reach the spirit. It is
mind speaking to mind. However complete the material expression
may seem, it is only a part of what the artist would say; imagination
transcends the actual. In the art which goes deepest into life, the
medium is necessarily inadequate. The artist fashions his work in a
sublime despair as he feels how little of the mighty meaning within
him he is able to convey. In the greatest works rightly seen the
medium becomes transparent. Within the Sistine Chapel the visitor,
when once he has yielded to the illusion, is not conscious of plaster
surface and pigment; indeed, he hardly sees color and design as such
at all; through them he looks into the immensity of heaven, peopled
with gods and godlike men. Consummate acting is that which makes
the spectator forget that it is acting. The part and the player become
one. The actor, in himself and in the words he utters, is the
unregarded vehicle of the dramatist's idea. In a play like Ibsen's
"Ghosts," the stage, the actors, the dialogue merge and fall away,
and the overwhelming meaning stands revealed in its complete
intensity. As the play opens, it cuts out a segment from the chaos of
human life; step by step it excludes all that is unessential, stroke by
stroke with an inevitableness that is crushing, it converges to the
great one-thing that the dramatist wanted to say, until at the end the
spectator, conscious no longer of the medium but only of the idea
and all-resolving emotion, bows down before its overmastering
force with the cry, "What a _mind_ is there!"

In the art which most completely achieves expression the medium is
not perceived as distinct from the emotion of which the medium is
the embodiment. In order to render expressive the material
employed in its service, art seeks constantly to identify means and
end, to make the form one with the content. The wayfarer out of his
need of shelter built a hut, using the material which chance gave into
his hand and shaping his design according to his resources; the
purpose of his work was not the hut itself but shelter. So the artist in
any form is impelled to creation by his need of expression; the thing
which he creates is not the purpose and end of his effort, but only
the means. Each art has its special medium, and each medium has its
peculiar sensuous charm and its own kind of expressiveness. This
power of sensuous delight is incidental to the real beauty of the
work; and that beauty is the message t