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The quality of line and the sensuousness of colour nowhere cast their spells over us more strangely than in Giorgione's pictures, and by these means he wrought "effects" such as no artist has surpassed.
Sound, meaning, feeling, these are the essential constituents of discourse; imagery is variable and accidental. For, as we have observed so often, feelings are more vital and permanent when embedded in concrete sensations and images than when attached to abstract meanings. Through the image, the poet confers upon his art some of the sensuousness which it would otherwise lack.
The sensuousness that penetrated him kept his sympathy with life extraordinarily buoyant, and all the eager projects for the disclosure of a scheme of wisdom became for a time the more vividly desired, as the general tide of desire flowed more fully within him.
The glamour, the mystery, the intimate charm of the early pieces is lost, and there is felt, enwrapping the whole, that sultry atmosphere of untempered sensuousness which has already, upon more than one occasion, been commented upon.
But it was a contradiction; for, as you saw it rise and fall, you were struck by its dramatic delicacy; as it rested on the railing of the veranda, by its latent power. You faced incongruity everywhere. His dress was bizarre, his face almost classical, the brow clear and strong, the profile good to the mouth, where there showed a combination of sensuousness and adventure.
By our own inconsiderateness and sensuousness, we live in a lie, in a false dream of permanence, and so in a sadder sense we walk in 'a vain show, deluding ourselves with the conceit of durability, and refusing to see that the apparent is the shadowy, and the one enduring reality God.
A true, though excessive, sensuousness gives value to the former of these two romances; a lively and sportive humor, a fine wit, recommends the other: but one totally lacks all sobriety of mind that would befit it, the other lacks all aesthetic dignity. If you consult experience, one is rather ridiculous; if you think of the ideal, the other is almost contemptible.
But, on the other hand, real taste excludes all extreme affections, which only put sensuousness to the torture, without giving the mind any compensation. These affections oppress moral liberty by pain, as the others by voluptuousness; consequently they can excite aversion, and not the emotion that would alone be worthy of art.
The transition from the passivity of sensuousness to the activity of thought and of will can be effected only by the intermediary state of aesthetic liberty; and though in itself this state decides nothing respecting our opinions and our sentiments, and therefore it leaves our intellectual and moral value entirely problematical, it is, however, the necessary condition without which we should never attain to an opinion or a sentiment.
In the third place we discover that, while accepting the mental influences and submitting to the personal attractions I have indicated, he strove, by indulging solitary tastes, to maintain his central energies intact for art joining in no rebellious conspiracies against the powers that be, bending his neck in silence to the storm, avoiding pastimes and social diversions which might have called into activity the latent sensuousness of his nature.
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