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If he proceeds only from a given form, which is supposed to answer to the notion of beauty, what an emptiness, what an unreality there always is in his pro- ductions, as in Cipriani's pictures! Believe me, you must master the essence, the natura natiirans, which presupposes a bond between nature in the higher sense and the soul of man. Now so to place these images, totalized, and fitted to the limits of the human mind, as to elicit from, and to superinduce upon, the forms themselves the moral reflexions to which they approximate, to make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature, — this is the mystery of genius in the Fine Arts. Dare I add that the genius must act on the feeling, that body is but a striving to become mind, that it is mind in its essence! And this is the true exposition of the rule that the artist must first eloign himself from nature in order to return to her with full effect. Because if he were to begin by mere painful copying, he would produce masks only, not forms breathing life.
He must out of his own mind create forms according to the severe laws of the intellect, in order to generate in himself that co-ordination of freedom and law, that in- volution of obedience in the prescript, and of the prescript in the impulse to obey, which assimilates him to nature, and enables him to understand her. He merely absents him- self for a season from her, that his own spirit, which has the same ground with nature, may learn her unspoken language in its main radicals, before he approaches to her endless compositions of them. Yes, not to acquire cold notions — lifeless technical rules — but living and life- producing ideas, which shall contain their own evidence, the certainty that they are essentially one with the germinal causes in nature — his consciousness being the focus and mirror of both, — for this does the artist for a time abandon 3i6 Course of Lectures the external real in order to return to it with a complete sympathy with its internal and actual. The idea which puts the form together cannot itself be the form. It is above form, and is its essence, the universal in the individual, or the individuality itself, — the glance and the exponent of the indwelling power. Each thing that lives has its moment of self-exposition, and so has each period of each thing, if we remove the dis- turbing forces of accident.

To do this is the business of ideal art, whether in images of childhood, youth, or age, in man or in woman. And each thing that only appears to live has also its possible position of relation to life, as nature herself testifies, who, where she cannot be, prophesies her being in the crystallized metal, or the inhaling plant. The charm, the indispensable requisite, of sculpture is 1 See the Biographia Literaria of Mr. But painting rests in a material remoter from nature, and its compass is therefore greater. Light and shade give external, as well as internal, being even with all its accidents, whilst sculpture is confined to the latter. And here I may observe that the subjects chosen for works of art, whether in sculpture or painting, should be such as really are capable of being expressed and con- veyed within the limits of those arts.
Moreover they ought to be such as will affect the spectator by their truth, their beauty, or their sublimity, and therefore they may be addressed to the judgment, the senses, or the reason. Such works as do combine these sources of effect must have the preference in dignity. It is, I believe, from artists finding Greek models unfit for several important modern purposes, that we see so many allegorical figures on monuments and elsewhere. Painting was, as it were, a new art, and being unshackled by old 3i8 Course of Lectures models it chose its own subjects, and took an eagle's flight. Architecture exhibits the greatest extent of the difference from nature which may exist in works of art. It involves all the powers of design, and is sculpture and painting in- clusively.

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