and liberality, and truthfulness, to the love of God as their archetype,
and yet be perfectly obtuse to æsthetic beauty; and thus again we see
that high æstheticism is compatible with low morality, and conversely.
Doubtless when produced to infinity, all perfections are seen to
converge and unite in God, but short of this, they retain their
distinctness and opposition. At the same time, it cannot for a moment be
denied that keenness of moral, and of æsthetic perception, act and react
upon one another. He gains much morally whose eyes are opened to the
innumerable traces of the Divine beauty with which he is surrounded, and
there are æsthetic joys which are necessarily unknown to a soul which is
selfish and gross--still more to a soul from which the glories of
revealed religion are hidden, either through unbelief or sluggish
indifference. Yet, on the whole, it may be said that sanctity is
benefited by art more than art is by sanctity, especially where we deal
with so limited a medium of expression as painting. And so it seems to
us that, after all, there is nothing to surprise or pain us in the fact
that "the art of a Fra Filippo, the loose fish, looks almost as pure,
and is often quite as lovely as that of Fra Giovanni Angelico of
Fiesoli."

_Dec._ 1896.



Footnotes:


[Footnote 1: Vernon Lee, _Belcaro_.]