olden
ground. The painter is here smothered in the recorder, in the annalist;
only those perceptions are allowed to stand which have individual names
or chronicle facts mentioned in the story. But vision is really more
sensuous and rich than report, if art is only able to hold vision in
suspense and make it explicit. When painting is still at this stage, and
is employed on hieroglyphics, it may reach the maximum of decorative
splendour. Whatever sensuous glow finer representations may later
acquire will be not sensuous merely, but poetical; Titians, Murillos,
or Turners are _colourists in representation_, and their canvases would
not be particularly warm or luminous if they represented nothing human
or mystical or atmospheric. A stained-glass window or a wall of tiles
can outdo them for pure colour and decorative magic. Leaving decoration,
accordingly, to take care of itself and be applied as sense may from
time to time require, painting goes on to elaborate the symbols with
which it begins, to make them symbolise more and more of what their
object contains. A catalogue of persons will fall into a group, a group
will be fused into a dramatic action. Conventional as the separate
figures may still be, their attitudes and relations will reconstitute
the dramatic impression. The event will be rendered in its own language;
it will not, to be recognised, have to appeal to words. Thus a symbolic
crucifixion is a crucifixion only because we know by report that it is;
a plastic crucifixion would first teach us, on the contrary, what a real
crucifixion might be. It only remains to supply the aerial medium and
make dramatic truth sensuous truth also.

[Sidenote: Sensuous and dramatic adequacy approached.]

To work up a sensation intellectually and reawaken all its passionate
associations is to reach a new and more exciting sensation which we call
emotion or thought. As in poetry there are two stages, one pregnant and
prior to prose and another posterior and synthetic, so in painting we
have not only a reversion to sense but an ulterior synthesis of the
sensuous, its interpretation in a dramatic or poetic vision. Archaic
painting, with its abstract rendering of separate things, is the prose
of design. It would not be beautiful at all but for its colour and
technical feeling--that expression of candour and satisfaction which may
pervade it, as it might a Latin rhyme. To correct this thinness and
dislocation, to restore life without