is instinctive. It is not that we wish to do good to others by
communicating it. It is simply that we wish to communicate it. The
experience itself is incomplete for us until we communicate it. The
happiness which it gives us is frustrated by our failure to communicate
it. We should be utterly happy if we could make others see what we see
and feel what we feel, but we fail of happiness because we cannot.

Why? One can only conjecture and express conjectures in dull language.
This beauty is itself a universal quality or virtue which makes
particular things more real when they have it. It speaks to the
universal in us, to the everyman in us, and, speaking so, it makes us
aware of the universal in all men. We too wish to speak to that
universal, we wish to find it and the more intense reality which is to
be seen only where it is seen, we wish ourselves to be a part of it; and
we can do that only when all other men also are a part of it. Beauty
seems to speak not merely to us but to the whole listening earth, and we
would be assured that all the earth is listening to it, not to us.

But we ourselves have to play our part in the realizing of this
universal; the sense of it comes and goes; for the most part we
ourselves are not aware of it. We are merely particulars, like other
men, and separated from them by the fact that we are all particulars.
Only, when for a moment we are aware of it, then we are filled with a
passion to make it real and permanent; and it is this passion which
causes art and the blind instinctive effort at art, at communication, at
expression, which we have all experienced.

But it follows from this that the audience to which the artist addresses
himself is not any particular men and women: it is mankind. The moment
he addresses himself to any particular men and women and considers their
particular wants and desires, he is giving up that very sense of the
universal that impelled him to expression; he is ceasing to be an artist
and becoming something else, a tradesman, a philanthropist, a
politician. The artist as artist speaks to mankind, not to any
particular set of men; and he speaks not of himself but of that
universal which he has experienced. His effort is to establish that
universal relation which he has seen, a universal relation of feeling.
And to him, in his effort, there is neither time nor space. Mankind are
not here or there or of this moment or of that; they are everywhere and
for ever.