424 Mr. Henry Irving [Feb. 1, 



category. The function of art is to do, and not to create — it is to 

 make to seem, and not to make to be, for to make to be is the 

 creator's work. 



Now as to this question of imitation. The artist wishes to pro- 

 duce — to produce what ? Does the sculptor take his clay and the 

 painter his brush and pigment and canvas, and the poet his pen and 

 paper, and set to work to produce a vague something which will 

 grow into the seeming of a real thing as he goes on ? Such an idea 

 is ridiculous. The artist intends, and must intend, to carry out a 

 thought. It need not have originated in his own mind, but it must 

 be there, howsoever begotten or received. To try to realise an image 

 existing in one's own brain so that it may become apparent to the 

 senses of others, is the work of all art ; and it is because the outline 

 in plastic art has to be exact — because its merit is judged by organs 

 of mechanical accuracy, that it is necessary to reduce to exactness 

 consonant with the realities of life, the vagueness of imagination, 

 aided by the emotions. Inasmuch as words allow of greater com- 

 plexity of thought than do tangible and visible things, so much 

 freer is the poet or writer of any kind in the exercise of his art. 

 When Shelley, in his Prometheus Unbound, describes Demogorgon 

 " a tremendous gloom," he conveys an idea that cannot be conveyed 

 adequately by any pictorial art. The blackest shadows of Rem- 

 brandt or Constable would be like sunshine beside the vague idea in 

 the mind of the reader of these words who has an imagination to 

 understand them. It is this necessity for exactness which compels 

 the constant study of nature on the part of all artists. There can be 

 no higher aim than to reproduce nature — nature shorn of such 

 external accidents as would distract the mind of the spectator — 

 nature epitomised and yielding her secret meaning. What is there 

 in works of genius, howsoever they may be represented, which touches 

 the heart with emotion ? We feel it as we gaze on the beauty which 

 Canova wrought in marble, which Raphael and Velasquez and Van- 

 dyke and Reynolds and Gainsborough depicted on canvas, which 

 Michael Angelo piled up to the dome of St. Peter's — or as we listen to 

 the tender strains of Mozart, the sad witchery of Mendelssohn, or the 

 tempestuous force of Wagner. And yet the roots — the archetypes 

 of all these— have lived, not perhaps in the cognate form in which 

 they are known to us, but as elemental facts in which the skill and 

 wisdom of man have garnered and treasured and used to these noble 

 ends. The eyes of the sculptor and the painter beheld at some time 

 the elements of the beauty which they reproduced. The architect 

 found his ideals in the rising stems and sweeping branches of the 

 forest aisles, or mayhap in the piling up of sunset clouds. And as to 

 the music, every note of it is to be found in nature's choral forces — 

 that mighty gamut of creation which rises from the tiniest whisper 

 of whirring wings in the insect world, through the sighing of the 

 night wind, the crackle of swaying corn, the roar of falling water, 

 and the mighty voice of the sounding sea, up to the hiss of the 



