ily describe as
artistic creation. The name indicates the suddenness, originality,
and individuality of the conception thus attained. What we call
idealization is often a case of it. In idealization proper, however,
what happens is the elimination of individual eccentricities; the
result is abstract, and consequently meagre. This meagreness is
often felt to be a greater disadvantage than the accidental and
picturesque imperfection of real individuals, and the artist
therefore turns to the brute fact, and studies and reproduces that
with indiscriminate attention, rather than lose strength and
individuality in the presentation of an insipid type. He seems
forced to a choice between an abstract beauty and an unlovely
example.

But the great and masterful presentations of the ideal are somehow
neither the one nor the other. They present ideal beauty with just
that definiteness with which nature herself sometimes presents it.
When we come in a crowd upon an incomparably beautiful face,
we know it immediately as an embodiment of the ideal; while it
contains the type, -- for if it did not we should find it monstrous
and grotesque, -- it clothes that type in a peculiar splendour of
form, colour, and expression. It has an individuality. And just so
the imaginary figures of poetry and plastic art may have an
individuality given them by the happy affinities of their elements
in the imagination. They are not idealizations, they are
spontaneous variations, which can arise in the mind quite as easily
as in the world. They spring up in

The wreathed trellis of a working brain;
. . . With all the gardener fancy e'er could feign
Who, breeding flowers, will never breed the same.

Imagination, in a word, generates as well as abstracts; it observes,
combines, and cancels; but it also dreams. Spontaneous syntheses
arise in it which are not mathematical averages of the images it
receives from sense; they are effects of diffused excitements left in
the brain by sensations. These excitements vary constantly in their
various renewals, and occasionally take such a form that the soul is
surprised by the inward vision of an unexampled beauty. If this
inward vision is clear and steady, we have an aesthetic inspiration,
a vocation to create; and if we can also command the technique of
an appropriate art, we shall hasten to embody that inspiration, and
realize an ideal. This ideal will be gradually recognized as
supremely beautif