onstitutes the whole moral nature of the artist.
"With a great poet," says Keats, "the sense of beauty overcomes
every consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration." It is the
standard which measures the worth of any act. It is conscience, too;
for the functions performed by conscience in the normal moral life
of the man of action are fulfilled by the artist's devotion to his ideal;
his service to his art is his sole and sufficient obligation.

And where the man of action looks to find his rewards in the
approval of his fellow men, the artist cares to please himself. The
very act of expressing is itself the joy and the reward. To this truth
Keats again stands as witness: "I feel assured," he says, "I should
write from the mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful,
even if my night's labours should be burnt every Morning and no
eye ever shine upon them." And still again: "I value more the
privilege of seeing great things in loneliness than the fame of a
prophet." Not that the artist does not crave appreciation. His
message fails of completeness if there is no ear to hear it, if it does
not meet a sympathy which understands. But the true artist removes
all shadow of petty vanity and becomes, in Whitman's phrase, "the
free channel of himself." He is but the medium through whom the
spirit of beauty reveals itself; in thankfulness and praise he but
receives and transmits. That it is given him to see beauty and to
interpret it is enough.

It is by virtue of his power to feel that the artist is able to apprehend
beauty; his temperament is ever responsive to new harmonies. By
force of his imagination, which is one function of his temperament,
he sends his spirit into other lives, absorbs their experience and
makes it his own, and ultimately identifies himself with world forces
and becomes creator. In a lyric passage in a letter Keats exclaims:--

"The mighty abstract Idea I have of Beauty in all things stifles the
more divided and minute domestic happiness. . . . I feel more and
more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in
this world alone, but in a thousand worlds. No sooner am I alone
than shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me, and serve my
Spirit the office which is equivalent to a King's body-guard--then
'Tragedy with sceptered pall comes sweeping by.' According to my
state of mind I am with Achilles shouting in the Trenches, or with
Theocritus in the Vales of Sicily