the act of creation
a man incorporates his own personality into the visible world about
him, and in a true and noble sense gives himself to his fellows. When
an artist looks at his work he sees himself; he has performed the
highest task of which he is capable, and fulfilled the highest purpose
for which he was planned by an artist greater than himself.

The rapture of the creative mood and moment is the reward of the little
group whose touch on any kind of material is imperishable. It comes
when the spell of inspired work is on them, or in the moment which
follows immediately on completion and before the reaction of
depression--which is the heavy penalty of the artistic temperament--has
set in. Balzac knew it in that frenzy of work which seized him for days
together; and Thackeray knew it, as he confesses, when he had put the
finishing touches on that striking scene in which Rawdon Crawley
thrashes Lord Steyne within an inch of his wicked life. The great
novelist, who happened also to be a great writer, knew that the whole
scene, in conception and execution, was a stroke of genius. But while
this supreme rapture belongs to a chosen few, it may be shared by all
those who are ready to open the imagination to its approach. It is one
of the great rewards of the artist that while other kinds of joy are
often pathetically short-lived, his joy, having brought forth enduring
works, is, in a sense, imperishable. And it not only endures; it renews
itself in kindred moments and experiences which it bestows upon those
who approach it sympathetically. There are lines in the "Divine Comedy"
which thrill us to-day as they must have thrilled Dante; there are
passages in the Shakespearian plays and sonnets which make a riot in
the blood to-day as they doubtless set the poet's pulses beating three
centuries ago. The student of literature, therefore, finds in its
noblest works not only the ultimate results of race experience and the
characteristic quality of race genius, but the highest activity of the
greatest minds in their happiest and most expansive moments. In this
commingling of the best that is in the race and the best that is in
the individual lies the mystery of that double revelation which makes
every work of art a disclosure not only of the nature of the man
behind it, but of all men behind him. In this commingling, too, is
preserved the most precious deposit of what the race has been and
done, and of what the man has seen, fe