I always feel that the instinct for beauty is perhaps the surest indication of some essence of immortality in the soul; and indeed there are moments when it gives one the sense of pre-existence, the feeling that one has loved these fair things in a region that is further back even than the beginnings of consciousness.  Blake, indeed, in one of his wild half-inspired utterances, went even further, and announced that a man’s hopes of immortality depended not upon virtuous conduct but upon intellectual perception.  And it is hard to resist the belief, when one is brought into the presence of perfect beauty, in whatever form it may come, that the deep craving it arouses is meant to receive a satisfaction more deep and real than the act of mere contemplation can give.  I have felt in such moments as if I were on the verge of grasping some momentous secret, as if only the thinnest of veils hung between me and some knowledge that would set my whole life and being on a different plane.  But the moment passes, and the secret delays.  Yet we are right to regard such emotions as direct messages from God; because they bring with them no desire of possession, which is the sign of mortality, but rather the divine desire to be possessed by them; that the reality, whatever it be, of which beauty is the symbol, may enter in and enthral the soul.  It remains a mystery, like all the best things to which we draw near.  And the joy of all mysteries is the certainty which comes from their contemplation, that there are many doors yet for the soul to open on her upward and inward way; that we are at the threshold and not near the goal; and then, like the glow of sunset, rises the hope that the grave, far from being the gate of death, may be indeed the gate of life.

VII

ART

I often wish that we had a more beautiful word than “art” for so beautiful a thing; it is in itself a snappish explosive word, like the cry of an angry animal; and it has, too, to bear the sad burden of its own misuse by affected people.  Moreover, it stands for so many things, that one is never quite sure what the people who use it intend it to mean; some people use it in an abstract, some in a concrete sense; and it is unfortunate, too, in bearing, in certain usages, a nuance of unreality and scheming.

What I mean by art, in its deepest and truest sense, is a certain perceptiveness, a power of seeing what is characteristic, coupled as a rule, in the artistic temperament, with a certain power of expression, an imaginative gift which can raise a large fabric out of slender resources, building a palace, like the Genie in the story of Aladdin, in a single night.