eed preserved a
directness of apprehension which you have lost. He gets, and
responds to, the real smell; not a notion or a name. Certainly the
senses, when taken at face-value, do deceive us: yet the deception
resides not so much in them, as in that conceptual world which
we insist on building up from their reports, and for which we
make them responsible. They deceive us less when we receive
these reports uncooked and unclassified, as simple and direct
experiences. Then, behind the special and imperfect stammerings
which we call colour, sound, fragrance, and the rest, we
sometimes discern a _whole fact_--at once divinely simple and
infinitely various--from which these partial messages proceed;
and which seeks as it were to utter itself in them. And we feel,
when this is so, that the fact thus glimpsed is of an immense
significance; imparting to that aspect of the world which we are
able to perceive all the significance, all the character which it
possesses. The more of the artist there is in us, the more intense
that significance, that character will seem: the more complete,
too, will be our conviction that our uneasiness, the vagueness of
our reactions to things, would be cured could we reach and unite
with the fact, instead of our notion of it. And it is just such an act
of union, reached through the clarified channels of sense and
unadulterated by the content of thought, which the great artist or
poet achieves.

We seem in these words to have come far from the mystic, and
that contemplative consciousness wherewith he ascends to the
contact of Truth. As a matter of fact, we are merely considering
that consciousness in its most natural and accessible form: for
contemplation is, on the one hand, the essential activity of all
artists; on the other, the art through which those who choose to
learn and practise it may share in some fragmentary degree,
according to their measure, the special experience of the mystic
and the poet. By it they may achieve that virginal outlook upon
things, that celestial power of communion with veritable life,
which comes when that which we call "sensation" is freed from
the tyranny of that which we call "thought." The artist is no more
and no less than a contemplative who has learned to express
himself, and who tells his love in colour, speech, or sound: the
mystic, upon one side of his nature, is an artist of a special and
exalted kind, who tries to express something of the revelation he