In its primary aspect, a great picture has no more definite
message for us than an accidental play of sunlight and shadow for a
moment, on the wall or floor: is itself, in truth, a space of such
fallen light, caught as the colours are caught in an Eastern carpet, but
refined upon, and dealt with more subtly and exquisitely than by nature
itself. And this primary and essential condition fulfilled, we may trace
the coming of poetry into painting, by fine gradations upwards; from
Japanese fan-painting, for instance, where we get, first, only abstract
colour; then, just a little interfused sense of the poetry of flowers;
then, sometimes, perfect flower-painting; and so, onwards, until in
Titian we have, as his poetry in the Ariadne, so actually a touch of
true childlike humour in the diminutive, quaint figure with its silk
gown, which ascends the temple stairs, in his picture of the
Presentation of the Virgin, at Venice.
But although each art has thus its own specific order of impressions,
and an untranslatable charm, while a just apprehension of the ultimate
differences of the arts is the beginning of aesthetic criticism; yet it
is noticeable that, in its special mode of handling its given material,
each art may be observed to pass into the condition of some other art,
by what German critics term an Anders-streben--a partial alienation from
its own limitations, by which the arts are able, not indeed to supply
the place of each other, but reciprocally to lend each other new forces.
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