ginatively. And by
imagination I mean the making of images--I mean that stretching out of
the _essential_ personality towards nature, so that it may touch
nature at as many points as possible, fashioning it into images,
binding itself to nature, and nature to itself, ever seeking to expand
in this contact or sympathy, so that as far as possible the whole
essential personality may be expressed through as much as possible of
nature. The artistic impulse, the poetic or creative impulse, is that
which impels him to the expression of what is most really and
centrally himself. The world of nature as perceived by him when he is
in full possession of himself assumes a form schemed by his
imagination; and it is this which he endeavours to body forth when he
selects now these and now those objects to represent his conception of
life.

We may, then, take it that the first essential to an artist is the
imaginative impulse which makes him desire to express himself in terms
of life. And the second is that energetic quality by which he
endeavours to express what is central to his personality, that part of
him which is his "real self." This is what is meant by "sincerity" in
art. And a third surely is a sort of self-detachment, or sympathy, or
knowledge, by means of which he is able to estimate the material in
which he works. The two last mentioned qualities, taken together,
imply a sense of form, in accordance with which the idea is embodied
in the finished work of art, and technique--the professional knowledge
by the help of which this embodiment is accomplished.

The objection may be raised that the man who has an essentially
distorted or meagre personality and succeeds exactly in expressing
himself is, according to my estimate, entitled to the same artistic
credit as a man of the loftiest ideas. To that I reply that though the
clue to his work is to be found, in the last resort, in his
personality, it is not by his personality that he is to be judged; he
is to be judged by his works; and in producing these works he
expresses himself, not in terms of himself, but in terms of external
objects, in terms of life known to all of us; and that if he perfectly
expresses distorted or meagre views of life, the representation of
life which he gives to us will itself be palpably distorted and
meagre. We are all capable of detecting the falsity if the facts of
life are distorted before our eyes, or represented in so dull or
meagre a way that