a plastic work, you produce your
pencil and brushes and copy it; if it be a musical composition, you try
and reproduce it by means of your voice or your instrument; and you
thus obtain the highest degree of aesthetical activity and pleasure
compatible with mere appreciation. But supposing you can neither draw,
nor sing, nor play; supposing you have only another set of faculties,
those dealing with thoughts and images, those of the artist in words, of
the writer. How will you obtain that high degree of aesthetical activity,
how will you go over the steps of the original creator? You will find
that words cannot copy the work of art, plastic or musical; that lines
and lights and shades, or modulations and harmonies, must be seen or
heard to be appreciated; that, in short, you have no means of absolutely
reproducing what you have seen or heard;--instinctively, unintentionally,
unconsciously, you will seek for an equivalent for it; you will try and
produce with the means at your disposal something analogous to the work
of art, you will obtain your aesthetic activity from another set of
faculties; not being able to draw or to sing, you will think and feel,
and, in default of producing a copy, you will produce an equivalent. But
the same result is not obtainable by different means; a painter, copying
a statue, will produce not a statue but a picture; a sculptor copying a
picture will produce a model, not a sketch; yet the difference between
the _modus operandi_ of painting and sculpture is as nothing compared
with that between the _modus operandi_ of art which appeals to the eye
or the ear, and art which appeals direct to the mind; of art which deals
with visible or audible shapes, and of art which deals with purely
abstract thoughts and images. How much greater, then, must not also
be the difference in the result! Instead of a statue you have, not a
picture, but a poem, a work of art of totally different nature from
the one which you originally tried to reproduce. Instead of visual or
audible forms, you have feelings and fancies; and if you compare your
equivalent with the original work of art you will probably find that it
has little in common with it: you had seen a beautifully chiselled head,
and you say that you had perceived a beautiful emotion; you had heard a
lovely modulation, and you have written that you witnessed a pathetic
parting; instead of your eye and your ear, your imagination and feeling
have been active, and