else, just as it would have done if he had never touched it. To this
nature he has, as I said, done a certain violence in order to stamp
upon it the appearance of Good; but the Good is still, in a sense,
only an appearance; the reality of the thing remains independent and
alien. So that what the man has found, in so far as he has found Good,
is after all only a form of himself; and one can conceive him feeling
a kind of despair, like that of Wotan in the Walkuere, when in his
quest for a free, substantial, self-subsistent Good he finds after
all, for ever, nothing but images of himself:

"'Das Andre, das ich ersehne,
Das Andre, erseh' ich nie.'

"I don't know whether what I am saying is intelligible, for I find it
rather hard to put it into words."

"Yes," he said, "I think I understand. But what you are saying, so far
as it is true, seems to be true only for the artist himself. To
all others the work of Art must appear as something independent of
themselves."

"True," I said, "and yet I think that they too feel, or might be made
to fed if it were brought home to them, this same antagonism between
the nature of the stuff and the form that has been given to it.
The form will seem from this point of view something factitious and
artificial given to the stuff, not indeed by themselves, but by one
like themselves, and in their interest. They will contrast, perhaps,
as is often done, a picture of the landscape with the landscape
Itself. The picture, they will say, however beautiful, is not a
'natural' Good, not a real Good, not a Good in its own right; it is
a kind of makeshift produced by human effort, beautiful, if you will,
admirable, if you will, to be sought, to be cherished, to be loved in
default of a better, with the best faculties of brain and soul, but
still not that ultimate thing we wanted, that Good in and of itself,
as well as through and for us, Good by its own nature apart from our
interposition, self-moved, self-determined, self-dependent, and in
which alone our desires could finally rest.--Don't you think that some
such feeling may, perhaps, be at the bottom of Bartlett's criticism of
Art as unreal?"

Bartlett laughed. "If so," he said, "it is quite unknown to myself.
For to tell the truth, I have not understood a word that you have
said."

"Well," I said, "in that case, at any rate you can't disagree with me.
But what do the others think?" And I turned to Dennis and Leslie, for
Wilson and Pa