objects with which poet, dramatist or novelist deals are ideas,
persons, associated things, having character and interest of their
own. The experience he is to provide is primarily a spiritual
experience, an affair of the mind and the emotions. And being, as it
must clearly be, an experience _sui generis_, it is obviously not
derived from a mere reproduction of life; for life cannot be
reproduced excepting in life itself, whereas art claims no more than
to be an imitation, or an envisagement, of nature, and its life is its
own. What we demand of it is that it should put into its picture
something that is and is not in nature--something, in other words,
that is only there for those who choose to see it, but which the
artist makes clearer, awakening the perceptions to that aspect of
truth which he has in view. In a book called _The Ascending Effort_,
Mr. George Bourne urged that the art of life consists in the
realisation of "choice ideas"; meaning by "choice ideas" those which
are refined out of the commonplace and the meagre; the ideas which are
apprehended most actively, with all the mind and all the perceptions;
the ideas which admit of relation to all other ideas, which come into
some sort of harmony with such schemes of life as we have made. If
this is true of the art of life, _a fortiori_ is it true of the fine
arts from which the analogy is drawn. In other words, the artist's aim
is not to reproduce the facts which make up the mass of our ordinary
and undigested life, but to substitute for the dishevelled commonplace
the "choiceness" of an ordered interpretation. Only in this way can
art give us an experience _sui generis_; only by the refinement and
re-energising of the treatment can it give us emotions vivid enough to
compete in some measure with the vividness of nature.

Implicitly all great artists must have accepted this general view of
their function, and many in one way or another have explicitly stated
it. "As light to the eye, even such is beauty to the mind," said
Coleridge, whose meaning was philosophically definite, but in no way
at variance with Shakespeare's too hackneyed but ever memorable words:

Spirits are not finely touched,
But to fine issues.

The "fine": the "alight" or "luminous": the "choice"--here are three
ways of qualifying the objects which artists seek to present. Matthew
Arnold was captivated by the simile of light, and having repeated
Amiel's passionate cry for "mo