She had a faculty (which, fortunately for themselves, pure women often have) of ignoring all moral blotches in a character that won her admiration.

She purified the objects; of her regard by the mere act of turning such spotless eyes upon them.
Hilda's despondency, nevertheless, while it dulled her perceptions in one respect, had deepened them in another; she saw beauty less vividly, but felt truth, or the lack of it, more profoundly.

She began to suspect that some, at least, of her venerated painters, had left an inevitable hollowness in their works, because, in the most renowned of them, they essayed to express to the world what they had not in their own souls.
They deified their light and Wandering affections, and were continually playing off the tremendous jest, alluded to above, of offering the features of some venal beauty to be enshrined in the holiest places.

A deficiency of earnestness and absolute truth is generally discoverable in Italian pictures, after the art had become consummate.

When you demand what is deepest, these painters have not wherewithal to respond.
They substituted a keen intellectual perception, and a marvellous knack of external arrangement, instead of the live sympathy and sentiment which should have been their inspiration.