So with the expression of personality in literature. A book which is perfectly clear at the first cursory reading is by that fact condemned as commonplace. If there were anything vital in it, it would appear at least a little strange, and would not be fully understood until it had been for some time inwardly digested. At the end of that time it would have done its best service for us and its ascendency would have waned. It is always thus, I imagine, with writers who strongly move us; there is first mystery and a sense of unexplored life, then a period of assimilative excitement, and after that chastened affection, or perhaps revulsion or distrust. A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies. It was a maxim of Goethe that where there is no mystery there is no power; and something of the perennial vitality of his writings may be attributed to the fact that he did not trouble himself too much with the question whether people would understand him, but set down his inmost experiences as adequately as he could, and left the rest to time. The same may be said of Browning, and of many other great writers. Something similar holds true of power in plastic art. The sort of mystery most proper and legitimate in art, however, is not an intellectual mystery—though some artists have had a great deal of that, like Leonardo, who “conquered by the magnetism of an incalculable personality”[90]—but rather a sensuous mystery, that is to say a vague and subtle appeal to recondite sources of sensuous impression, an awakening of hitherto unconscious capacity for harmonious sensuous life, like the feeling we get from the first mild weather in the spring. In this way, it seems to me, there is an effect of mystery, of congenial strangeness, in all powerful art. Probably everyone would recognize this as true of music, even if all do not feel its applicability to painting, sculpture and architecture. The well-known fact that mystery is inseparable from higher religious idealism may be regarded as a larger expression of this same necessity of associating inscrutability with personal power. If the imagination cannot be content with the definite in lesser instances, it evidently cannot when it comes to form the completest image of personality that it can embrace.