26 ESSAYS IN NATIONAL IDEALISM.

realism they talk about isn't art at all, but science;
interesting, no doubt, as a scientific achievement, but
nothing more.... Transcripts from Nature, what do I want
with transcripts ? I prefer her own signature; I don't
want forgeries more or less skilful.... It is the message,,
the f burden' of a picture that makes its real value."

At another time he said, " You see, it is these things
of the soul that are real.... the only real things in the-
universe."

Of the religiousness of the art he said:
" That was an awful thought of Buskin's, that artists.
paint God for the world. There's a lump of greasy pig-
ment at the end of Michael Angelo's hog-bristle brush, and,
by the time it has been laid on the stucco, there is some-
thing there that all men with eyes recognize as divine-
Think of what it means. It is the power of bringing G-od
into the world—making God manifest."

"The object of art must be either to please or to*
exalt; I can't see any other reason for it at all. One- is a
pretty reason, the other a noble one."

Of * Expression' in imaginative pictures he said :
a Of course niy faces have no expression in the sense-
in which people use the word. How should they have any?'
They are not portraits of people in paroxysms of terror,,
hatred, benevolence, desire, avarice, veneration and all
the ' passions' and * emotion' that Le Brun and that
kind of person find so magnifique in Raphael's later-
work .... The only expression allowable in great portrai-
ture is the expression of character and moral quality, not
of anything temporary, fleeting, accidental. Apart from
portraiture you don't want even so much, or very seldom:
in fact, you want only types, symbols, suggestions. The
moment you give wlvit people onll expression, you destroy