l to compose. And similarly with
every other mental faculty: most men can follow a simple argument,
some a more complex one, but few can reason out unaided a complicated
proposition. Now the creative degree in any faculty is the most intense
in its development. The painter is the man who receives the largest
number of most delicately complete visional impressions; the musician
the man who receives the largest number of most delicately complete
audible impressions: to the painter everything is a shape, a colour; to
the musician everything is a sound; the whole universe, to the thinker,
is but a concatenation of logical propositions. Thus, our ideal man
must, at starting, possess every higher faculty, developed to the most
intense degree, and every one of them developed equally: for out of him
is to be made every kind of artist. Here, then, we have our ideal man:
he possesses in the highest degree, and in the most perfect balance, all
the emotional, logical, and perceptive powers of the mind; he is, if
you choose, the abstract creature (never existing, and never, alas! to
exist), the all beautiful, all powerful, perfect fiction, which we call
_humanity_; and with him is our work. He is perfectly balanced, he is
a mere abstraction: for these two reasons he is, so far, inactive; we
cannot, with the best will in the world, imagine his doing anything
as long as he can do everything: he will, in all probability, merely
passively enjoy. Before he can create, we must alter him. And he is to
create, remember, not as a statesman or a handicraftsman, but as an
artist: he is to deal not with realities, but with fictions; he is not
to touch our material interests, he is merely to evoke for us a series
of phantom sights or sounds, of phantom men and women. Therefore, our
first act must be to diminish, by at least a half, all the practical
sides of his nature, so that no practical activities divert him from his
purely ideal field. So that it be for him infinitely more natural to
think, to feel, to imitate, to combine impressions, than to be of any
immediate use in the world; so that the mere employment of his powers be
his furthest aim, without thinking what effect that employment will have
upon the real condition of himself or of others. This much we have done:
we have obtained a creature whose interest is never purely practical.
But this will not suffice. We must diminish by at least a quarter his
mere logical powers, thus rendering hi