But
those who have had ample opportunities of intimately knowing the growth
of works in the minds of artists, will bear me out in saying that a
vivid memory supplies the elements from a thousand different sources,
most of which are quite beyond the power of localisation, the
experience of yesterday being strangely intermingled with the dim
suggestions of early years, the tones heard in childhood sounding
through the diapason of sorrowing maturity; and all these kaleidoscopic
fragments are recomposed into images that seem to have a corresponding
reality of their own.
As all Art depends on Vision, so the different kinds of Art depend on
the different ways in which minds look at things. The painter can only
put into his pictures what he sees in Nature; and what he sees will be
different from what another sees. A poetical mind sees noble and
affecting suggestions in details which the prosaic mind will interpret
prosaically. And the true meaning of Idealism is precisely this vision
of realities in their highest and most affecting forms, not in the
vision of something removed from or opposed to realities.
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