bears no memorial of any external form that may have provoked it.  Expression is no wise bound by the forms or emotions or ideas of life.  We cannot know exactly what the artist feels.  We only know what he creates.  If reality be the goal of his emotion, the roads to reality are several.  Some artists come at it through the appearance of things, some by a recollection of appearance, and some by sheer force of imagination.

To the question—­“Why are we so profoundly moved by certain combinations of forms?” I am unwilling to return a positive answer.  I am not obliged to, for it is not an aesthetic question.  I do suggest, however, that it is because they express an emotion that the artist has felt, though I hesitate to make any pronouncement about the nature or object of that emotion.  If my suggestion be accepted, criticism will be armed with a new weapon; and the nature of this weapon is worth a moment’s consideration.  Going behind his emotion and its object, the critic will be able to surprise that which gives form its significance.  He will be able to explain why some forms are significant and some are not; and thus he will be able to push all his judgments a step further back.  Let me give one example.  Of copies of pictures there are two classes; one class contains some works of art, the other none.  A literal copy is seldom reckoned even by its owner a work of art.  It leaves us cold; its forms are not significant.  Yet if it were an absolutely exact copy, clearly it would be as moving as the original, and a photographic reproduction of a drawing often is—­almost.  Evidently, it is impossible to imitate a work of art exactly; and the differences between the copy and the original, minute though they may be, exist and are felt immediately.  So far the critic is on sure and by this time familiar ground.  The copy does not move him, because its forms are not identical with those of the original; and just what made the original moving is what does not appear in the copy.  But why is it impossible to make an absolutely exact copy?  The explanation seems to be that the actual lines and colours and spaces in a work of art are caused by something in the mind of the artist which is not present in the mind of the imitator.  The hand not only obeys the mind, it is impotent to make lines and colours in a particular way without the direction of a particular state of mind.  The two visible objects, the original and the copy, differ because that which ordered the work of art does not preside at the manufacture of the copy.  That which orders the work of art is, I suggest, the emotion which empowers artists to create significant form.  The good copy, the copy that moves us, is always the work of one who is possessed by this mysterious emotion.  Good copies are never attempts at exact imitation; on examination we find always enormous differences between them and their originals:  they are the work of men or women who do not copy but can translate