Let us consider some of the difficulties of the artist in dealing with subjects that are to be considered in other modes than his own.
The artist is of necessity extremely stubborn, like men who have to do things; impressionable as a man who must push the tiller at the slightest warning, for he must be both rudder and helmsman. He is unjust very often, for he sees men before principles—often, alas, the man whom he sees being himself. He is unaffected to a surprising degree by criticism or advice from outside, and extremely careful of it from within the circle. He is doubtful and irresponsive in answer to reasoning not clearly put into his own terms of thinking. Like the Chinese philosopher, the artist is apt to say, or to think without saying, "What is proven by the fact that your dialectics are better than mine, and that your mind has a better use and handling of logic? Nothing more than these very facts of your powers. Is, therefore, what you say true because I cannot confute it? All this, you say, may be right in the terms of another way of looking at things, but it does not seem to be so in any arrangement that I can make of mine." "E pur si muove," he would have answered, like Galileo, to arguments in his own mode but based upon theological and therefore extraneous views.
Far down within him remains a dislike of a closed and finished proposition. He is Bagehot's Englishman. He does not wish to commit himself to a statement that twice two make five, but he is also extremely unwilling to pin himself to the statement that twice two make four. His mind lives in the practical, in the joining of the ideal with the real, which does not prevent his being a dreamer—in fact, confirms him in that direction. All these things he has in common with the man of practical action who, himself, in these things, recalls the attitude of mind said to be feminine.
As he works for no result outside of his work—that is to say that the emotions produced by him upon himself and upon others are not prolonged outside of the work itself—he is kept more and more within a circle of unprovable suppositions, within a method of applying thought that seems satisfactory, as it is complete in its circuit. For, as you know, he gives only a fictitious pain, a fictitious sadness—and no real sorrow or hurt comes from his most beautiful tragedy; indeed, it produces an exaltation of the mind not disconnected with joy. Confined within his own circle he generally loses the use of the methods of words; and he is often, and most wisely and rightly, unwilling to handle them; for he has the most complete and almost superstitious respect for the mastery of tools in methods of appreciation. When he uses words he finds that they are tools whose use he does not know—living tools that refuse to work, that stumble over each other, that lead him astray, that turn on him sometimes, or actually direct his path, instead of being led by him; until at length he recognizes that they are old acquaintances in new forms. They are the signs of thought, of ideas, and perceptions. They are not these last themselves. And he becomes both delighted and timid; pleased, because words express differently and yet like his tools; timid, because how long and difficult and endless perhaps are their full use and mastery. He sees also that each one is an abstraction; that each phrase, and often each word, has involved the consumption, the absorption, the waste of hundreds of sensations concerning still more objects. To put into record merely the impressions of nature, he has only a few notes, and he knows that these external appearances that delight him are written in an infinite gamut. Before the accurate and full description of anything that he sees could be worked out in words, it would have decayed and been born again many times. He sees that the essence of these tools is to generalize, and thereby to leave over in each thing something that is inexpressible. All this reminds him of the failures and inadequacies of his own art, wherein (in those moments of despair which are the consequence of passionate attachment) he feels that he has felt all, and that his miserable means only allow him to express a part. This eternal enemy—so much loved—nature, never meets him half-way for more than a moment. Just as he closes the circle of the little world he has made, in which he thinks, for a moment, that she is imprisoned, and says to himself and to us—There! she passes on making other worlds and creating continual appearances.
How is he in days like this, when the life of the seasons is beginning again, to paint the spring that delights him? He can paint some trees and a little sky, and the reflections of water. How can he paint its murmur? How can he paint the settling restlessness of the air above him? How can he paint the forgotten odors of new growth? How can he paint that "becoming" of the season, in which is also expressed the faint sadness of a past long put aside?
Surely he feels that all is inadequate, and that the only happy one is he who forgets to paint, and only looks without seeing.
He may turn to those who work in other ways, but who also—he becomes more and more sure of it—have limitations not unlike his. But those limitations are not his, and they are not responsible to him, and so far he can be happy with them. With them he can continue the dreams of a complete recall and perception. And when they fail he does not suffer; he is more willing to see that they could not look at everything from every point of view at once.
He recognizes with some amusement how words, and consequently ideas, are placed in masses, as he places forms and colors; and is occasionally even a little worried when what he considers styles are confused, and thought which he respects is brushed about for effect or for purpose, like so much paint.
And he recognizes that just as with him in the modes he knows, minds are caught in the net of imitation, and fly around and about it without escaping, so that they are even affected in their deepest soul—that this often comes from using certain manners and certain styles, "for that the matter of style very much comes out of the manner," and the outside reacts upon the inner.
He gives up asking for all sorts of truth in any one form of language, and does not lose the interest, the exhilaration that Shakespeare gives because his Marc Antony does not include all, besides, that history has told. Science cannot wither the charm of Cleopatra.