The Cruise of the Branwen

ATHENS element which assures us of a Future and relieves us of that despotism of the Past to which the clod of shapeless mud and the iron-bound mathe– matical conclusion must alike be fettered. This is that life which is the baffling factor in all organic beings ; and in the greatest masterpieces of creative art their beauty is as baffling and intangible as life. This too is the one link through which our brains can realise and our eyes can see as Pheidias, Ictinus, or Callicrates could see and realise the Parthenon. It is indeed the only clue by which we may arrive at :my the least success in understanding what they meant. Art, at its highest, is the expression of its maker's emotion though channels ,~.rhich the rest of his world may understand. And it is only that artist who gives you his own inspiration of the things and men he sees around him who will be intelligible not to his own time and his own friends alone, but to all time, and to all genera– tions of the world's posterity. For the methods by which he has expressed the emotions roused in him by his environment are precisely similar to the methods by which we shall recognise the expression of similar emotions until man shall cease to be. We recognise it because the elements that are common to the artist and the spectator are inherent in humanity itself; in the long life– story of which each forms, or has formed, a part ; in the organic character which has been shared by every man since \ve inherited this planet.'* * See Sir Walter Armstrong's "Life of Gainsborough," and my own" Turner's Water-colours." (Cassell and Co.)