in figure, action and event; but when it is a question of realizing the spirit, differences begin to emerge and multiply. Rifts of temperament and varieties of experience between artist and spectator make chasms of misunderstanding and misappreciation. How diverse are the representations in the mind finally, as revealed in our tastes and judgments! The same image, mirrored in individuals, becomes radically different in opposed minds, and each is apt to believe that his own is the true and only one. It is commonplace that every reader thinks that he is Hamlet. What a number of Hamlets that makes! It is a commonplace also that this ease of identification with a character is a test of genius in a writer and ranks him in power and significance. Those who create so are called the universal writers. Whence arises this paradox, so common in art, of infinite diversity in identity? It comes from the fact that, so far from realizing the image as it was in the artist's mind and receiving it charged with his personality merely, it is we ourselves who create the image by charging it with our own personality. In this creation we do not simply repeat in ourselves his state of mind and become as it were ghosts of him who is dead; but we originate something new, living and our own. There is no other way for us to appropriate his work, to interpret it and understand it. The fact is that a work of art, being once created and expressed, externalized, is gone from the artist's mind and returns to the world of nature; it becomes a part of our external world, and we treat it precisely as we treat the rest of that world, as mere material for our own artist-life which goes on in our own minds and souls in the exercise of our own powers in their limitations. Our appropriation of

art is as strictly held within these bounds as is our grasp upon the material world.

It is one of the charms of art that it is not to be completely understood. In an age in which so high a value is put upon facts, information, positive knowledge, it is a relief to have still reserved to us a place apart where it is not necessary to know all. The truth of science is stated in a formula of mathematics, a law of physics, a generalization of one or another kind; it is clear, and it is all contained there; in each specific case there is nothing more to be known. The truth of art is of a different sort; it does not seem to be all known, finished and finally stated, but on the contrary to be ever growing, more rich in significance, more profound in substance, disclosing heaven over heaven and depth under depth. The greatest books share our lives, and grow old with us; we read them over and over, and at each decade it is a new book that we find there, so much has it gained in meaning from experience of life, from ripening judgment, from the change of seasons in the soul. The poetry of Wordsworth is a typical instance of such a book. It is the same with the artists, with sculptors and musicians. Art of all sorts has this lifelong increment of value, and whoever has experienced this easily realizes to what a degree and how constantly the reader's intelligence, cultivation and experience are controlling and limiting factors in his power to appropriate what is before him. In art he appropriates only a part of what the work contains. It is thus that the great artists, Shakespeare, Dante, Virgil, are lifelong studies.

A second but powerful limitation lies in those differences of temperament, just referred to, which have an arbitrary potency in appreciation. The practical man

is, as a rule, really self-excluded from the field of art; but, inside the field, the stoic will not make much of Byron nor the cynic of Shelley. In certain arts, such as the many kinds of prints, a special training of the eye and some technical knowledge of processes must be acquired before one really sees what the eye itself must discover in the engraving in order to apprehend its subtle qualities. The way, however, is most commonly blocked by certain inhibitions which are so lodged in the mind by education and opinion that they effectively paralyze any effort at re-creation. I remember once, years ago, when I was myself a student, meeting on a western train out of Buffalo a clergyman who kindly engaged me in conversation; and I, being but a boy, repaid his interest by flooding him with my enthusiasms for George Eliot and Scott, who happened to be then my ascendant stars. I recall well his final reply: "Young man," he said, "I never read anything that isn't true." What an inhibition that was, in his literary and artistic career! I have since wondered if he found much to read. Ideal truth, as you perceive, had never dawned upon his mind and that is the finer and happier part of truth. The prejudice of the early New England church against the theater is a curious instance of an inhibition that rendered nugatory a great historic branch of art, the drama; and it is the more singular, viewed as a religious phenomenon, because of the great place the drama held in religion itself in Catholic countries and especially in medieval times. What Puritan could read the sacred drama of Spain with any understanding? I have friends who object to war as a theme of verse, and the praise of wine by the poets is anathema in many quarters. These are all examples of moral inhibitions

bred in the community and operating against great divisions of literature. What a sword of destruction that would be which would strike Mars and Bacchus from the world's poetry! The American inhibition, however, which best illustrates what I have in mind, is that which rejects the nude in sculpture and painting, not only forfeiting thereby the supreme of Greek genius and sanity, but to the prejudice, also, of human dignity, as it seems to me. Such inhibitions in one way and another exist in communities and individuals; the appreciation of literature, and of art in general, is subject to them; and I cite these examples to bring out clearly how true it is that, almost involuntarily and unconsciously, in re-creating the work of art we remake it in ourselves and not in its own old world, and the meaning we charge it with is our own personality and not that of its original creator. If I look with shamed eyes at Hermes, Narcissus and Venus, the shame is mine, and not the sculptor's; if I cannot read the old verses on Agincourt with sympathy and delight in their heroic breath, the poverty of soul is mine, not Drayton's. In every way, the responsibility for what we make of art, in re-creating it, springs from what we are.

It is plain that, in consequence of our various limitations in faculty, knowledge, experience, temperament and working always with some subjection to communal ideas and tastes, we must suffer many losses of what the work of art originally contained and fall short of realizing it as it was in the artist's mind. On the other hand there is some compensation in the fact that the work itself may take on new meanings that the artist did not dream of; for, in returning to the external world and becoming a part of our real environ

ment, the work of art has resumed that plastic quality which belongs to the world of nature and makes it material for us to mold our own souls in. The essence of the work, its living power for us, is not what the artist put in it, but what we draw from it; its worldvalue it not what it was to the artist, but what it is to the world. It is common enough for the reader to find meanings in a book that the writer did not consciously put there; there is much in personality that the artist himself is not aware of, and also there may be much in the work which he does not attend to, and hence there is excess of significance in both ways; and moreover, the reader may respond to the work with greater sensitiveness than belonged to the creator and in new ways. Thus arises the paradox which I often maintain, that it is not the poet, but the reader, who writes the poem.

This is more plainly seen when literature is looked at under the changing lights of time. New ages appropriate the works of the past by accomplishing a partial transformation in them, and unless art is capable of such a remaking, it cannot last; it becomes merely archaic, historic, dead-a thing for the scholar's museum. Homer has delighted ages, but it is through his capacity to live again in the battle-loving and travel-loving hearts of men; it is not because later generations have read the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" as the Greeks read or heard them. Each age reads something into the text, as we say, and this "reading-in" is incessant in the history of art. It is well illustrated in the criticism of Pater, so frequently called creative criticism, and especially in his "Marius, the Epicurean," a marvelous blend of the modern spirit with ancient material- but such "reading-in" is his most brilliant achievement in all his essays,