But this speculation—­I thought—­is going beyond the bounds of vagueness.  Let there be some thread of coherence in your thoughts, as there is in the progress of this evening, fast fading into night.  Return to the consideration of the nature and purposes of Art!  And recognize that much of what you have thought will seem on the face of it heresy to the school whose doctrine was incarnated by Oscar Wilde in that admirable apotheosis of half-truths:  “The Decay of the Art of Lying.”  For therein he said:  “No great artist ever sees things as they really are.”  Yet, that half-truth might also be put thus:  The seeing of things as they really are—­the seeing of a proportion veiled from other eyes (together with the power of expression), is what makes a man an artist.  What makes him a great artist is a high fervour of spirit, which produces a superlative, instead of a comparative, clarity of vision.

Close to my house there is a group of pines with gnarled red limbs flanked by beech-trees.  And there is often a very deep blue sky behind.  Generally, that is all I see.  But, once in a way, in those trees against that sky I seem to see all the passionate life and glow that Titian painted into his pagan pictures.  I have a vision of mysterious meaning, of a mysterious relation between that sky and those trees with their gnarled red limbs and Life as I know it.  And when I have had that vision I always feel, this is reality, and all those other times, when I have no such vision, simple unreality.  If I were a painter, it is for such fervent vision I should wait, before moving brush:  This, so intimate, inner vision of reality, indeed, seems in duller moments well-nigh grotesque; and hence that other glib half-truth:  “Art is greater than Life itself.”  Art is, indeed, greater than Life in the sense that the power of Art is the disengagement from Life of its real spirit and significance.  But in any other sense, to say that Art is greater than Life from which it emerges, and into which it must remerge, can but suspend the artist over Life, with his feet in the air and his head in the clouds—­Prig masquerading as Demi-god.  “Nature is no great Mother who has borne us.  She is our creation.  It is in our brain that she quickens to life.”  Such is the highest hyperbole of the aesthetic creed.  But what is creative instinct, if not an incessant living sympathy with Nature, a constant craving like that of Nature’s own, to fashion something new out of all that comes within the grasp of those faculties with which Nature has endowed us?  The qualities of vision, of fancy, and of imaginative power, are no more divorced from Nature, than are the qualities of common-sense and courage.  They are rarer, that is all.  But in truth, no one holds such views.  Not even those who utter them.  They are the rhetoric, the over-statement of half-truths, by such as wish to condemn what they call “Realism,” without being temperamentally capable of understanding what “Realism” really is.