If he works
on a smaller canvas he aims to make himself completely expressive of
himself. That, also, is the aim of the greater artist who expresses
himself through the medium of a world of characters of his own creation.
He needs that machinery, if a coarse and non-organic metaphor may be
tolerated, for the explication of his own intuitions of the ideal, which
are so various that the attempt to express them through the _persona_ of
himself would inevitably end in confusion. That is why the great poetic
genius is never purely lyrical, and why the greatest lyrics are as often
as not the work of poets who are only seldom lyrical.
Moreover, every act of intuition or divination of the ideal in act in
the world of men must be set, implicitly or explicitly, in relation to
the absolute ideal. In subordinating its particular intuitions to the
absolute ideal art is, therefore, merely asserting its own sovereign
autonomy. True criticism is itself an organic part of the whole activity
of art; it is the exercise of sovereignty by art upon itself, and not
the imposition of an alien.
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