Wollt ihr hoch auf ihren Flugeln schweben,

Werft die Angst des Irdischen von euch!

Fliehet aus dem engen dumpfen Leben

In des Ideales Reich!

“Das Ideal und das Leben.”

Wouldst thou soar heavenward on its joyous wing?

Cast off the earthly burden of the Real;

High from this cramped and dungeoned being, spring

Into the realm of the Ideal.

As some injudicious master lowers and vitiates the taste of the student by fixing his attention to what he falsely calls the Natural, but which, in reality, is the Commonplace, and understands not that beauty in art is created by what Raphael so well describes,— namely, THE IDEA OF BEAUTY IN THE PAINTER’S OWN MIND; and that in every art, whether its plastic expression be found in words or marble, colours or sounds, the servile imitation of Nature is the work of journeymen and tyros,— so in conduct the man of the world vitiates and lowers the bold enthusiasm of loftier natures by the perpetual reduction of whatever is generous and trustful to all that is trite and coarse. A great German poet has well defined the distinction between discretion and the larger wisdom. In the last there is a certain rashness which the first disdains,—

“The purblind see but the receding shore,

Not that to which the bold wave wafts them o’er.”

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 Nature 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 Raphael; there is truth in the Apollo, the Antinous, and the Laocoon. But you do not meet the............