m far more inclined to view things
as concrete, living manifestations, than as logical abstractions. This
has served to prevent his being diverted into metaphysic or scientific
speculations: there is now no longer any fear of his becoming a
psychologist instead of a poet, a mathematician or physicist instead of
a painter or a composer: things now interest him no longer for their
practical bearing, nor for their abstract meaning: he cares for them not
as forces, nor as ideas, but as forms, as visions. And this time we
have, as it were, rough-hewn our artist. But what artist? He is, it is
true, mainly attracted by the mere contemplation of things apart from
practical or scientific interests, but he is equally attracted by all
sorts of visions: he receives every kind of impression. This time,
again, he will, from perfect balance, remain inactive. We must throw his
faculties a little into disorder, we must, at random, diminish here in
order (relatively) to increase there: let us, for instance, diminish by
a trifle his faculty for manipulating colours or masses of stone, his
faculty for conceiving sounds in succession and in combination; let us,
in short, make it a little difficult for him to be a painter or sculptor
or musician.

What will he be, this first made artist of ours? this creature, clipped
in all the mere practically scientific instincts, only that his whole
intense personality may be given more completely, more absolutely to the
world of artistic phantoms? Before breaking up this huge psychological
snow-man, this ungainly monster roughly moulded into caricature shape by
awkward removing of material here and adding on there, before dashing
it back into the limbo of used up and unformed similes, let us ask
ourselves what artist he vaguely resembles: what is the artist thus
formed, it would seem, of a mere intense human being; of all the
faculties of our nature, only more subtle and powerful, and working not
in the world of practical realities, nor of abstract truths, but in that
of imaginary forms? The answer comes instinctively, unhesitatingly to
all of us: this universal artist, this artistic organism which contains
the whole intensified individual, is the poet. Nay: why call him poet?
why reserve this supreme place of artist not of colours or sounds, but
of spoken emotion, and perception, and action, for the man whose words
are grouped into metrical shape? Is it this metrical shape, this
mere enveloping form pe