some have been so purified that we can feel them aesthetically and that
others are so clogged with unaesthetic matter (_e.g._ associations) that
only the sensibility of an artist can perceive their pure, formal
significance. I should be charmed to believe that it is as certain that
everyone must come at reality through form as that everyone must express
his sense of it in form. But is that so? What kind of form is that from
which the musician draws the emotion that he expresses in abstract
harmonies? Whence come the emotions of the architect and the potter? I
know that the artist's emotion can be expressed only in form; I know
that only by form can my aesthetic emotions be called into play; but can
I be sure that it is always by form that an artist's emotion is
provoked? Back to reality.

Those who incline to believe that the artist's emotion is felt for
reality will readily admit that visual artists--with whom alone we are
concerned--come at reality generally through material form. But don't
they come at it sometimes through imagined form? And ought we not to add
that sometimes the sense of reality comes we know not whence? The best
account I know of this state of being rapt in a mysterious sense of
reality is the one that Dante gives:

"O immaginativa, che ne rube
tal volta sì di fuor, ch' uom non s'accorge
perchè d'intorno suonin mille tube;

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

* * * * *