But each work of art though rational is nevertheless a unique individual, and though all works of art as forms of communication must necessarily aspire to the ideal of complete definition, yet it does not follow that some of the stages short of absolute determination may not very well possess considerable aesthetic interest of their own. Conversation among people who understand each other tends to become elliptical. A hint of one’s meaning is generally sufficient for a friend; indeed, when we are thoroughly assured of the good will of our auditor, a hint often conveys our meaning better than a more laboured form of expression. It is the same in pictorial art. To those who understand the language and are on terms of intimacy with the artist’s usual modes of expression and habitual range of thought and feeling, a few hurried scribbles or washes are as delightfully suggestive and full of significance as a completed painting; and at the same time, from the very fact that we have gone more than half-way to meet the artist, we enjoy the additional pleasure of intimate intercourse. The sympathetic and imaginative and well-informed spectator is therefore apt to resent the suggestion that such delightfully eloquent sketches as the ‘Pass of Faïdo,’ ‘Lucerne,’ ‘Zurich,’ and a hundred others equally eloquent and suggestive, are in any way short of perfection. And no doubt from the strictly aesthetic point of view they are right. ‘The best of this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them.’ But I think it is clear that considerable experience of the completed works of an artist is necessary before even the privileged spectators can feel perfect confidence in their own interpretation of the artist’s slighter work. When dealing, for example, with some of the sketches and studies for marine subjects, as ‘Fishermen launching a Boat in a rough Sea’ (Plate XIX.), or with the marine and pastoral subjects in the _Liber_, we can interpret them with perfect confidence because, in pictures like ‘The Guard Ship at the Nore,’ ‘Windsor,’ and ‘Frosty Morning,’ the artist has shown us exactly the kind of completion his sketches point to. But with the latest sketches (Faïdo, Lucerne, etc.), we are on a different footing. A few only of these sketches were carried farther, and I believe I am right in saying that according to the consensus of educated opinion the subjects lost rather than gained by elaboration. I believe this opinion to be correct, and I would suggest that the explanation is not entirely to be found in the waning powers of the artist. Some mental and emotional contents are incapable of definite embodiment. The vague yearning and enigmatical unrest which form the most prominent elements in these designs are probably of that kind. Contents of such a nature that they are only partially amenable to artistic treatment are therefore more adequately treated in the less explicit forms of art.