Earnestness and depth of consciousness should no doubt be prominent in the expression of such heads, but the specific features and lines both of countenance and figure ought as little to be of a simply ideal beauty as they are entitled to fall short in the direction of the commonplace and the ugly, or erroneously to aspire after the bare pretensions of the Sublime. The truest success in respect to the external figure will be found in a mean between the directness of Nature's detail and the ideal of beauty. Rightly to hit on this just mean is difficult. It is pre-eminently in this that the ability, taste, and genius of an artist will assert itself. And in general we may assert that in all artistic execution of this character--putting on one side entirely the different nature of the content, which is inseparable from religious faith--there is more scope offered for the exercise of the artist's private judgment than is the case when dealing with the classic Ideal. In classical art the artist seeks to present the spiritual and Divine immediately in the lines of the bodily shape itself, in the organism of the human figure; the lines of the human form, therefore, in this ideal divergence from what is ordinarily met with in finite existence, are fundamentally necessary to the interest. In the kind of art we are now discussing the configuration remains that of ordinary experience; its specific lines are up to a certain point unessential, detail, in short, that may indifferently be treated in divers ways and with greater artistic licence. The supreme interest, therefore, is concentrated, on the one hand, in the mode and manner whereby our artist makes that which is spiritual and ideal within the content under the mode of Spirit itself shine forth through this envisagement of ordinary experience; and, on the other hand, in the individual discretion exercised in the execution, the technical means and shifts employed, by virtue of which he is able to impart to his creations the breath of spiritual life and to bring home this finer essence to our hearts and senses.