sensuous may also
see it. In my library is an original sonnet by John G. Whittier. In
almost every line are erasures and interlineations. In some cases the
careful poet has written a new line and pasted it over the rejected one.
What does this mean? It means that he has discovered a truth of moral
beauty and is attempting to interpret his discovery to the world. His
first interpretation of his vision did not suit him, nor his second, nor
his third, and he has revised and re-revised in the attempt to make his
verse a true interpretation of the truth which he had seen. He did not
make the truth; it eternally was. Neither did the musician make the
truth of harmony, nor the painter the truth of form and color. They also
eternally were. Poet, musician, painter, have seen, heard, felt,
realized in their own souls some experience of life, some potent reality
which philosophy cannot formulate, nor creed contain, nor eloquence
define; and each in his own way endeavors to give it to the world of
men; each in his own way endeavors to lift the gauzy curtain,
impenetrable to most souls, which hides the invisible, the inaudible,
the eternal, the divine from men; and he gives them a glimpse of that of
which he himself had but a glimpse.

In one sense and in one only can art be called creative: the artist,
whether he be painter, musician, or poet, so interprets to other men the
experience which has been created in him by his vision of the
supersensible and eternal, that he evokes in them a similar experience.
He is a creator only as he conveys to others the life which has been
created in himself. As the electric wire creates light in the home; as
the band creates the movement in the machinery; thus and only thus does
the artist create life in those that wait upon him. He is in truth an
interpreter and transmitter, not a creator. Nor can he interpret what he
has not first received, nor transmit what he has not first experienced.
The music, the painting, the poem are merely the instruments which he
uses for that purpose. The life must first be in him or the so-called
music, painting, poem are but dead simulacra; imitations of art, not
real art. This is the reason why no mechanical device, be it never so
skillfully contrived, can ever take the place of the living artist. The
pianola can never rival the living performer; nor the orchestrion the
orchestra; nor the chromo the painting. No mechanical device has yet
been invented to produce po