they would say, for example, that the illusions of a madman are not real, meaning that they do not represent real things, however vivid their appearance may be, because they are the productions merely of his own consciousness; whereas the very same appearances presented to a sane man would be called without hesitation real, because they would be conceived to proceed from objects having an independent nature of their own.  Something of this kind, I suppose, is included in the notion ‘real’ as it is held by ordinary people.”

“Perhaps” said Leslie, “but what then?  And how does it bear upon Art?”

“I am not sure,” I replied, “but it occurred to me that works of Art, though of course they are real objects, are such that a certain violence, as it were, has been done to their reality in our interest.  What I mean will be best understood, I think, if we put ourselves for the moment into the position of the artist.  To him certain materials are presented which of course are real in our present acceptation of the term, being such as they are of their own nature, without any dependence upon him.  Upon these materials he flings himself, and shapes them according to his desire, impressing, as it were, his own nature upon theirs, till they confront him as a kind of image of himself in an alien stuff.  So far, then, he has a Good, and a Good presented to him as real; but for the Goodness of this reality he is himself responsible.  In so far as it is, so to speak, merely real, it has still the nature which was first presented to him, before he began his work—­a nature indifferent, if not opposed, to all his operations, as is shown by the fact that it changes and passes away into something else, just as it would have done if he had never touched it.  To this nature he has, as I said, done a certain violence in order to stamp upon it the appearance of Good; but the Good is still, in a sense, only an appearance; the reality of the thing remains independent and alien.  So that what the man has found, in so far as he has found Good, is after all only a form of himself; and one can conceive him feeling a kind of despair, like that of Wotan in the Walkuere, when in his quest for a free, substantial, self-subsistent Good he finds after all, for ever, nothing but images of himself: 

  “’Das Andre, das ich ersehne,
  Das Andre, erseh’ ich nie.’

“I don’t know whether what I am saying is intelligible, for I find it rather hard to put it into words.”

“Yes,” he said, “I think I understand.  But what you are saying, so far as it is true, seems to be true only for the artist himself.  To all others the work of Art must appear as something independent of themselves.”