Works of Art, then, above all other productions of the mind, must have solidity and inwardness, that essential retiring grace which seems to shrink from the attention it wins, that style of power held in reserve which grows upon acquaintance, that suggestive beauty, “part seen, imagined part,” which does not permit the beholder to leave without a silent invitation to return.  And in proportion as the interest of such works depends on novelty, or stress of manner, or any strikingness of effect, as if they were ambitious to make themselves felt, and apprehensive of not being prized at their worth; in the same proportion their tenure of interest is naturally short, because they leave the real springs of thought untouched.

This, to be sure, holds more or less true of all the forms of mental production; but its truth is more evident and more self-approving in the sphere of Art than in the others.  Hence the common saying, that poetry, for instance, must be very good indeed, else it is good for nothing.  And men of culture and judgment in that line naturally feel, in general, that a work of art which is not worth seeing many times is not worth seeing at all; and if they are at first taken with such a work, they are apt to be ashamed of it afterwards, and to resent the transient pleasure they found in it, as a sort of fraud upon them.  In other words, Art aspires to interest permanently, and even to be more interesting the more it is seen; and when it does not proceed in the order of this “modest charm of not too much,” this remoteness of meaning where far more is inferred than is directly shown, there we may be sure the vital principle of the thing is wanting.

Allston, the distinguished painter-artist, is said to have had an intense aversion to all “eccentricity in Art.”  He might well do so; and, being a philosopher of Art as well as an artist, he had no difficulty in knowing that his aversion was founded in truth, and was fully justified by the reason of the thing.  For the prime law of Art, as is implied in what I have been saying, is to produce the utmost possible of silent effect; and to secure this end truth must be the all-in-all of the artist’s purpose,—­a purpose too inward and vital, perhaps, for the subject to be distinctly conscious of it; which is the right meaning of artistic inspiration.  But eccentricity in Art aims, first and last, at sensible effect; to appease an eager, prurient curiosity is its proper motive-spring; and it is radically touched with some disease, perhaps an itch of moral or intellectual or emotional demonstrativeness; and so it naturally issues in a certain plurisy of style, or some self-pleasing crotchet or specialty of expression,—­something which is striking and emphatic, and which is therefore essentially disproportionate and false.  In a word, there is a fatal root of insincerity in the thing.  For instance, if one were to paint a tree in the brilliancy of full-bloom, or a human face in the liveliest play of soul, I suppose the painting might be set down as a work of eccentricity; for, though such things are natural in themselves, they are but transient or evanescent moods of Nature; and a painting of them has not that calmness and purity of truth and art on which the mind can repose: