beginning of their lives, and with painters down to minute folds of
drapery and shapes of leaves and stones; and over all this unindexed
and immeasurable mass of treasure, the imagination brooding and
wandering, but dream-gifted, so as to summon at any moment exactly such
a group of ideas as shall justly fit each other." This is the
explanation of their genius, as far as it can be explained.

Genius is rarely able to give any account of its own processes. But
those who have had ample opportunities of intimately knowing the growth
of works in the minds of artists, will bear me out in saying that a
vivid memory supplies the elements from a thousand different sources,
most of which are quite beyond the power of localisation, the
experience of yesterday being strangely intermingled with the dim
suggestions of early years, the tones heard in childhood sounding
through the diapason of sorrowing maturity; and all these kaleidoscopic
fragments are recomposed into images that seem to have a corresponding
reality of their own.

As all Art depends on Vision, so the different kinds of Art depend on
the different ways in which minds look at things. The painter can only
put into his pictures what he sees in Nature; and what he sees will be
different from what another sees. A poetical mind sees noble and
affecting suggestions in details which the prosaic mind will interpret
prosaically. And the true meaning of Idealism is precisely this vision
of realities in their highest and most affecting forms, not in the
vision of something removed from or opposed to realities. Titian's
grand picture of "Peter the Martyr" is, perhaps, as instructive an
example as could be chosen of successful Idealism; because in it we
have a marvellous presentation of reality as seen by a poetic mind. The
figure of the flying monk might have been equally real if it had been