arbaric art almost
succeeds, by dint of splendour, in banishing the sense of confusion and
absurdity; for everything, even reason, must bow to force. Yet the
impression remains chaotic, and we must be either partly inattentive or
partly distressed. Nothing could show better than this alternative how
mechanical barbaric art is. Driven by blind impulse or tradition, the
artist has worked in the dark. He has dismissed his work without having
quite understood it or really justified it to his own mind. It is rather
his excretion than his product. Astonished, very likely, at his own
fertility, he has thought himself divinely inspired, little knowing that
clear reason is the highest and truest of inspirations. Other men,
observing his obscure work, have then honoured him for profundity; and
so mere bulk or stress or complexity have produced a mystical wonder by
which generation after generation may be enthralled. Barbaric art is
half necromantic; its ascendancy rests in a certain measure on
bewilderment and fraud.

To purge away these impurities nothing is needed but quickened
intelligence, a keener spiritual flame. Where perception is adequate,
expression is so too, and if a man will only grow sensitive to the
various solicitations which anything monstrous combines, he will
thereby perceive its monstrosity. Let him but enact his sensations, let
him pause to make explicit the confused hints that threaten to stupefy
him; he will find that he can follow out each of them only by rejecting
and forgetting the others. To free his imagination in any direction he
must disengage it from the contrary intent, and so he must either purify
his object or leave it a mass of confused promptings. Promptings
essentially demand to be carried out, and when once an idea has become
articulate it is not enriched but destroyed if it is still identified
with its contrary. Any complete expression of a barbarous theme will,
therefore, disengage its incompatible elements and turn it into a number
of rational beauties.

[Sidenote: They differ, finally, in pertinence, and in width of appeal.]

When good taste has in this way purified and digested some turgid
medley, it still has a progress to make. Ideas, like men, live in
society. Not only has each a will of its own and an inherent ideal, but
each finds itself conditioned for its expression by a host of other
beings, on whose co-operation it depends. Good taste, besides being
inwardly clear, has to be