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146 larger wisdom. In the last there is a certain rashness which the first disdains —

Yet in this logic of the prudent and the worldly there is often a reasoning unanswerable of its kind.

You must have a feeling — a faith in whatever is self-sacrificing and divine — whether in religion or in art, in glory or in love — or Common-sense will reason you out of the sacrifice, and a syllogism will debase the Divine to an article in the market.

Every true critic in art, from Aristotle and Pliny — from Winkelman and Vasari to Reynolds and Fuseli, has sought to instruct the painter that Mature is not to be copied, but exalted; that the loftiest order of art, selecting only the loftiest combinations, is the perpetual struggle of Humanity to approach the Gods. The great painter, as the great author, embodies what is possible to man, it is true, but what is not common to mankind. There is truth in Hamlet; in Macbeth, and his witches; in Desdemona; in Othello; in Prospero, and in Caliban; there is truth in the cartoons of Rafaele; there is truth in the Apollo, the Antinoüs, and the Laocoön. But you do not meet the originals of the words, the cartoons, or the marble, in Oxford Street or St James's. All these, to return to Rafaele, are the creatures of the idea in the artist's mind. This idea is not inborn ; it has come from an intense study. But that study has been of the ideal, that can be raised from the positive and the actual into grandeur and beauty. The