at you are not asking him to be obvious, to utter
platitudes--that you are not asking him to debase his art to make things
easy for you, who are too indolent to climb to the mountain, but want
it brought to your feet. There are people who pass by a nocturne by
Whistler, a misty twilight by Corot, and who whisper solemnly before a
Noel Paton as if they were in a Cathedral. Is God, then, only present
when His Name is uttered? When we call a figure Time or Death, does
it add dignity to it? What is the real inspiration we derive from that
noble design by Mr. Watts? Not the comprehension of Time, not the nature
of Death, but a revelation human form can express of the heroic dignity.
Is it not more to us to know that man or woman can look half-divine,
that they can wear an aspect such as we imagine belongs to the
immortals, and to feel that if man is made in the image of his Creator,
his Creator is the archetype of no ignoble thing? There were immortal
powers in Watts' mind when those figures surged up in it; but they were
neither Time nor Death. He was rather near to his own archetype, and in
that mood in which Emerson was when he said, "I the imperfect adore
my own perfect." Touch by touch, as the picture was built up, he was
becoming conscious of some interior majesty in his own nature, and
it was for himself more than for us he worked. "The oration is to the
orator," says Whitman, "and comes most back to him." The artist, too, as
he creates a beautiful form outside himself, creates within himself,
or admits to his being a nobler beauty than his eyes have seen. His
inspiration is spiritual in its origin, and there is always in it some
strange story of the glory of the King.

With man and his work we must take either a spiritual or a material
point of view. All half-way beliefs are temporary and illogical. I
prefer the spiritual with its admission of incalculable mystery and
romance in nature, where we find the infinite folded in the atom, and
feel how in the unconscious result and labor of man's hand the Eternal
is working Its will. You may say that this belongs more to psychology
than to art criticism, but I am trying to make clear to you and to
myself the relation which the mind which is in literature may rightly
bear to the vision which is art. Are literature and ethics to dictate
to Art its subjects? Is it right to demand that the artist's work shall
have an obviously intelligible message or meaning, which the intellect