And so it is with the artist; he cannot begin by asking himself whether the mass of men will understand what he proposes to produce; he must produce it, and then trust in man, and God, for its effect.  Art is produced by the individual artist and experienced by the individual man.  Tolstoy holds that it is to be experienced by mankind in the mass, not by individuals; his audience is an abstraction.  Whistler holds that it is produced by the individual, but for himself, and not experienced by mankind either in the mass or as individuals.  Both are heretics.  What is the truth?

I will now turn for a moment to the high aesthetic doctrine of Benedetto Croce.  He in his Aesthetic tells us that all art is expression.  True enough, as far as it goes; but what do we mean by expression?  Croce’s doctrine of expression is incomplete, he does not explain clearly what he means by expression, because he also avoids the question of the necessary relation between the artist and his audience; and this is the question which our thought about art has to deal with, just as we have to solve it in our practice of art and in our actual relation with the artist.  Croce does not see that the question—­What is expression? depends upon the question—­What is the relation between the artist and his audience?  He does see that the audience exists, which Whistler denies; he insists that the audience have the same faculties as the artist, though to a less degree—­that the artist is not a dreamer apart.  He says indeed that to experience a work of art we also must exercise our aesthetic faculty; our very experience of it is itself expression; and this is a most important point.  But for Croce, as for Whistler, the artist, when he expresses himself, is concerned only with what he expresses, not with the people to whom he expresses himself.  Croce does not see this obvious fact, that a work of art is a work of art because it is addressed to some one and is not a private activity of the artist.  That is why he fails to give a satisfying account of the nature of expression.  Croce cannot distinguish between expression, or art, and day-dreaming; but the distinction is this, that as soon as I pass from day-dreaming to expression, I am speaking no longer to myself but to others.  So the form of every work of art is conditioned by the fact that it is addressed to others.  A story, for instance, is a story, it has a plot, because it is told.  A play is a play, and also has a plot, because it is made to be acted before an audience.  A piece of music has musical form, with its repetitions and developments, because it is made to be heard.  A picture has composition, emphasis, because it is painted to be seen.  The very process of pictorial art is a process of pointing out.  When a man draws he makes a gesture of emphasis; he says—­This is what I have seen and what I want you to see.  And in each case the work of art is a work of art, expression is expression, because it implies an audience or spectators.  Without that implication, without the effort of address, there could be no art, no expression, at all.