ate, is less advanced in his art; for
art is made rudimentary not by its date but by its irrationality. Yet
even if Homer had been primitive he might well have been inspired, in
the same way as a Bacchic frenzy or a mystic trance; the most blundering
explosions may be justified antecedently by the plastic force that is
vented in them. They may be expressive, in the physical sense of this
ambiguous word; for, far as they may be from conveying an idea, they may
betray a tendency and prove that something is stirring in the soul.
Expressiveness is often sterile; but it is sometimes fertile and capable
of reproducing in representation the experience from which it sprang. As
a tree in the autumn sheds leaves and seeds together, so a ripening
experience comes indifferently to various manifestations, some barren
and without further function, others fit to carry the parent experience
over into another mind, and give it a new embodiment there.
Expressiveness in the former case is dead, like that of a fossil; in the
latter it is living and efficacious, recreating its original. The first
is idle self-manifestation, the second rational art.

[Sidenote: Natural history of inspiration.]

Self-manifestation, so soon as it is noted and accepted as such, seems
to present the same marvel as any ideal success. Such self-manifestation
is incessant, many-sided, unavoidable; yet it seems a miracle when its
conditions are looked back upon from the vantage ground of their result.
By reading spirit out of a work we turn it into a feat of inspiration.
Thus even the crudest and least coherent utterances, when we suspect
some soul to be groping in them, and striving to address us, become
oracular; a divine afflatus breathes behind their gibberish and they
seem to manifest some deep intent. The miracle of creation or
inspiration consists in nothing but this, that an external effect should
embody an inner intention. The miracle, of course, is apparent only, and
due to an inverted and captious point of view. In truth the tendency
that executed the work was what first made its conception possible; but
this conception, finding the work responsive in some measure to its
inner demand, attributes that response to its own magic prerogative.
Hence the least stir and rumble of formative processes, when it
generates a soul, makes itself somehow that soul's interpreter; and dim
as the spirit and its expression may both remain, they are none the less
in profoun