mechanical nor artificial; it is made under certain inflexible laws,
but they are the laws of the human spirit, not the rules of a craft;
they are rooted in that deeper psychology which deals with man as an
organic whole and not as a bundle of separate faculties.

It was once pointed out to Tennyson that he had scrupulously
conformed, in a certain poem, to a number of rules of versification
and to certain principles in the use of different sound values. "Yes,"
answered the poet in substance, "I carefully observed all those rules
and was entirely unconscious of them!" There was no contradiction
between the Laureate's practice of his craft and the technical rules
which govern it. The poet's instinct kept him in harmony with those
essential and vital principles of language of which the formal rules
are simply didactic statements.

Art, it need hardly be said, is never artifice; intelligence and
calculation enter into the work of the artist, but in the last
analysis it is the free and noble expression of his own personality.
It expresses what is deepest and most significant in him, and
expresses it in a final rather than a provisional form. The secret of
the reality and power of art lies in the fact that it is the
culmination and summing up of a process of observation, experience,
and feeling; it is the deposit of whatever is richest and most
enduring in the life of a man or a race. It is a finality both of
experience and of thought; it contains the ultimate and the widest
conception of man's nature and life, or of the meaning and reality of
Nature, which an age or a race reaches. It is the supreme flowering of
the genius of a race or an age. It has, therefore, the highest
educational value. For the very highest products of man's life in this
world are his ideas and ideals; they grow out of his highest nature;