e true artist, who does not find his materials in the world,
but creates them according to the inner laws by which the world and
himself are governed, the vehicle is not more a part of his creation
than the "impassioned truth" which it conveys. Here, as elsewhere, form
and substance are inseparable; and the difference of form that
distinguishes the novel from the other kinds of composition which it
seems for the present to have superseded, symbolises, or rather is
identical with, a different potency in the art by which the substance is
created.[1]

FOOTNOTE:

[1] "Though in its most general sense the substance and matter of all
fine art is the same, issuing from the common source of the human desire
for expression, yet the region of fancy corresponding to each medium of
utterance is molded by intercourse with that medium, and acquires an
individuality which is not directly reducible to terms of any other
region of aesthetic fancy. Feeling, in short, is modified in becoming
communicable; and the feeling which has become communicable in music is
not capable of re-translation into the feeling which has become
communicable in painting. Thus the arts have no doubt in common a human
and even rational content--rational in so far as the feelings which are
embodied in expression, for expression's sake, arise in connection with
ideas and purposes; but each of them has separately its own peculiar
physical medium of expression and also a whole region of modified
feeling or fancy which constitutes the material proper to be expressed
in the medium and according to the laws of each particular art."--B.
Bosanquet, 'The Relation of the Fine Arts to One Another' (_Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society_).

B. IMITATION vs. ART

2. Mere copying is not art. The farther the artist rises above the stage
of imitation, the higher is his art, the more elevating its influence on
those who can enter into its spirit. If the landscape-painter does
nothing more than represent nature as seen by the outward eye, the
vulgar objection against looking at pictures--"I can see as fine a view
as this any day"--is unquestionably valid. But if the painter is
anything better than a photographer, he does far more than this. He
brings nature before us, as we have seen it, perhaps, only once or twice
in our lives, under the influence of some strong emotion. He does that
for us which we cannot do for ourselves; he reproduces those moments of
spiritua