s is reversed; he perceives, as by vision, some
intense single situation--that picture, for instance, in _Lord Jim_,
where the Captain looking over the side of his ship is tempted to
desert his crew. Such a situation, a focal point in a story, is for
the artist object and idea in one, simultaneously presented by the
imagination; the union of matter and spirit is already there at the
moment of creation; and in that way, I imagine, most of the finest
pictures, poems, dramas and stories have been first conceived. When
once that focal point has been presented in all its vividness and
significance by the imagination, it remains for the artist to mass his
detail in and around it as appropriately as his invention and
technique permit.

We have now reached conclusions which were approached from two
distinct points of view. Starting from certain axioms or self-evident
propositions, and looking at art from the outside, I suggested that it
must provide us with an energetic experience which we value for its
own sake without thought of consequences or alien interests, an
experience which has a fineness or an illuming quality of its own. And
examining the same question from the inside--from the side of the
mental processes implied in the act of creation--I have tried to adapt
the conclusions of Coleridge to a view which should not pre-suppose
his metaphysic, and have asked what is implied in this fineness or
illuming quality in a work of art, this which is called beautiful. And
when we learnt that all creative art comes from the imagination of the
artist projecting itself upon the material of life, I concluded that
the two things essential to the creative imagination were knowledge
and sincerity--knowledge of life itself, so that the artist can use an
intelligible language and speak in terms of things real to
everyone--and sincerity, meaning conformity with that which is
essential or central in the artist himself. Art is thus a
representation of actual life in terms of the artist. It must be real,
and it must be ideal. It is the act of genius to be able to give us in
one and the same creation a representation of nature and an expression
of the artist's personality. This is the new thing which genius
constantly adds to the sum-total of human experience--it is the old
stuff of life quickened and illuminated by the new incarnation. And
thus the stuff of life itself is increased, and succeeding artists
start with a wider range of materi