this: there is nothing in any work of art except what some man has put
there. _What he has put in_ is our content question; _what shape he has
put it into_ is our form question. In Bosanquet's more technical language:
"A man is the middle term between content and expression." There is
doubtless some element of mystery in what we call creative power, but this
is a part of man's mystery. There is no mystery in the artist's material
as such: he is working in pigments or clay or vibrating sound or whatever
other medium he has chosen. The qualities and possibilities of this
particular medium fascinate him, preoccupy him. He comes, as we say, to
think in terms of color or line or sound. He learns or may learn in time,
as Whistler bade him, "never to push a medium further than it will go."
The chief value of Lessing's epoch-making discussion of "time-arts" and
"space-arts" in his _Laokoon_ consisted in the emphasis laid upon the
specific material of the different arts, and hence upon the varying
opportunities which one medium or another affords to the artist. But
though human curiosity never wearies of examining the inexhaustible
possibilities of this or that material, it is chiefly concerned, after
all, in the use of material as it has been moulded by the fingers and the
brain of a particular artist. The material becomes transformed as it
passes through his "shop," in some such way as iron is transformed into
steel in a blast furnace. An apparatus called a "transformer" alters the
wave-length of an electrical current and reduces high pressure to low
pressure, or the reverse. The brain of the artist seems to function in a
somewhat similar manner as it reshapes the material furnished it by the
senses, and expresses it in new forms. Poetry furnishes striking
illustrations of the transformations wrought in the crucible of the
imagination, and we must look at these in detail in a subsequent chapter.
But it may be helpful here to quote the testimony of two or three artists
and then to examine the psychological basis of this central function of
the artist's mind.