o it is with the artist; he cannot begin by asking himself whether
the mass of men will understand what he proposes to produce; he must
produce it, and then trust in man, and God, for its effect. Art is
produced by the individual artist and experienced by the individual man.
Tolstoy holds that it is to be experienced by mankind in the mass, not
by individuals; his audience is an abstraction. Whistler holds that it
is produced by the individual, but for himself, and not experienced by
mankind either in the mass or as individuals. Both are heretics. What is
the truth?

I will now turn for a moment to the high aesthetic doctrine of Benedetto
Croce. He in his _Aesthetic_ tells us that all art is expression. True
enough, as far as it goes; but what do we mean by expression? Croce's
doctrine of expression is incomplete, he does not explain clearly what
he means by expression, because he also avoids the question of the
necessary relation between the artist and his audience; and this is the
question which our thought about art has to deal with, just as we have
to solve it in our practice of art and in our actual relation with the
artist. Croce does not see that the question--What is expression?
depends upon the question--What is the relation between the artist and
his audience? He does see that the audience exists, which Whistler
denies; he insists that the audience have the same faculties as the
artist, though to a less degree--that the artist is not a dreamer apart.
He says indeed that to experience a work of art we also must exercise
our aesthetic faculty; our very experience of it is itself expression;
and this is a most important point. But for Croce, as for Whistler, the
artist, when he expresses himself, is concerned only with what he
expresses, not with the people to whom he expresses himself. Croce does
not see this obvious fact, that a work of art is a work of art _because
it is addressed to some one_ and is not a private activity of the
artist. That is why he fails to give a satisfying account of the nature
of expression. Croce cannot distinguish between expression, or art, and
day-dreaming; but the distinction is this, that as soon as I pass from
day-dreaming to expression, I am speaking no longer to myself but to
others. So the form of every work of art is conditioned by the fact that
it is addressed to others. A story, for instance, is a story, it has a
plot, because it is told. A play is a play, and also has a plo