so infinitely
interwoven a dualism can be divided, coarsely, and leaving or taking too
much on one side or the other, we can divide this dual existence into
that which has been given to us by the artist, the visible, material
form; and that which association, recollection, fancy, has been added
by ourselves to the artist's work. Of this dualism, therefore, of
impression and fancy, only that portion of the work of art which is
absolutely visible and concrete; the form, whether it exist in combined
colour and shadow, or marble mass, as in the plastic arts, or in
partially combined and partially successive sounds, as in music, only
this form is really given by the artist, is that which, with reference
to his productive power, we can call the work of art. He may, it is
true, have deliberately chosen that form which should lead us to such
associations of ideas, but in so far he has been acting not as the
artist, but as a sort of foreshadowed spectator or listener; he has,
before taking up his own work with the mere material, visible, tangible,
audible realities of the art, stepped into the place to be occupied by
ourselves, and foreseen, by his knowledge of the effects which he can
produce, by his experience of what associations are awakened by each of
his various forms, the imaginative activities which his yet unfinished
work will call for in those who see or hear it. But he will, in so
doing, be deliberately or unconsciously leaving his own work,
forestalling ours: nay, the artist who says to himself, "Now I will
paint a soul in a condition of ecstasy," is in reality transforming
himself into the customer who would enter his workshop and say, "Paint
me a figure such as your experience tells you suggests to beholders
the idea of religious enthusiasm; copy the features of any religious
enthusiast of your acquaintance, or put together such dispersed features
as seem to you indicative of that temper of mind." All this, while
the real artistic work has not begun; for that begins when the artist
first places before his easel the model for his archangel: either the
delicate, hectic, little girlish novice-boy, or the distinct outline
of the armed young angel existing in his mind and requiring only to be
printed off into concrete existence. Thus, in our examination of the
amount of an artist's personality which can go into his work, we must
remember that this work is merely the externally existing, definite,
finite form, and not the