hing, and this circumstantiality of expression is
tolerable only so long as it is the only expression. Beauty is an honor
to matter; but spirit, the source of beauty, is impatient of such
measure of it as Art can give. As, in the legend, Eurydice, the dawn,
sinks back into night at the look of the arisen sun, so this lovely
flush of the dawning intelligence wanes before the eye of the intellect.
The picture is a help so long as it transcends previous conception; but
when the mind comes up with these sallies, and the picture is compared
with the idea, it sinks back into a thing. Thenceforth it takes rank
with Nature, and falls victim to the natural laws. It is only an aspect
and an instant,--not eternal, but a petty persistence,--not God, but an
idol,--not the saint, but his flesh and integuments.

Shall we say, then, that beauty is an illusion? Certainly it is no
falsity; we may call it provisional truth,--truth at a certain stage, as
appearance, not yet as idea. It is _appearance_ seen as final, as the
highest the mind has reached. Hence its miraculousness. It is in advance
of consciousness; we cannot account for it any more than the savage
could account for his fetich,--why this bunch of rags and feathers
should be more venerable to him than other rags and feathers. But to
deny that the impressiveness it adds to matter comes from a deeper sense
of the truth would be as unwise as for him to deny his fetich. The
fetich is false, not as compared with other rags and feathers, but as
compared with a higher conception of God. The falsity is not that he
sees God in this rubbish, but that he does not see Him elsewhere.
Coleridge said that a picture is something between a thought and a
thing. It must keep the mean; either extreme is fatal. Plato makes Eros
intermediate between wisdom and ignorance, born of unequal parentage,
neither mortal nor immortal, forever needy, forever seeking the Psyche
whom he can never meet face to face.

The history of Art has a certain analogy to the growth of the corals.
Like them, it seeks the light which it cannot endure. A certain depth
beneath the surface is most favorable to it,--a dim, midway region of
twilight and calm, remote alike from the stagnant obscurity of mere
sensation and from the agitated surface of day, the dry light of the
intellect. When it is laid bare, it dies,--its substance, indeed,
enduring as the basis of new continents, but the life gone, and only the
traces of its act