“O immaginativa, che ne rube
tal volta si di fuor, ch’ uom non s’accorge
perche d’intorno suonin mille tube;

chi move te, se il senso non ti porge? 
Moveti lume, che nel ciel s’informa,
per se, o per voler che giu lo scorge.

* * * * *

e qui fu la mia mente si ristretta
dentro da se, che di fuor non venia
cosa che fosse allor da lei recetta.”

Certainly, in those moments of exaltation that art can give, it is easy to believe that we have been possessed by an emotion that comes from the world of reality.  Those who take this view will have to say that there is in all things the stuff out of which art is made—­reality; artists, even, can grasp it only when they have reduced things to their purest condition of being—­to pure form—­unless they be of those who come at it mysteriously unaided by externals; only in pure form can a sense of it be expressed.  On this hypothesis the peculiarity of the artist would seem to be that he possesses the power of surely and frequently seizing reality (generally behind pure form), and the power of expressing his sense of it, in pure form always.  But many people, though they feel the tremendous significance of form, feel also a cautious dislike for big words; and “reality” is a very big one.  These prefer to say that what the artist surprises behind form, or seizes by sheer force of imagination, is the all-pervading rhythm that informs all things; and I have said that I will never quarrel with that blessed word “rhythm.”

The ultimate object of the artist’s emotion will remain for ever uncertain.  But, unless we assume that all artists are liars, I think we must suppose that they do feel an emotion which they can express in form—­and form alone.  And note well this further point; artists try to express emotion, not to make statements about its ultimate or immediate object.  Naturally, if an artist’s emotion comes to him from, or through, the perception of forms and formal relations, he will be apt to express it in forms derived from those through which it came; but he will not be bound by his vision.  He will be bound by his emotion.  Not what he saw, but only what he felt will necessarily condition his design.  Whether the connection between the forms of a created work and the forms of the visible universe be patent or obscure, whether it exist or whether it does not, is a matter of no consequence whatever.  No one ever doubted that a Sung pot or a Romanesque church was as much an expression of emotion as any picture that ever was painted.  What was the object of the potter’s emotion?  What of the builder’s?  Was it some imagined form, the synthesis of a hundred different visions of natural things; or was it some conception of reality, unrelated to sensual experience, remote altogether from the physical universe?  These are questions beyond all conjecture.  In any case, the form in which he expresses his emotion