to the higher.  He shows this by reminding her of a picture of Raphael’s, which he was mad to possess; which now that he possesses it, he often neglects for a picture-book of Dore’s; but which, if threatened with destruction, he would save at the sacrifice of a million Dores, perhaps of his own life.  And now he turns back to her phantom self, as present in his own mind; describes it in terms of exquisite grace and purity; and declares hers the one face which fits into his heart, and makes whole what would be half without it.

Elvire is conciliated; but her husband will not leave well alone.  He has established her full claim to his admiration:  but he is going to prove that so far as her physical charms are concerned, she owes it to his very attachment:  “for those charms are not attested by her looking-glass.  He discovers them by the eye of love—­in other words—­by the artist soul within him.”

All beauty, Don Juan farther explains, is in the imagination of him who feels it, be he lover or artist; be the beauty he descries the attribute of a living face, of a portrait, or of some special arrangement of sound.  The feeling is inspired by its outward objects, but it cannot be retraced to them.  It is a fancy created by fact, as flame by fuel; no more identical with it.  The fancy is not on that account a delusion.  It is the vision of ideal truth:  the recognition by an inner sense of that which does not exist for the outer.  That is why hearts choose each other by help of the face, and why they choose so diversely.  The eye of love, which again is the eye of art, reads soul into the features, however incomplete their expression of it may be.  It reconstructs the ideal type which nature has failed to carry out.

He illustrates this by means of three faces roughly sketched in the sand.  At first sight they are grotesque and unmeaning.  Yet a few more strokes of the broken pipe which is serving him as a pencil, will give to two of these a predominating expression; convert the third into a likeness of Elvire.

“These completing touches represent the artist’s action upon life.  By this method Don Juan has been enabled on a former occasion, to complete a work of high art.  A block of marble had come into his possession, half shaped by the hand of Michael Angelo.

“...  One hand,—­the Master’s,—­smoothed and scraped That mass, he hammered on and hewed at, till he hurled Life out of death, and left a challenge:  for the world, Death still,—....” (vol. xi. p. 260.)

Not death to him:  for as he gazed on the rough-hewn block, a form emerged upon his mental sight—­a form which he interpreted as that of the goddess Eidothee.[53] And as his soul received it from that of the dead master, his hand carried it out.”