matter, in their union or identity, present one
single effect to the "imaginative reason," that complex faculty for
which every thought and feeling is twin-born with its sensible analogue
or symbol.

It is the art of music which most completely realises this artistic
ideal, this perfect identification of form and matter. In its ideal,
consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form
from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere in and
completely saturate each other; and to it, therefore, to the condition
of its perfect moments, all the arts may be supposed constantly to tend
and aspire. Music, then, and not poetry, as is so often supposed, is the
true type or measure of perfected art. Therefore, although each art has
its incommunicable element, its untranslatable order of impressions, its
unique mode of reaching the "imaginative reason," yet the arts may be
represented as continually struggling after the law or principle of
music, to a condition which music alone completely realises; and one of
the chief functions of aesthetic criticism, dealing with the products of
art, new or old, is to estimate the degree in which each of those
products approaches, in this sense, to musical law.

By no school of painters have, the necessary limitations of the art of
painting been so unerringly though instinctively apprehended, and the
essence of what is pictorial in a picture so justly conceived, as by the
school of Venice; and the train of thought suggested in what has been
now said is, perhaps, a not unfitting introduction to a few pages about
Giorgione, who, though much has been taken by recent criticism from what
was reputed to be his work, yet, more entirely than any other painter,
sums up, in what we know of himself and his art, the spirit of the
Venetian school.

The beginnings of Venetian painting link themselves to the last, stiff,
half-barbaric splendours of Byzantine decoration, and are but the
introduction into the crust of marble and gold on the walls of the Duomo
of Murano, or of Saint Mark's, of a little more of human expression. And
throughout the course of its later development, always subordinate to
architectural effect, the work of the Venetian school never escaped from
the influence of its beginnings. Unassisted, and therefore unperplexed,
by naturalism, religious mysticism, philosophical theories, it had no
Giotto, no Angelico, no Botticelli. Exempt from the stress of though