relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital
portion of our lives, and a symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of
what, having prayed for, we fear that we may receive.--_The Critic as
Artist_.

DANTE THE LIVING GUIDE

There is no mood or passion that Art cannot give us, and those of us who
have discovered her secret can settle beforehand what our experiences are
going to be. We can choose our day and select our hour. We can say to
ourselves, 'To-morrow, at dawn, we shall walk with grave Virgil through
the valley of the shadow of death,' and lo! the dawn finds us in the
obscure wood, and the Mantuan stands by our side. We pass through the
gate of the legend fatal to hope, and with pity or with joy behold the
horror of another world. The