e. No doubt the thing of beauty, the profound thing,
the thing of joy, is most delightful for the spectator to contemplate;
to the artist himself it is apt to be most inspiring, and therefore art
seems to be concerned mainly with beauty and joy. But that is the only
reason. As artist, his function is simply to body forth, and present to
other minds, whatever he conceives, and he is consummate artist just in
proportion as he secures that end.

Now take the literary artist. He in his turn conceives a thought, or
picture of the imagination or fancy. A feeling may come over him with a
gentle grace, a subtle influence, an overmastering passion. A mood--a
state of soul--may colour all his view, tinging it with some haunting
melancholy or irradiating his whole world till it seems a Paradise. How
is he to communicate to us this thought, this picture, this fancy, the
grace and subtlety and passion, the precise hues of his mood for
sombreness or radiancy? Well, he takes words, and by selecting them, by
combining them, by harmonizing them with a master's hand, he sets
before us certain magic phrases wrought into a song, an ode, an elegy,
or whatsoever form of creation is most apt and true, and he makes us see
just what he sees and feel just what he feels, printing it all upon our
own brains and hearts.

In this then must lie the essence of the literary gift--in the power of
a writer to express himself, to communicate vividly, without mistiness
of contents or outline, his own spirit and vision. I repeat that it is
irrelevant whether what he sees and feels be beautiful or not, joyful or
not, profound or not, even true or not. Nor does it matter either what
his style may be. He is a master in the art of writing when he can make
his own mind, so to speak, entirely visible or audible to us, when he
can express what his inward eye beholds in such terms that we can behold
it in the same shape and in the same light--if, for example, when he
sees a thing in "the light which never was on sea or land, the
consecration and the poet's dream," he can make us also see it in that
faery light.

This is no such easy thing. The fact that there are a hundred thousand
words in the English dictionary does not make it easier. It is not
those who know the most words that can necessarily best express
themselves. Neither is it true that, because feeling is real, it can
therefore speak. "Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh"
has no such sen