It is by virtue of his power to feel that the artist is able to apprehend beauty; his temperament is ever responsive to new harmonies. By force of his imagination, which is one function of his temperament, he sends his spirit into other lives, absorbs their experience and makes it his own, and ultimately identifies himself with world forces and becomes creator. In a lyric passage in a letter Keats exclaims:—
"The mighty abstract Idea I have of Beauty in all things stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness. . . . I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone, but in a thousand worlds. No sooner am I alone than shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me, and serve my Spirit the office which is equivalent to a King's body-guard—then 'Tragedy with sceptered pall comes sweeping by.' According to my state of mind I am with Achilles shouting in the Trenches, or with Theocritus in the Vales of Sicily. Or I throw my whole being into Troilus, and repeating those lines, 'I wander like a lost soul upon the Stygian Banks staying for waftage,' I melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate that I am content to be alone."
This power to penetrate and to identify was exercised with peculiar directness and plenitude by Walt Whitman, prophet of the omnipotence of man. To find the burden of his message formulated in the single phrase one may turn to his Poems quite at random.
"My spirit has pass'd in compassion and determination around the whole earth."
"I inhale great draughts of space,—
The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.
. . . . .
All seems beautiful to me."
Of the artist may be affirmed what Whitman affirms of the Answerer:—
"Every existence has its idiom, every thing has an idiom and tongue,
He resolves all tongues into his own and bestows it upon men, and any man translates, and any man translates himself also,
One part does not counteract another part, he is the joiner, he sees how they join."
As the artist sends out his spirit through the world, as he becomes the channel of universal and divine influences, so he is admitted to new and ever new revelations of beauty. And stirred by the glorious vision, he brings that beauty to earth, communicating it to his fellows and making them partakers of it, as he gives his feeling expression. Thus finding utterance as the prophet of God, he consummates his mission and takes his place in the world order. Herein he has his being, for life is expression; and each new harmony which he makes manifest is the medium of his fuller identification with the universal life.
So it is that the artist is the supreme interpreter, the mediator between man and beauty. His work is a work of joy, of gratitude, of worship. He is the happy servant of God, His prophet, through whom He declares Himself to the children of men.